The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

by Richard Russell Lawrence

  I walked around a bit, talking briefly with Gus again and with John Glenn. I especially wanted to thank John for all the hard work he had done as my backup pilot. Some of the crew looked a little tense up there, but none of the astronauts showed it.

  At 5:20 I disconnected the hose which led to my portable air-conditioner, slipped off the protective galoshes that had covered my boots and squeezed through the hatch. I linked the suit up with the capsule oxygen system, checked the straps which held me tight in the couch, removed the safety pins which kept some of the switches from being pushed or pulled inadvertently and passed them outside.

  John had left a little note on the instrument panel, where no one else could see it but me. It read, NO HAND BALL PLAYING IN THIS AREA. I was going to leave it there, but when John saw me laugh behind the visor he grinned and reached in to retrieve it. I guess he remembered that the capsule cameras might pick up that message, and he lost his nerve. No one could speak to me now, face-to-face. I had closed the visor and was hooked up with the intercom system. Several people stuck their heads in to take a last-minute look around, and hands kept reaching in to make little adjustments. Then, at 6:10, the hatch went on and I was alone. I watched as the latches turned to make sure they were tight.

  This was the big moment, and I had thought about it a lot. The butterflies were pretty strong now. “OK, Buster,” I said to myself, “you volunteered for this thing. Now it’s up to you to do it.” There was no question in my mind now that we were going – unless some serious malfunction occurred. I had anticipated the nervousness I felt, and I had made plans to counteract it by plunging into my pilot preparations. There were plenty of things to do to keep me busy, and the tension slackened off immediately. I went through all the checklists, checked the radio systems and the gyro switches.

  At other places around the Cape at this point, the other astronauts were taking up their positions to back me up in any way they could. Deke Slayton sat at the Capsule Communicator desk in Mercury Control Centre. He would do most of the talking with me during the countdown and flight so that both the lingo and the spirit behind it would be clear and familiar. John and Gus joined Deke as soon as I was firmly locked in and there was nothing more they could do at the pad. Wally and Scott stood by at Patrick Air Force Base, ready to take off in two F-106jets to chase the Redstone and capsule as far as they could and observe the flight. Gordon stayed in the blockhouse, monitoring the weather and standing by to help put into effect the rescue operations he had worked on which would get me out of the capsule in a hurry if we had an emergency while we were still on the pad. Inside the Mercury Control Centre itself, all the lights were green. All conditions were “Go”. The gantry rolled back at 6:34, and I lay on my back seventy feet above the ground checking the straps and switches and waiting for the countdown to proceed.

  I passed some of the time looking through the periscope. I could see clouds up above and people far beneath me on the ground. The view was fascinating – and I had a long, long time to admire it. There were four holds in all, the first at 7:14 when the count stood at T-15 minutes. A thick, muggy layer of clouds had begun to drift in over the launch site, and a hold was called to give the Control Centre an opportunity to check on the weather. Cape Canaveral sits on a narrow spit of land with the Gulf Stream close by to the east and the Gulf of Mexico only 130 miles to the west. The weather is likely to change rapidly between these two bodies of water. The day can be bright and sunny one minute, cloudy and breezy the next. It is fickle and difficult to keep track of, and in order to follow the capsule and the booster closely, photograph their performance and watch for possible emergencies, the men in the Control Centre require a clear view of the first part of a flight.

  The appearance of a small hole in the clouds, however, gave Walt Williams, the Operations Director, enough confidence to carry on, and the meteorologists reported that the clouds would soon blow away and that the sky would be clear again within about thirty minutes. Walt decided to recycle the count – or set it back – to allow for this delay, and he let the mission proceed.

  Then another problem cropped up. During the delay for weather, a small inverter located near the top of the Redstone began to overheat. Inverters are used to convert the DC current which comes from the batteries into the AC current required to power some of the systems in the booster. This particular inverter provided 400-cycle power which was needed to get the missile into operation and off the pad. It had to be replaced. This involved bringing the gantry back into position around the Redstone so that the technicians could get at it, and eighty-six minutes went by before the Control Centre could resume the count.

  I continued to feel fine, however. The doctors could tell how I was doing by looking at their instrument panels and talking it over with me. When the inverter was fixed, the gantry moved away, the cherrypicker manoeuvred its cab back outside the capsule, and the count went along smoothly for twenty-one minutes before it suddenly stopped again. This time the technicians wanted to doublecheck a computer which would help predict the trajectory of the capsule and its impact point in the recovery area.

  I think that my basic metabolism started to speed up along about this point. Everything – pulse rate, carbon dioxide production, blood pressure – began to climb. I suppose that my adrenalin was flowing pretty fast, too. I was not really aware of it at the time. But once or twice I had to warn myself – “You’re building up too fast. Slow down. Relax.” Whenever I though that my heart was palpitating a little, I would try to stop whatever I was doing and look out through the periscope at the pad crews or at the waves along the beach before I went back to work.

