Faget recalls that back in 1958 they decided that 60 degrees of oscillation was “good enough” when they worked on prototypes in the wind tunnels. But he laughed rather sadistically at the memory – “oscillations of 60 degrees would have produced a wild ride.” By 1962, more circumspect human-factors engineers had settled on the oscillations of a mere 10 degrees. And Scott was right at the edge of “tolerable.” He tried to find reassurance in the evenness of the oscillations, which signaled good aerodynamic stability.
But then, something new: the orange glow gave way to green flashes, and then to a distinctly greenish gleam, unreported by his predecessors. Must be the ionizing beryllium shingles, Scott thought. Again at fifty thousand feet, the oscillations returned.
The Cape should be able to hear him by now, he thought. His transmissions became more expectant.
Carpenter reported: “And I’m standing by for altimeter off the peg. Cape, do you read yet?”
Scott’s rate of descent was slowing to only one hundred feet per second. Cabin pressure was “holding okay.” He was at forty-five thousand feet, already arming the drogue parachute, the first of two chutes designed to steady and slow the capsule on its descent toward splashdown. Then he heard a voice, maybe Gus, and replied, “Roger, Aurora 7 reading okay.”
Carpenter reported: “Getting some pretty good oscillations now and we’re out of fuel.”
His “pretty good” oscillations were actually pretty bad, registering now outside the “tolerable range” of 10 percent, the worst so far. Not yet. Not yet. He was waiting for twenty-five thousand feet, the upper limit for a drogue-chute release, performed entirely at the astronaut’s discretion. His heart rate, which had averaged about seventy beats per minute throughout the flight, hit a peak of 104. Not unexpected.
Carpenter reported: “Drogue out manually at 25. It’s holding and it was just in time.”
The drogue chute did its job steadying the capsule. “Just in time” was a reference to its welcome effect on the oscillations. Still falling. Still reporting at thirteen thousand feet. Scott was “standing by” for the main chute at “mark 10” – the altimeter mark of ten thousand feet:
“Mark 10. I see the main is out and reefed and it looks good to me. The main chute is out. Landing bag is auto now. The drogue has fallen away. I see a perfect chute. Visor open. Cabin temperature is only 110 at this point. Helmet hose is off.”
Carpenter asked: “Does anybody read – does anybody read Aurora 7? Over.”
Then Cape Capcom (Gus Grissom): “Aurora 7, Aurora 7, Cape Capcom. Over.”
Carpenter reported: “Roger, I’m reading you. I’m on the main chute at 5,000, status is good.”
Some back and forth. Aurora 7 was beneath the clouds now: “Hello.” “How do you read?” “Loud and clear, Gus. How me?” But Gus heard not a single transmission from Scott. Transmitting blind, Gus announced:
“Aurora 7 . . . your landing point is 200 miles long. We will jump the Air Rescue people to you.”
Carpenter replied: “Roger. Understand. I’m reading.”
Gus repeated: “Be advised your landing point is long. We will jump Air Rescue people to you in about one hour.”
Carpenter acknowledged: “Roger. Understand 1 hour.”
Scott could see the water now and prepared for the landing. The impact was not at all hard, but the capsule went completely underwater, only to pop back up and list sharply to one side. He was dismayed to see a good bit of water splash down on to the voice recorder.
All things considered – the unexpected amount of water; the sharp listing of the capsule (sixty degrees, although it would soon recover to a more reasonable forty-five degrees as the landing bag filled with water and began to act like a sea anchor), and the growing heat in the cabin – Scott thought it sensible to get out quickly. With a pararescue team an hour away, this meant egress through the nose of the capsule, a procedure practiced many times in preparation for just such situations. Al and John had orderly side-hatch exits, John’s aboard a destroyer, the USS Noa. An appalling side-hatch explosion had sent Gus scrambling out, against an incoming tide of seawater, into the ocean where he nearly drowned – recovery helicopters focused on the task of keeping his waterlogged capsule from sinking sixteen thousand feet to the ocean floor. Scott’s top-hatch egress would be Project Mercury’s first and, as it turned out, only one. It took him four minutes.
Carpenter’s suit was fitted with a neck dam, a watertight rubber seal at the collar. Kris Stoever:
First, he removed the instrument panel from the bulkhead, exposing the narrow egress up through the nose of the capsule, where until recently two parachutes had been neatly stowed. It was a tight fit, but with some scooting and muscling upward, he made his way to the small hatch opening. Egress procedures mandated Scott deploy his neck dam. But he was very hot. Surveying the gently swelling seas and all his flotation gear, he decided not to.
