Carpenter reported: “I’m going – I’ll open the visor a minute, that’ll cool – it seems cooler with the visor open.”
The Capcom persisted. Mercury Control needed me to reconfirm that I had used the fly-by-wire control system to check out all the thrusters.
Capcom replied: “Aurora 7, confirm you’ve checked fly-by-wire, and all thrusters are okay.”
Carpenter replied: “Roger. Fly-by-wire is checked, all thrusters are okay.”
But the information coming from the horizon scanner was faulty. During the orbital phase of spaceflight, a malfunctioning automated navigational system is tolerable – for my flight this was especially so because the ASCS was so rarely used. But during an ASCS-controlled retrofire – that critical exit off the orbital highway – an accurate horizon scanner is crucial. For retrofire, the spacecraft must be aligned exactly in two axes – pitch and yaw. Pitch attitude, or angle, must be 34 degrees, nose down. Yaw, the left-right attitude, must be steady at 0 degrees, or pointing directly back along the flight path. The ASCS performs this maneuver automatically, and better than any pilot, when the on-board navigational instruments are working properly.
If the gyros are broken, all is not lost: a pilot can do two things to bring yaw attitude to zero. The first is to point the nose in a direction he thinks is a zero-degree yaw angle and then watch the terrain pass beneath the vehicle. This is nearly impossible to do over featureless ocean or terrain. Far better to have a certain geographical feature or cloud pattern to watch. Because the pilot is traveling backward, the geographical features he is trying to track must begin at the bottom of the window and flow in a straight line from there to the top. When this happens, the pilot knows he is in a zero-degree attitude. This can be done through the periscope too, but it takes a little longer and is less accurate.
My travails with a hot cabin and a humid spacesuit continued over Australia. Deke, the Muchea Capcom, assumed ground communications. It was his unhappy job to tell me that my cabin temperatures had climbed to 107 degrees Fahrenheit (they would peak, during the third orbit, at 108 degrees). Dehydration under such conditions is a worry, and for these and other reasons NASA medics had lobbied for some of the capcom posts, to no avail. By the time I had completed another solid-food experiment, by eating some Pillsbury-made morsels, I was within voice range of the next Australian capcom, at Woomera, and still fussing with my suit temperature controls. The capcom there asked me for suit temperature and humidity readings. They were at 74 degrees Fahrenheit, with the “steam exhaust” registering a miserable 71 degrees of humidity inside my suit. Still, the numbers had come down since Australia, so the Woomera Capcom asked rather hopefully:
“Are you feeling more comfortable at this time?”
A noncommittal “I don’t know” was the best I could manage. I was frustrated with the suit controls and realized with exasperation that for all the exhaustive testing of the suits prior to this and other early launches, no one thought to test its cooling capacity with the face-plate open! And so many in-flight activities required me to keep my visor up.
Carpenter reported: “I’m still warm and still perspiring. I would like to – I would like to nail this temperature problem down. It – for all practical purposes, it’s uncontrollable as far as I can see.”
Capcom asked: “How about water?”
Carpenter replied: “That would be a no.”
Carpenter reported: “I had taken four swallows at approximately this time last orbit. As soon as I get the suit temperature pegged a little bit, I’ll open the visor and have some more water. Over.”
At this point in the flight, over Canton, I was scheduled to take a xylose pill (which is a biomedically traceable sugar pill for later analysis in my collected urine). I could feel the melted Pillsbury mess in the plastic bag and said, “I hate to do this,” more to myself than to the Canton Capcom. Then, surprise, when I opened it: “It didn’t melt!” I found the xylose pill, but all my cookies had crumbled. Chocolate morsels escaped their confines to float, weightless, around my tiny workspace. The rest of the stuff in the bag was a mess. The Nestle concoction, more fruit and nougat than heat-sensitive chocolate, held up far better.
I was approaching Hawaii, and my second sunrise in space. Referring to the flight plan, the Canton Capcom prompted me, before LOS, for an update on the balloon experiment: “Which of the five colors was most visible?”
