Moon Shot

by Jay Barbree

  Williams went after Convair’s Cape manager, B.C. MacNabb, and laid it on the line. “Fix it or get the hell out.” MacNabb screwed up one eye. “We’ll fix it.”

  MacNabb brought Convair’s toughest test conductor to his office. He passed on Williams’ ravings and told Tom O’Malley that they were about to get bumped for the Titan missile. O’Malley moved from an Atlas ICBM test pad to the Mercury-Atlas pad, called the launch team together, and gave them the new word. “The next son of a bitch who says no sweat, who tells me or anybody else we don’t have a problem, will ride the toe of my boot out the door.”

  T.J., as he was known, took no lip from anyone. What he got for his hard-boiled attitude was a crew with a new dedication, anxious to work day and night and turn the Atlas into a fine piece of reliable machinery.

  Many Atlas systems were modified. The fragile skin was strengthened in the most vulnerable area—they put a damn belt around it—and on September 13, five months after the last blowup, NASA and Convair were ready to try again. This time the Atlas worked like a precision watch and drilled an unmanned Mercury capsule into orbit. After circling the globe once, ground signals triggered braking rockets and the spacecraft returned safely to earth.

  John Glenn stepped forward.

  Vostok I and Vostok II scrambled the Mercury schedule. No more suborbital flights. Mission No. 3 would go for orbit, and Glenn, as backup to both Shepard and Grissom, was in a perfect position to snag the assignment.

  Except that first he had to endure the same humiliation that had bedeviled Alan Shepard. On November 29, 1961, Glenn stepped aside while NASA bioengineers loaded a chimpanzee called Enos into a Mercury capsule. Again the Atlas performed flawlessly. The public said, “Ho, hum,” and the chimp came home in good shape.

  John Glenn’s launch was first set for December 20—a Christmas present for America. But things didn’t work out as planned. From the day Glenn’s booster and spacecraft were placed on the pad, there began a series of frustrating mechanical and weather delays. Finally on the morning of February 20th, 1962 all was right for John Glenn and his Mercury spacecraft Friendship Seven.

  The launch team became a human machine.

  “Status check,” test conductor T. J. O’Malley barked into his lip mike.

  “Pressurization?”

  “GO.”

  “Lox tanking?”

  “Have a blinking high-level light.”

  “You are GO,” snapped O’Malley.

  “Range operations?”

  “GO for launch.” The entire string of stations along the global tracking network was in the green.

  “Mercury capsule?”

  “GO.”

  “All prestart panels are correct,” O’Malley called. “The ready light is on. Eject Mercury umbilical.”

  “Mercury umbilical clear.”

  “All recorders to fast,” T. J. ordered. “T-minus 18 seconds and counting. Engine start!”

  “You have a firing signal,” astronaut Scott Carpenter told his friend John Glenn from his capsule communicator’s position in the blockhouse.

  B. G. MacNabb got onto the line to speak directly to O’Malley. “May the wee ones be with you, Thomas.” O’Malley was glad to hear the words. He’d take the luck of the wee ones with gratitude. Personally he’d been praying all the way through the countdown. Now he took a deep breath, and the tough old Irish Catholic crossed himself. “Good Lord, ride all the way,” he said quietly.

  “Godspeed, John Glenn!” The call boomed from Carpenter as he racked down the final seconds of the count. “Three seconds . . . two . . . one . . . zero!”

  The blockhouse fell silent, only the sound of instruments breaking the suddenly frigid air. Atlas was ablaze, flame pouring from its three powerful main engines and two shrieking verniers.

  “Uh . . . rog—roger . . . the clock is operating . . . We’re underway . . . ”

  And he was. The Atlas became a monolith of intense fire and gleaming silver, the dark Mercury capsule resting atop with its orange escape tower, all being lifted by Atlas’s 360,000 pounds of flaming thrust. The autopilot ticking away commands, the rocket obeying. It gimbaled its engines and worked its small vernier rockets, and Glenn called out, “We’re programming in roll okay.”