  The last hold came at T minus 2 minutes 40 seconds. This time the people in the blockhouse were worried about the pressure on the supply of lox in the Redstone which we would need to feed the rocket engines. The pressure on the fuel read a hundred psi too high on the blockhouse gauge, and if this meant resetting the pressure valve inside the booster manually, the mission would have to be scrubbed for at least another forty-eight hours. Fortunately, the technicians found they were able to bleed off the excess pressure by turning some of the valves by remote control, and the final count resumed at 9:23. I had become slightly and I think understandably impatient at this point. I had been locked inside the capsule for nearly four hours now, and as I listened to the engineers chattering to one another over the radio and debating about whether or not to repair the trouble, I began to get the impression that they were being too cautious just for my sake and might wind up taking too long. It wasn’t really fair of me, but “I’m cooler than you are,” I said into my mike. “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?” They fixed their “little problem” and the orange cherrypicker moved away from the capsule for the last time.

  In contrast, after the days of postponement and the holds, the last few minutes leading up to 9:34 a.m. EST (2:43 p.m. GMT) went perfectly. Everyone was prompt in his reports. I could feel that all the training we had gone through with the blockhouse crew and booster crew was really paying off down there. I had no concern at all. I knew how things were supposed to go, and that is how they went. About three minutes before lift-off, the blockhouse turned off the flow of cooling freon gas – I knew it would shut off anyway at T-35 seconds when the umbilical fell away. At two minutes before launch, I set the control valves for the suit and cabin temperature, shifted to the voice circuit and had a quick radio check with Deke Slayton at the Capsule Communicator (Cap Com) desk in Mercury Control Centre. I also contacted Chase One and Chase Two Wally Shirra and Scott Carpenter in the chase planes – and heard them loud and clear. They were in the air, ready to take a high-level look at me as I went past them after the launch.

  Electronically speaking, my colleagues were all around me at this moment.

  Deke gave me the count at T-90 seconds and again at T-60. I had nothing to do just then but maintain my communications, so I rogered both messages. At T-35 seconds I watched through the periscope as the u
mbilical which had fed Freon and power into the capsule snapped out and fell away. Then the periscope came in and the little door which protected it in flight closed shut. The red light on my instrument panel went out to signal this event, which was the last critical function the capsule had to perform automatically before we were ready to go. I reported this to Deke, and then I reported the power readings. Both were in a “Go” condition. I heard Deke roger my message, and then I listened as he read the final count: 10-9-8-7 . . . At the count of “5” I put my right hand on the stopwatch button which I had to push at lift-off to time the flight. I put my left hand on the abort handle which I would move in a hurry only if something went seriously wrong and I had to activate the escape tower.

  Just after the count of “Zero”, Deke said “Lift-off”.

  I think I braced myself a bit too much while Deke was giving me the final count. Nobody knew, of course, how much shock and vibration I would really feel when the Redstone took off.

  There was no one around who had tried it and could tell me; and we had not heard from Moscow how it felt. I was probably a little too tense. But I was really exhilarated and pleasantly surprised when I answered, “Lift-off and the clock is started”.

  There was a lot less vibration and noise rumble than I had expected. It was extremely smooth – a subtle, gentle, gradual rise off the ground. There was nothing rough or abrupt about it. But there was no question that I was going, either. I could see it on the instruments, hear it on the headphones, feel it, all around me.

  It was a strange and exciting sensation. And yet it was so mild and easy – much like the rides we had experienced in our trainers – that it somehow seemed very familiar. I felt as if I had experienced the whole thing before. But nothing could possibly simulate in every detail the real thing that I was going through at that moment, so I tried very hard to figure out all the sensations and to pin them down in my mind in words which I could use later. I knew that the people back on the ground – the engineers, doctors and psychiatrists – would be very curious about how I was affected by each sensation and that they would ask me quite a lot of questions when I got back. I tried to anticipate these questions and have some answers ready.

  For the first minute, the ride continued to be very smooth. My main job just then was to keep the people on the ground as relaxed and informed as possible. It was no good for them to have a test pilot up there unless they knew fairly precisely what he was doing, what he saw and how he felt every thirty seconds or so along the way. So I did quite a bit of reporting over the radio about oxygen pressure and fuel consumption and cabin temperature and how the Gs were mounting slowly, just as we had predicted they would. I do not imagine that future spacemen will have to bother quite so much about some of these items. This was the first time, so we were being cautious.

  I was scheduled to communicate about something or other for a total of seventy-eight times during the fifteen minutes that I was up. And I had to manage or at least monitor a total of twenty-seven major events in the capsule. This kept me rather busy. But we wanted to get our money’s worth when we planned this flight, and we filled the flight plan and the schedule with all the things we wanted to do and learn. We rigged two movie cameras inside the capsule, for example, one of which was focused on the instrument panel to keep a running record of how the system behaved. The other one was aimed at me to see how I reacted. The scientists used the film to compile a chart of all my eye movements, which they related to the position of the instruments I had to watch as each moment and event transpired. On the basis of this data they later moved a couple of the instruments closer together on the panel so that future pilots would not have to move their eyes so often to keep up with things.