Carpenter reported: “I would say that the day-glow orange is best.”
Capcom replied: “Roger. For your information, the second sunrise should be expected in approximately 3 to 4 minutes.”
“The Surgeon is after me here,” he added, for another blood pressure check. “Is this convenient?” My in-flight duties at sunrise called for vigorous physical activity, so I waved him off:
“Negative. I won’t be able to hold still for it now. I’ve got the sunrise to worry about.”
He let me alone.
Sunrises and sunsets were extremely busy time-blocks during Mercury flights. There were important measurements to make of the airglow and other celestial phenomena and innumerable photographs to take.
John O’Keefe had some solid hypotheses about the “fireflies” John had seen during his flight. But they remained unexplained. Whatever the critters were, they were particularly active, or at least visible, at dawn, adding to the scientist-pilot’s burden. At 02 49 00 I reported the arrival of a beautiful dawn in space: “I’ll record it,” I told the Canton Capcom, “so you can see it.” As a patrol plane pilot, I had trained to serve as the U.S. Navy’s eyes and ears – a militarily indispensable role. In space, as a Mercury astronaut, I was now the eyes and ears for an entire nation. I felt an obligation to record what few would ever have a chance to see.
I was just beginning to go through my crowded schedule of sunrise-related work when Hawaii took over from Canton, announcing, “Hawaii Com Tech. How do you read me?” prompting me for a short report. The Navy has a one-through-five scale for grading the volume and clarity of voice transmissions. An old Navy quip came to mind, “I read you two by two” – a voice-report short-hand for “too loud and too often.” But I reserved the smart answer and said only, “Stand by one. My status is good. My capsule status is good. I want to get some pictures of the sunrise. Over.”
Capcom asked for a fuel consumption report. Carpenter reported that his fuel supplies were 45–62.
The 45–62 figures were the percentages of Aurora 7’s fuel supply. I had less than half my manual fuel supply left; my automatic fuel supplies stood at 62 percent. Not alarmingly low yet, but low enough. Still Kraft, directing the flight from the Cape, later reported that he wasn’t worried: “except for some overexpenditure of hydrogen peroxide fuel,” he wrote in his own postflight analysis of MA-7, “everything had gone perfectly.” I still had 40 percent of my manual fuel, which, “according to the mission rules,” Kraft figured, “ought to be quite enough hydrogen peroxide . . . to thrust the capsule into the retrofire attitude, hold it, and then to reenter the atmosphere using either the automatic or the manual control system.”
But I myself was running low on water – hadn’t drunk any even after the prompting over Woomera. This was a mistake. I was in good physical condition and could tolerate dehydration, but I still should have been drinking copious amounts of water to compensate for what I was losing through sweat and respiration. Someone, the flight surgeon, directed the Hawaii Capcom to inquire about my water intake:
“Did you drink over Canton? Did you drink any water over Canton?”
Carpenter replied: “That is negative. I will do, shortly.”
The water would have to wait. But Hawaii Capcom persisted: “Roger. Surgeon feels this is advisable.” More cabin and suit temperature readings were asked for and given. It was at this time that Mercury Control, alert to potential problems, had pondered one of my earlier voice reports (at capsule elapsed 02 08 46) about the difficulty I was having, not with the thrusters, but with the ASCS. It directed Hawaii
Capcom to have me conduct an ASCS check:
“Aurora 7. This is Capcom. Would like for you to return gyros to normal and see what kind of indication we have: whether or not your window view agrees with your gyros.”
Sixteen seconds passed. I was feverishly working through the sunrise-related scientific work, too busy to drink water, too busy to send a telemetered blood pressure reading, and ground control had just asked me to perform an attitude check. “Roger. Wait one,” I replied.
Mercury Control had chosen an awkward moment to troubleshoot the (intermittently) malfunctioning ASCS. They wanted an attitude check, at dawn, over a featureless ocean while I was busily engaged with the dawn-related work specified in my flight plan. Again, adequate checks for attitude, particularly in yaw, are difficult enough in full daylight over recognizable land terrain, requiring precious minutes of continuous attention to the view of the ground out your periscope and the window. In my postflight report I explained the difficulty.