  The million were back. The huge assembly of people lined the highways, beaches, stood atop buildings. Some went mad while some hit their knees and prayed. Atlas roared and pounded its way upward with its thunder engulfing the million screaming voices and those with prayers.

  It seemed no sooner than John Glenn had gotten started he was in Max-Q. Tremendous air pressure squeezing his Atlas, slamming the big rocket, hammering its reinforced belted girth, rattling and shaking its teeth. The Marine along for the ride called down, “It’s a little bumpy along here.”

  Then, as suddenly as Friendship Seven had entered, it was out of Max-Q climbing at supersonic speed, accelerating rapidly as the engines increased in thrust and power, gulping its fuel, lightening its weight.

  A little more than two minutes from earth, Atlas’s two boosters burned out and fell away, reducing the weight even more. The remaining sustainer engine and its small verniers would now take John Glenn and Friendship Seven the rest of the way.

  For another three minutes the Atlas’s final sustainer engine burned so smoothly all those on the ground could see was a bright pinpoint of light fading in the bright Florida sun.

  Glenn was over a hundred miles high, traveling at 17,300 miles per hour when the sustainer engine cutoff.

  The escape tower was the first to go. Then separation rockets fired. Friendship Seven pushed away from the inert booster.

  “Roger, zero-g, and I feel fine,” Glenn reported. “Capsule is turning around. Oh! That view is tremendous!”

  Glenn and America were in orbit. Cheers and tears erupted across the land.

  The astronaut was on his way to three trips around the earth, and he reminded himself he had a debt to pay to millions of people who were anxious, almost desperate, to hear from the first American orbiting their world just what it felt and looked like. So Glenn grinned and, when time permitted, he became the narrator for his voyage.

  Over the Indian Ocean on his first orbit, Glenn became the first American to witness a sunset from more than a hundred miles above the earth. “This moment of twilight is simply beautiful,” he reported. “The sky in space is very black, with a thin band of blue along the horizon. The sun went down fast but not quite as quickly as I expected. For five or six minutes there was a slow but continuous reduction in light intensity, and brilliant orange-and-blue layers spread out forty-five to sixty degrees on either side of the sun, tapering gradually toward the horizon.”

  He offered other glowing descriptions of the planet sliding by beneath him, spoke of the snow-white mantle covering high mountains, the rich deep green of Bahamian waters, the sculptured sands of the deserts. He peered down at volcanoes and saw avalanches, told of sun reflecting off the clouds and the highest spires of great cities.

  In the blackness each massive thunderstorm became a giant light bulb spitting and snarling with electrical fire. Observing a string of thunderstorms, flattening out along the horizon, it seemed like approaching a battlefield with guns flashing and rockets firing and bombs bursting. It was incredible.

  Suspended in the blackest velvet of night, only the motors and instruments of Friendship Seven offered any sounds. The remainder of the universe had gone mute. His eyes became acclimated to the darkness, and he turned down the lights of his instrument panel.

  Moving through the velvet night, Glenn began to see the stars. They appeared first as a filmy haze, became defined as a blanket, and then he was staring at the brightest, most clearly defined celestial engines he had ever seen—the stars in a glory until so very recently never seen by the eyes of humans.

  As he quickly completed his first run through the night, flying backward, he could see the thinnest crease in the darkness behind him, a fairyland breath of sliver
ed light. The breath became a whisper and, swiftly growing to a riotous shout of color, the horizon was transformed magically into a vivid, glowing crescent that separated night from day.

  As the sun stabbed across half of the capsule structure, the other half lay in shadow and the dim reflected light from the planet below.

  Suddenly John Glenn was no longer alone.

  Surrounding Friendship Seven like tiny light motes from some fable of fairyland, were thousands of tiny creatures. Some came right to his window, and he stared in wonder at the tiny specks. Then he saw they were frost and ice, some shaped like curlicues, others spangled and starry like snowflakes sailing and dancing and swirling in an incredible swarm about the spacecraft.

