“That is affirmative. Landing bag switch is in the center off position.”
“You haven’t had any banging noises or anything of this type at higher rates?” He meant the rate of movement in roll, pitch, or yaw.
“Negative.”
“They wanted this answer.”
I flew on, feeling no vertigo or nausea or other ill effects from weightlessness, being able to read the same lines on the eye chart I could at the beginning. I pumped the blood pressure cuff for another check and gave the readings in the regular half-hour reports. Flying the capsule with the one-stick hand controller was taking most of my attention. The second dawn produced another flurry of the luminescent partides. “They’re all over the sky,” I reported. “Way out I can see them, as far as I can see in each direction, almost.”
The Canton Island capcom ignored the particles and asked me to report any sensations I was feeling from weightlessness. Then came an unprompted transmission.
“We also have no indication that your landing bag might be deployed. Over.”
I had a prickle of suspicion. “Roger. Did someone report landing bag could be down? Over.”
“Negative. We have a request to monitor this and ask if you heard any flapping when you had high capsule rates.”
It suddenly made sense. They were trying to figure out where the particles had come from. I was convinced they weren’t coming from the capsule. They were all over the sky.
Daylight again. I had caged and reset the gyros during the night, and did it again in the light, but they were still off. I reported to the capcom in Hawaii that the instruments indicated a twenty-degree right roll when I was lined up with the horizon.
“Do you consider yourself go for the next orbit?”
“That is affirmative. I am go for the next orbit.” There was no question in my mind about that. I could control the capsule easily, and I was confident that even with faulty gyroscopes I could align the capsule for its proper retrofire angle by using the stars and the horizon.
I flew over the Cape into the third orbit. The gyros seemed to have corrected themselves. Al radioed a recommendation that I allow the capsule to drift on manual control to conserve fuel.
The sky was clear over the Atlantic. Gus came on from Bermuda and I radioed, “I have the Cape in sight down there. It looks real fine from up here.”
“Rog. Rog.”
“As you know.”
“Yea, verily, Sonny.”
I could see not only the Cape, but the entire state of Florida. The eastern seaboard was bathed in sunshine, and I could see as far back as the Mississippi Delta. It was also clear over the recovery area to the south. “Looks like we’ll have no problem on recovery,” I said.
“Very good. We’ll see you in Grand Turk.”
Gus faded as I let the capsule drift around again 180 degrees, so that I was facing forward for the second time. It was more satisfying, and felt more like real flying. I still felt good physically, with none of the suspected ill effects. When I turned the capsule back to orbit attitude, the problem with the gyros reappeared, indicating more pitch, roll, and yaw than my view of the horizon indicated. The Zanzibar capcom asked why.
“That’s a good question. I wish I knew, too.”
I saw my third sunset of the day, and flew over clouds with lightning pulsing and rippling inside them. The lightning flashes looked like lightbulbs pulsing inside a veil of cotton gauze. Over the Indian Ocean, I went back to full manual control because the automatic with manual backup was using too much of the thrusters’ supply of fuel. There had to be enough left when the time came to achieve the proper reentry attitude. I pitched the capsule up for a look at the night stars. The constellation Orion was right in the middle of the window, and I could hold my attitude by watching it.
Over Muchea, approaching four hours since liftoff, I told Gordo, “I want you to send a message to the commandant, U.S. Marine Corps, Washington. Tell him I have my four hours required flight time in for the month and request flight chit be established for me. Over.”
“Roger. Will do. Think they’ll pay it?”
“I don’t know. Gonna find out.”
“Roger. Is this flying time or rocket time?”
“Lighter than air, buddy.” Gordo would appreciate that. He and Deke had led the charge for getting us some flying time while we were training.
I turned the capsule around again so I could face the sunrise. The light revealed a new cloud of the bright partides, and I was still convinced they weren’t coming from the capsule. The flight surgeon at Woomera suggested that I eat again. But I had been paying too much attention to the attitude control, and now I was concerned about lining up the spacecraft for reentry. This was the next set of hurdles, another crucial change in flight conditions that would require every ounce of my attention. I was over Hawaii when the capcom there said, “Friendship Seven, we have been reading an indication on the ground of segment fifty-one, which is landing bag deploy. We suggest this is as an erroneous signal. However, Cape would like you to check this by putting the landing bag switch in auto position and see if you get a light Do you concur with this? Over.”
Now, for the first time, I knew why they had been asking about the landing bag. They did think it might have been activated, meaning that the heat shield that would protect the capsule from the searing heat of reentry was unlatched. Nothing was flapping around. The package of retro-rockets that would slow the capsule for reentry was strapped over the heat shield. But it would jettison, and what then? If the heat shield dropped out of place, I could be incinerated on reentry, and this was the first confirmation of that possibility. I thought it over for a few seconds. If the green light came on, we’d know that the bag had accidentally deployed. But if it hadn’t, and there was something wrong with the circuits, flipping the switch to automatic might create the disaster we had feared. “Okay,” I reluctantly concurred, “if that’s what they recommend, we’ll go ahead and try it.”
I reached up and flipped the switch to auto. No light. I quickly switched it back to off. They hadn’t been trying to relate the particles to the landing bag at all.
“Roger, that’s fine,” the Hawaii capcom said. “In this case, we’ll go ahead, and the reentry sequence will be normal.”
The seconds ticked down toward the retro-firing sequence. I passed out of contact with Hawaii and into Wally Shirra’s range at Point Arguello. I was flying backward again, the blunt end of the capsule facing forward, manually backing up the erratic automatic system. The retro warning light came on. A few seconds before the rockets fired, Wally said, “John, leave your retro pack on through your pass over Texas. Do you read?”
“Roger.”
I moved the hand controller and brought the capsule to the proper attitude. The first retro-rocket fired on time at 4:33:07. Every second off would make a five-mile difference in the landing spot. The braking effect on the capsule was dramatic. “It feels like I’m going back toward Hawaii,” I radioed.
“Don’t do that,” Wally joked. “You want to go to the East Coast.”
The second rocket fired five seconds later, the third five seconds after that. They each fired for about twelve seconds, combining to slow the capsule about five hundred feet per second, a little over 330 miles per hour, not much but enough to drop it below orbital speed. Normally the exhausted rocket package would be jettisoned to burn as it fell into the atmosphere, but Wally repeated, “Keep your retro pack on until you pass Texas.”
“That’s affirmative.”
“Pretty good-looking flight from what we’ve seen,” Wally said.
“Roger. Everything went pretty good except for this ASCS problem.”
“It looked like your attitude held pretty well. Did you have to back it up at all?”
“Oh, yes, quite a bit. Yeah, I had a lot of trouble with it.”
“Good enough for government work from down here.”
“Yes, sir, it looks good, Wally. We’ll see you back East.”
“Rog.”
I gave a fast readout of the gauges and asked Wally, “Do you have a time for going to jettison retro? Over.”