Manual control of the spacecraft yaw attitude using external references has proven to be more difficult and time-consuming than pitch and roll alignment, particularly as external lighting diminishes . . . Ground terrain drift provided the best daylight reference in yaw. However, a terrestrial reference at night was useful in controlling yaw attitudes only when sufficiently illuminated by moonlight. In the absence of moonlight, the pilot reported that the only satisfactory yaw reference was a known star complex nearer the orbital plane.
But Mercury Control had requested an attitude check, and I complied, first reporting that I had to get back within “scanner limits,” that is, to an attitude in which the horizon was visible to the pitch horizon scanner. That required more maneuvering, which required more fuel. I was still trying to cram in more observations.
Capcom asked: “Can we get a blood pressure from you, Scott?”
I sent the blood pressure, reported on the transmission, and continued voice reports on the experiments: the behavior of the “fireflies”; the balloon, still shadowing Aurora 7 like a stray animal, was oscillating some. Just before LOS, I reported I was going to “gyros normal. Gyros normal now.” Hawaii Capcom replied: “Roger, TM [telemetry] indicates your-zero pitch.” And then “LOS, Scott, we’ve had LOS.”
Loss of signal. I was moving on to voice contact with Al Shepard, California Capcom, and approaching the start of my final, most perilous circumnavigation of the planet.
Kris Stoever continued:
The pilot of Aurora 7 speeded toward California, where Al Shepard was capcom, in charge of ground communications. Scott first gave Al his short report on fuel, cabin-air temperature, and control mode (“manual, gyros normal, maneuver off”). But then the important issue: the suit steam-exhaust temperatures. They were “still reading,” he told Al dispiritedly, “70 degrees.”
But Al had good news:
“Understand you’re GO for orbit three.”
While the GO business was nice to hear, it was really hot in the cabin, and Scott still had lots of work to do. As it happened, more than the MA-7 cabin temperatures were hot. From all reports, Kraft was full-out fuming as Scott approached the continental United States. The flight director appears to have concluded, erroneously, that the pilot of MA-7 had deliberately ignored his request for an attitude check over Hawaii. Now, in addition to his anxieties about fuel use, Kraft was nursing a grudge about a snub that never took place.
In his memoir, he writes that as Carpenter approached California, he directed Al Shepard, the California Capcom, to set things right. Al’s new job, Kraft told the famously self-possessed Navy commander, was “to find what the hell was going on up there,” adding that he left the California Capcom with “no doubt” about his “frustration” with Carpenter. Kraft was in fact bellowing through the earpieces of Al’s headset.
The flight director told Al he needed two things from Scott: an attitude check and a tight curb on fuel use. In an exercise of judgment as California Capcom, Shepard relayed just one of Kraft’s two requests:
“General Kraft is still somewhat concerned about your auto fuel. Use as little auto – use no auto fuel unless you have to prior to retrosequence time.”
Shepard then turned to the matter at hand, which was the heat in the cabin and an apparently malfunctioning heat exchanger in Scott’s suit. He suggested another, more comfortable setting. He omitted Kraft’s request for an attitude check. Al then did unto Scott as he hoped others might one day to unto him, offered the pilot a little time, a little quiet, and some encouragement:
“Roger. You’re sounding good here. Give you a period of quiet while I send Z and R cal.”
The two men carried out these quiet space chores over the next three and a half minutes. Then Al gathered information. Either he knew enough to ask, or he was prompted by the flight surgeon:
“Do you – have you . . . have you stopped perspiring at the moment?”
No, Scott told him, he was “still perspiring.” A good sign. No impending heat stroke. Catching the drift of the conversation, Scott reported he might open his visor “and take a drink of water.”
Capcom acknowledged: “Roger. Sounds like a good idea.”