  Glenn was beside himself with awe and curiosity and fascination. He had no idea where this stunning phenomenon had originated. “I’ll try to describe what I’m in here,” he radioed the ground. Those below in the tracking station on Canton Island snapped too.

  “I’m in a big mass of thousands of very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they’re luminescent,” Glenn went on. “They are bright yellowish-green. About the size and intensity of a firefly on a real dark night. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Roger, Friendship Seven, this is Canton CapCom,” came an immediate answering voice. “Can you hear any impact with the capsule? Over.”

  “Negative, negative. They’re very slow,” Glenn responded. “They’re not going away from me at more than maybe three or four miles an hour.”

  The ground team was awestruck, hardly more so than Glenn, as they both did their best to determine what was going on “up and out there.”

  Just as suddenly as they appeared, the shining specks vanished as Friendship Seven sped over the Pacific expanse into brighter sunlight. But they were back on the next sunrise, and the next, illuminated by the rays of that rising ball of fire.

  While puzzled over the “fireflies,” the interest of ground controllers shifted dramatically to a matter of utmost urgency.

  Unknown to Glenn, the flight of Friendship Seven had become a full-scale emergency. Flight Director Chris Kraft and his controllers felt John Glenn was threatened by a problem totally unexpected, and so critical that his life was in jeopardy.

  The monitoring panels in Mercury Control lit up under an item marked Segment 51. That warning light sounded an alarm and indicated that the heat shield of Friendship Seven might have come loose from its securing connections.

  Mercury Control was very aware without the shield locked into position during reentry John Glenn would be cremated by the extreme temperatures of atmospheric reentry.

  The control team concentrated everything it had on the problem. If the heat shield was loose, what could they do to save John Glenn? One idea among the many proposed quickly emerged. Survival could very well lie with the retro-pack strapped to the outside of the heat shield. This was a package of six small rockets. Three small separation rockets had fired after the Atlas engine shutdown to push the Mercury away from the spent booster. Three larger rockets remained to decelerate the Mercury by five hundred feet per second from its orbital speed so it could begin reentry.

  The flight program was specific. The retros fired, the capsule slowed only slightly but enough to start its downward slide into the atmosphere. An onboard electrical signal was then sent to break the metal straps. This action separated the retro-pack to send it away from the spacecraft.

  Flight Director Chris Kraft and Operations Director Walt Williams met. If they left the retro-pack in place after the firing, they surmised, then the straps should be strong enough to hold the heat shield in place long enough for the Mercury to descend to an altitude where building air pressure would keep the heat shield in place after the retro-pack burned up.

  If, and these were the biggest ifs, the heat shield was loose, and if the retro-pack straps could not hold the shield in place, then the first American to orbit the earth would return as ashes.

  Kraft and Williams decided not to alarm Glenn by telling him about the potential problem. But Glenn became aware that something was wrong near the end of his second orbit and when he was told to leave the pack in place after the retro-rockets fired, he strongly asked, “Why?”

  Canton CapCom told Glenn he would be fully briefed when he was over the Texas station. Glenn liked none of it. No one knew the effect of the retro-pack burning from reentry friction. It could start to bang around and damage the heat shield. It could cause uneven heat distribution about the shield and even damage the shield before John came out of the fiery temperatures of reentry.

  In an automated and meticulously programmed mission, any departure from established protocols could have serious repercussions, like one domino toppling against another and taking down a long row. The capsule autopilot was set to follow a particular sequence. If the retro-pack didn’t get dumped, then the periscope would not retract, and the periscope doors would not be closed against the heat. To stay alive, John would now have to break from his own flight plan and start doing things manually, taking over from the autopilot.

  When the autopilot circuits detected a deceleration force of .05g, the capsule’s electronic brain would initiate automatic sequences to begin maneuvers that would safely land the capsule on the ocean surface.

  Keeping the retro-pack on meant that John Glenn would be a one-armed man trying to wallpaper a room that wouldn’t stay still. If he missed a single critical beat, the whole place could go up in flames all about him.

