The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Perched in the neck of the capsule, Scott rested for a moment. It was 80 degrees. Egress procedure called next for deploying the life raft. He placed his camera on a small ledge near the opening and dropped the raft into the water, where it quickly inflated. The SARAH (Search and Rescue and Homing) beacon came on automatically, allowing aircraft to home in on his position, somewhere southeast of the Virgin Islands. After grabbing the camera, Scott ventured down the side of the capsule and climbed into the raft. It was upside down. There was nothing to do but to turn it over; so back in the ocean he went and flipped the raft over with one arm, holding the camera aloft with the other. He tied the raft to the capsule, and only then did he deploy the neck dam. Finally in the raft, with his water and food rations and the camera dry at his side, he said a brief prayer of thanks and relaxed for the wait. He had never felt better in his life.

On CBS News the presenter Walter Cronkite reported: “While thousands watch and pray… Certainly here at Cape Canaveral the silence is almost intolerable.”

The USS John R. Pierce had a strong signal from Carpenter’s SARAH beacon and he was spotted by a Lockheed P2V, the type of US Navy patrol plane that he had flown during the Korean War. He used a hand mirror to signal to it. After NASA had been told, it announced, “A gentleman by the name of Carpenter was seen seated comfortably in his life raft.”

A gust of wind or a winch malfunction plunged him into the sea as he was being lifted by a helicopter. Water damage destroyed half his camera film.

NASA Flight director Chris Kraft blamed Carpenter for Aurora 7’s problems. Robert Voas wrote that Kraft:

grew angrier and more frustrated as the astronaut, busy with a science-heavy flight plan that he had deplored from the beginning, was insufficiently responsive.

Voas added that Kraft saw:

the magnitude of the danger, felt the tension as Carpenter assumed control of the capsule, and worried during the critical reentry period that Scott might not survive.

Voas explained how Aurora 7’s flight differed from that of its predecessors:

Aurora 7 was the first flight in which the success of the mission depended on the performance of the astronaut. In the two suborbital flights, the flight path was fixed: Al and Gus were coming home anyway. In John’s flight, aboard Friendship 7, he took over the spacecraft attitude control because the small thruster controls were malfunctioning. But Glenn’s capsule would have reentered safely in any case because the ASCS, the basic automatic control system, remained operational. The concern with the air bag separation was a false alarm.

But with Aurora 7, the gyro problem went undetected on the ground and the attitude control system was malfunctioning. The astronaut’s eye on the horizon was the only adequate check of the automated gyro system. With its malfunctioning gyros, the spacecraft could not have maintained adequate control during retrofire. Mercury Control may have viewed the manually controlled reentry as sloppy, but the spacecraft came back in one piece and the world accepted the flight for what it was: another success.

Aurora 7 provided proof of why it was important for man to fly in space. It was proof of what the members of the Space Task Group had told the skeptics at Edwards back in 1959: the Mercury astronaut would be a pilot. Many in the test pilot profession were still deriding the program as a “man in a can” stunt, with a guineapig astronaut along for the ride. The irony, of course, is that as Kraft’s anger over MA-7 seeped through the ranks of NASA, subsequent missions came as close to the “man in a can” flights that everyone was deriding in the first place.

With the increasing complexity of the Gemini and Apollo flights this early, intense conflict between control from the ground and control from the cockpit faded. But NASA missed an important opportunity to help the nation understand how putting man in space was not simply a stunt but a significant step toward conquering space.

In October 1962 nine new astronauts were added to the programme. Glenn’s new training partner was Neil Armstrong. Glenn:

I always got a kick out of Neil’s theory on exercise: everyone was allotted only so many heartbeats, and he didn’t want to waste any of his doing something silly like running down the road. Actually, he stayed in better shape than that would indicate.

Glenn gave an example of Armstrong’s sense of humour. It happened when they were on a survival exercise in a Central American jungle:

Neil had a sly sense of humor. After we had built our two-man lean-to of wood and jungle vines, he used a charred stick to write the name Choco Hilton on it. It rained every day. We used the jungle hammocks to stay off the ground. They were tented to keep off the rain, and had mosquito netting. We caught a few small fish and cooked them on a damp wood fire. At the end of the three days the astronauts assembled from their scattered sites and followed a small stream to a larger river. There we put on life vests and floated downriver to one of the feeder lakes to the Panama Canal, where a launch picked us up to end the exercise.

In May 1963 Gordo Cooper made the last flight of Project Mercury. Glenn:

I was aboard the Coastal Sentry near Kyushu, Japan in May of 1963 when Gordo made his twenty-two orbit flight in Faith 7. He had to come down early after his spacecraft lost orbital velocity and I helped talk him through the retro fire sequence. He fired the retros “right on the old gazoo,” as I reported, and came down in the Pacific near Midway thrty-four hours and twenty minutes and 546,185 miles after liftoff, ending what proved to proved to be the last and most scientifically productive flight of Project Mercury.

Glenn was not assigned another flight but he acted as a kind of ambassador for NASA. At the end of 1963 he decided to leave NASA and enter politics. When a domestic accident left him with concussion and inner ear problems, he was forced to withdraw as a candidate. He retired from the US Marine Corps on 1 January 1965.

During the spring of 1965 NASA began a programme of two-man flights called Project Gemini.

Chapter 3 Man in Space – The Glory Days

Project Gemini

The Gemini program was designed as a bridge between the Mercury and Apollo programs, primarily to test equipment and mission procedures in Earth orbit and to train astronauts and ground crews for future (Apollo) missions. The general objectives of the program included: long duration flights in excess of the requirements of a lunar-landing mission; rendezvous and docking of two vehicles in Earth orbit; the development