  One minute after lift-off the ride did get a little rough. This was where the booster and the capsule passed from sonic to supersonic speed and then immediately went slicing through a zone of maximum dynamic pressure as the forces of speed and air density combined at their peak. The spacecraft started vibrating here. Although my vision was blurred for a few seconds, I had no trouble seeing the instrument panel. I decided not to report this sensation just then. We had known that something like this was going to happen, and if I had sent down a garbled message that it was worse than we had expected and that I was really getting buffeted, I think I might have put everybody on the ground into a state of shock. I did not want to panic anyone into ordering me to leave. And I did not want to leave. So I waited until the vibration stopped and let the Control Centre know indirectly by reporting to Deke that it was “a lot smoother now, a lot smoother”.

  The pressure in the cabin held at 5.5 psi, just as it was designed to do. And at two minutes after launch, at an altitude of about 22 miles, the Gs were building up and I was climbing at a speed of 3,200 mph. The ride was fine now, and I made my last transmission before the booster engine cut off: “All Systems are Go.”

  The engine cut-off occurred right on schedule, at 2 minutes 22 seconds after lift-off. Nothing abrupt happened, just a delicate and gradual dropping off of the thrust as the fuel flow decreased. I heard a roaring noise as the escape tower blew off. I was glad I would not be needing it any longer. I reported all of these events to Deke, and then I heard a noise as the little rockets fired to separate the capsule from the booster. This was a critical point of the flight, both technically and psychologically. I knew that if the capsule got hung up on the booster, I would have quite a different flight, and I had thought about this possibility quite a lot before lift-off. There is good medical evidence to the effect that I was worried about it again when it was time for the event to take place, for my pulse rate reached its peak here – 138. It started down again right away, however. (About one minute before lift-off my pulse was 90, and Gus told me later that when he and John Glenn saw this on the medical panel in the Control Centre, they figured that my pulse was a good six points lower than Gus thought his was and eight points lower than John’s.) Right after leaving the booster, the capsule and I went weightless together and I could feel the capsule begin its slow, lazy turnaround to get into position for the rest of the flight. It turned 180°, with the bottom end swinging forward now to take up the heat. It had been facing down and backwards. The periscope went back out again at this point, and I was supposed to do three things in order: (1) take over manual control of the capsule, (2) tell the people downstairs how the controls were working, and (3) take a look outside to see what the view was like.

  The capsule was travelling at about 5,000 mph, and up to this point it had been on automatic pilot. I switched over to the manual control stick, and tried out the pitch, yaw and roll axes in that order. Each time I moved the stick, the little jets of hydrogen peroxide rushed through the nozzles on the outside of the capsule and pushed it or twisted it the way I wanted it to go. When the nozzles were on at full blast, I could hear them spurting away over the background noise in my headset. I found out that I could easily use the pitch axis to raise or lower the blunt end of the capsule. This movement was very smooth and precise, just as it had been on our ALFA trainer. I fed the yaw axis, and this manoeuvre worked, too. I could make the capsule twist slightly from left to right and back again, just as I wanted it to. Finally I took over control of the roll motion and I was flying Freedom 7 on my own. This was a big moment for me, for it proved that our control system was sound and that it worked under real space-flight conditions.

  It was now time to go to the periscope. I had been well briefed on what to expect, and I had some idea of the huge variety of colour and land masses and cloud cover which I would see from a hundred miles up. But no one could be briefed well enough to be completely prepared for the astonishing view that I got. My exclamation back to Deke about the “beautiful sight” was completely spontaneous. It was breathtaking. To the south I could see where the cloud cover stopped at about Fort Lauderdale, and that the weather was clear all the way down past the Florida Keys. To the north I could see up the coast of the Carolinas to where the clouds just obscu
red Cape Hatteras. Across Florida to the west I could spot Lake Okeechobee and Tampa Bay. Because there were some scattered clouds far beneath me I was not able to see some of the Bahamas that I had been briefed to look for. So I shifted to an open area and identified Andros Island and Bimini. The colours around these ocean islands were brilliantly clear, and I could see sharp variations between the blue of deep water and the light green of the shoal areas near the reefs. It was really stunning.

  But I did not just admire the view. I found that I could actually use it to help keep the capsule in the proper attitude. By looking through the periscope and focusing down on Cape Canaveral as the zero reference point for the yaw control axis, I discovered that this system would provide a fine backup in case the instruments and the auto-pilot happened to go out together on some future flight. It was good to know that we could count on handling the capsule this extra way – provided, of course, that we had a clear view and knew exactly what we were looking at. Fortunately, I could look back and see the Cape very clearly. It was a fine reference.

  All through this period, the capsule and I remained weightless. And though we had had a lot of free advice on how this would feel – some of it rather dire – the sensation was just what I expected it would be: pleasant and relaxing. It had absolutely no effect on my movements or my efficiency. I was completely comfortable, and it was something of a relief not to feel the pressure and weight of my body against the couch. The ends of my straps floated around a little, and there was some dust drifting around in the cockpit with me. But these were unimportant and peripheral indications that I was at Zero G.