  Glenn was ready to do whatever was necessary, of course, but with the decision to keep the retro-pack on he had changed from being a passenger riding a fiery chariot to earth to a very busy pilot in full, immediate manual control of his machine.

  There was something else. They had perfected a schedule. Now, in the most critical time of flight, the schedule was being changed. New factors were being introduced into the situation, and the old safe-and-sane rule of flight, especially test flying, is stick to procedures. You deviate at your own peril.

  Glenn wanted to know why the plan had changed and waited for word to come through Texas CapCom.

  His heart had picked up its beat. It held now at 96 beats a minute. The ace test pilot and combat veteran had slipped into his familiar role. For the past two orbits his heart had held even at 86 beats. The rise was minor and normal.

  Texas CapCom confirmed Glenn was to leave the retro-pack on through reentry. Exactly at 4 hours 43 minutes 53 seconds into the flight he must manually override that .05g switch and retract the periscope and seal its outer doors. He passed out of radio range before he got further information.

  Soon he had Mercury Control on the line from the Cape. Finally Alan Shepard gave him the reason for retaining the retro-pack. John was angry he had not been informed earlier, but he agreed with the decision.

  Four hours into the flight, off the coast of California, the three retro-rockets fired at five-second intervals. Glenn felt a triple thud at the base of the craft. “I feel like I’m going back to Hawaii,” he exclaimed.

  Friendship Seven edged into the atmosphere. Heat built up. The capsule swayed slightly from side to side. A sudden bang behind Glenn held his attention. He felt it was at least part of the retro-pack breaking away. Glenn called Texas CapCom. He couldn’t get through. A layer of ionized air enveloped the spacecraft and isolated it from communications.

  Glenn plunged deeper into the searing heat.

  His heartbeat increased to 109 beats a minute.

  As best they could on the ground, they monitored Glenn’s progress. Alan Shepard called with an urgent message for John to get rid of the pack the moment the capsule built up to 1g or greater. The message failed to get through the ionization layer.

  Enveloped by a shrieking fireball, Glenn dived earthward. He was completely alone.

  Through his window he saw a scene that belonged in a nightmare. A strap from the retro-pack had broken or burned free and was hammering against his window. It burst into fire and f
lashed away.

  Big, flaming chunks of metal whirled and pounded past the window. They were fire devils, which bumped and banged against the spacecraft as they flew past before being swept into the ionized tunnel he was carving out of the atmosphere.

  Never before had a man raced earthward at the core of a blazing metal meteor, hand-flying a wingless capsule.

  “It was a bad moment,” he reflected later. He judged that if everything did not come unglued, he would be okay. If things fell apart, then “it would be all over shortly and, period, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.”

  Two things dominated Glenn’s thinking as the heat built up and Friendship Seven rocked from side to side as he fought to keep the little ship steady. He kept waiting for a shield failure that would transform him into a human meteor.

  John Glenn’s heartbeat held steady at 109.

  Despite his apprehension, he kept his cool, flew with consummate skill as he watched the brilliant orange blaze outside his window, the burning chunks flying by. He felt the g forces building. He could have hugged them. It meant he was slowing steadily. He called CapCom; no way to get through the ionized teardrop yet.

  The heat shield at his back was at three thousand degrees. No heat buildup on his back to indicate shield failure.

  They felt helpless in Mercury Control. No one could help John. All they could do was wait for the communications blackout to end.

  It was the longest four minutes and twenty seconds they had ever known.

  An engineer stood behind Alan Shepard, part of a group collecting there. “Keep talking, Alan,” begged one man. Shepard called again.

  “Friendship Seven, this is Mercury Control. How do you read? Over.”

  The words penetrated the Friendship Seven like the song of an angel.

  Glenn’s reply was simple. “Loud and clear. How me?”

  A grin split Shepard’s face. “Roger,” he said. “Reading you loud and clear. How are you doing?”

  “Oh, pretty good,” Glenn said, “but that was a real fireball, boy!”

  Some lost it in Mercury Control.