and I believe the United States must sail on it and be in a position second to none.”
I called Annie at home in Arlington. She knew I was safe. She had had three televisions set up in the living room, and was watching with Dave and Lyn and the neighbours with the curtains drawn against the clamor of news crews outside on the lawn. Even so, she sobbed with relief. I didn’t know then that Scott had called to prepare her in case the heat shield was loose. He had told her I might not make it back. “I waited for you to come back on the radio,” she said. “I know it was only five minutes. But it seemed like five years.”
Hearing my voice speaking directly to her brought first tears, then audible happiness.
After putting on a jumpsuit and high-top sneakers, I found a quiet spot on deck and started answering into a tape recorder the questions on the two-page shipboard debriefing form. The first question was, what would you like to say first?
The sun was getting low, and I said, “What can you say about a day in which you get to see four sunsets?”
Before much more time had passed, I got on the ship’s loudspeaker and thanked the Noa’s crew. They had named me sailor of the month, and I endorsed the fifteen-dollar check to the ship’s welfare fund. A helicopter hoisted me from the deck of the
At the debriefing sessions, I had the highest praise for the whole operation, the training, the way the team had come back from all the cancellations, and the mission itself – with one exception. They hadn’t told me directly their fears about the heat shield, and I was really unhappy about that. A lot of people, doctors in particular, had the idea that you’d panic in such a situation. The truth was, they had no idea what would happen. None of us were panic-prone on the ground or in an airplane or in any of the things they put us through in training, including underwater egress from the capsule. But they thought we might panic once we were up in space and assumed it was better if we didn’t know the worst possibilities.
I thought the astronaut ought to have all the information the people on the ground had as soon as they had it so he could deal with a problem if communication was lost. I was adamant about it. I said, “Don’t ever leave a guy up there again without giving him all the information you have available. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a manned program?”
It emerged that a battle had gone on in the control center over whether they should tell me. Deke and Chris Kraft had argued that they ought to tell me, and others had argued against it, but I didn’t learn that until many years later. I don’t know who had made the decision, but they changed the policy after that to establish that all information about the condition of the spacecraft was to be shared with the pilot.
I was describing the luminous particles I saw at each sunrise when George Ruff, the psychiatrist, broke up everyone in the debriefing by asking, “What did they say, John?” (The particles proved to be a short-lived phenomenon. The Soviets called them the Glenn effect; NASA learned from later flights that they were droplets of frozen water vapor from the capsule’s heat exchanger system, but their firefly-like glow remains a mystery.)
George also had a catch-all question tagged on at the end of the standard form we filled out at the end of each day’s training. It was, Was there any unusual activity during this period?
“No,” I wrote, “just the normal day in space.”
Grand Turk was an interlude, in which morning medical checks and debriefing sessions were followed by afternoons of play. Scott, as my backup, stuck with me as I had Al and Gus after their flights. We went scuba diving and spearfishing, and Scott rescued a diver who had blacked out eighty feet down, giving him some of his own air as he brought him to the surface. There were no crowds, since the debriefing site was closed.
Annie had tried to give me some idea of the overwhelming public reaction to the flight. Shorty Powers had said there was a mood afoot for public celebration. But I was only faintly aware of the groundswell that was building.
Project Mercury returned to space on May 24, with Scott’s three-orbit flight in Aurora 7. Deke had been scheduled to make the flight, but the doctors had grounded him after detecting a slight heart murmur.
Malfunctions aboard Scott Carpenter’s orbital flight
They would monitor and adjust the cabin environment. They would operate the communications system. They would make physiological, astronomical, and meteorological observations that could not be made by instruments. Most important, they would be able to operate the reaction controls in space and be capable of initiating descent from orbit. This was the key part, that the astronaut could take over control of the spacecraft itself.
The chosen seven had shown emotional maturity, engineering, flight experience and motivation. Eighteen others were unreservedly recommended.
On 27 April 1959 they began work at Langley Air Force Base. NASA was considering 10 flights carrying chimpanzees but this changed on 12 April 1961. The Soviets made the first manned flight. Shepard followed on 5 May 1961. On 25 May President Kennedy presented his vision to Congress.
A couple of weeks later, Gilruth and Webb were aboard one of NASA’s R4Ds when over the radio the president was addressing Congress, pledging NASA to a lunar expedition. Gilruth was “aghast.” He looked at Webb, who knew all about it. In his special message to Congress, delivered on May 25, 1961, President Kennedy set out his vision on a number of “urgent national needs,” one of them the conquest of space. In a resonant call to arms, the president asked the nation to “commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” No other space project, Kennedy declared, would be “more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space.”