He let Scott drink. Sixteen quiet seconds passed. Then Al asked a question. Note the man’s impeccable manners:
“Seven, would you give us a blood pressure, please, in between swallows.”
It was a remarkable moment of earth-to-space human solicitude. A minute later, a refreshed Scott reported:
“Twenty swallows of water. Tasted pretty good.”
Capcom replied: “Roger, Seven, we’re sure of that.”
In a final, reassuring exchange before LOS, the California Capcom would send Aurora 7 on her way:
“Seven, this is California. Do you still read?”
Carpenter replied: “Roger, loud and clear.”
Capcom: “Roger, we have no further inquiries. See you next time.”
The “next time” would bring the two men, Shepard and Carpenter, together again in an even more life-saving conspiracy of astronauts.
After four hours in orbit and a long period of drifting flight, Aurora 7’s cabin temperature had dropped to 101 degrees Fahrenheit; the vexing problems with the suit temperature were being resolved. The balky camera was now a memory. Scott had succeed in shooting all the M.I.T. film for the “flattened sun” photographs. The experiment on the behavior of liquids in zero-G was a success. Capillary action can pump liquids in space. Over Woomera, Scott described and analyzed various successful valve settings for his suit – in-flight observations that would assist with a later redesign of the Mercury suit; he also took photometry readings and measurements on Phecda, a star in the Big Dipper, then sinking into the haze layer of the horizon. His short report had good news:
“I’m quite comfortable. Cabin temperature is 101 . . . fuel reads 46 and 40 percent. I am in drifting flight. I have had plenty of water to drink.”
For the next eleven minutes of spaceflight Scott transmitted an uninterrupted flow of observations. The partially inflated balloon, which had failed to jettison as planned over the Canaries, still bumped along behind the capsule. It kept “a constant bearing,” Scott reported, “at all times.” Still transmitting to Woomera:
“I have 22 minutes and 20 seconds left for retrofire. I think I will try to get some of this equipment stowed at this time.”
Coming up on sunrise, rich with “observables,” the pilot of Aurora prepared for one final observation of the airglow phenomenon, reporting for the tape recorder:
“There is the horizon band again; this time from the moonlit side.”
Carpenter complained once more about the light leak:
“Visor coming open now. It’s impossible to get dark-adapted in here.”
NASA had molded an eye patch for John Glenn so he could keep an eye covered through daytime on one orbit and emerge on the night side with a dark-adapted eye. But the small cabin was so dusty the sticky tape (designed to keep the patch secured over hi
s eye socket) became covered with dust and would not stick to his skin. NASA did not reattempt this dark-adaption patch with MA-7. Managing to get a good view through the filter, Scott continued: “Haze layer is very bright through the air glow filter. Very bright.” He then concentrated on the photometer measurements, reporting with some puzzlement that the width of the airglow layer was exactly equal to the width of the X inscribed on the lens. “I can’t explain it – I’ll have to – to—”
And then the sunrise, at 04 19 22. Scott would remember the sunrises and sunsets as the most beautiful and spectacular events of his flight aboard Aurora 7. “Stretching away for hundreds of miles to the north and the south,” they presented “a glittering, iridescent arc” of colors that, he later wrote, resolved into a “magnificent purplish-blue” blending, finally, with the total blackness of space. Thinking the camera might help with the air-glow measurement, he quickly grabbed for it and in doing so inadvertently rapped the spacecraft hatch.
A cloud of tiny, luminous particles swarmed past the window.
“Ahhhhhhhh!” he exclaimed, to the tape recorder. “Beautiful lighted fireflies that time,” explaining, “it was luminous that time.” Banging repeatedly on the hatch, he was rewarded with explosions of cloud after cloud of luminous particles from the spacecraft.
“If anybody reads,” Scott explained excitedly, “I have the fireflies. They are very bright. They are,” he announced with triumph, “capsule emanating!” He quickly explained the cause and effect that proved his finding: “I can rap the hatch and stir off hundreds of them. Rap the side of the capsule: huge streams come out.”
The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster Page 15