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 w
as 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 of operational proficiency of both flight and ground crews; the conduct of experiments in space; extravehicular (EVA) operations; active control of re-entry flight path to achieve a precise landing point; and onboard orbital navigation. Each Gemini mission carried two astronauts into Earth orbit for periods ranging from 5 hours to 14 days. The program consisted of 10 crewed launches, 2 unmanned launches and 7 target vehicles, at a total cost of approximately 1,280 million dollars.
Project Gemini and the bush telegraph
Hamish Lindsay was an Australian who worked for NASA Carnarvon, one of the NASA tracking stations in Australia. Chris Kraft, NASA’s first flight director, described him as “one who lived through the Camelot period of space in the 60s and knows the trauma we all endured”.
The tracking station at Carnarvon was built for the Gemini missions. Carnarvon was an outback town with a population of 2,200, 965 kilometres north of Fremantle on the west coast of Australia.
The first Gemini trial was on 8 April 1964 and was an unmanned test of the structural integrity of the new spacecraft and its launch vehicle, the Titan II. Lindsay:
Carnarvon’s first mission was a real Australian Outback story of the bush telegraph. It was Wednesday 8 April 1964 and the first unmanned Gemini trial, GT-I, was sitting on the launch pad ready to open the Gemini Program with a test of the structural integrity of the spacecraft and the launch vehicle. At Carnarvon the staff were still putting the finishing touches to the new station.
The author remembers that it was 10:22 pm local time – 1 minute 37 seconds to lift off. “We were standing by listening to the count, anxious to prove ourselves with our first mission. Everything was ready – we had all our mission information loaded, the equipment tuned up. Suddenly the line to Mission Control at Cape Canaveral went dead – at the time we didn’t know what had happened, but we were cut off from the outside world by a lightning strike 105 kilometres south of the station.”
Mrs Lillian O’Donoghue, the postmistress and operator of the weather station at Hamlin Pool at the southern end of Shark Bay, was roused up that night by a telephone call from the operator at Northampton, asking if she could contact Carnarvon. Using the bush telegraph – nothing more than a party line of telephones connected to the top strand of the local property fences, or in some places a line strung between the fence posts – Mrs O’Donoghue, who hadonlybeeninthe jobfor four months,was able to speak to the operator 241 kilometres away in the town of Carnarvon.
The mission tracking data from Cape Canaveral was intercepted at Adelaide, and phoned through to the Postmaster General’s Department test room in Perth. The Perth technicians then relayed the information to the technician at Mullewa, who established a phone patch through Northampton to Mrs O’Donoghue, and she and her husband then passed blocks of figures in half hour segments on to the Carnarvon operator from 10:30 pm until 3:45 am. From the Carnarvon telephone exchange it was a simple matter to get the information to the tracking station and the FPQ6 radar, a key element in the early phases of NASA launches from Cape Canaveral. It was 3 am before the PMG linesmen battled through driving rain and several washouts to get the normal landline operational again. After this episode a special tropospheric radio link was built between the station and Perth, and there were no more major communication breakdowns.
As Carnarvon had all the mission data already loaded before the lightning struck, the most important information was the time the spacecraft was launched and any changes. As Carnarvon wasn’t officially completed and not a critical station for this particular mission, the launch went ahead, leaving Pad 19 on 8 April 1964. Sent into orbit faster than expected, the spacecraft ended up 34 kilometres higher than planned. One of the only two powerful FPQ6 radar’s tracking at the time, Carnarvon followed the spacecraft over Australia until the mission was terminated after 64 orbits on 12 April, and came down in the South Atlantic.
In 1959 “Buzz” Aldrin was a US Air Force jet fighter pilot stationed in Germany. Both he and his friend Ed White wanted to be selected for the astronaut program. Aldrin realized that he needed higher education so decided to apply for an astronautics program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Aldrin described NASA’s program:
George Low joined NASA as Chief of the Office of Space Flight programs. He suggested the next goal after orbit should be a circumlunar flight which would lead to a landing on the moon. A landing on the moon would be NASA’s long term goal.
NASA realized a circumlunar flight would require a spacecraft that could provide life support for more than one astronaut and be capable of reaching a velocity of 25,000 miles per hour in order to escape from Earth’s gravitational field. It would a
lso have to shield the crew from radiation while traveling to the moon and be able to withstand reentry to Earth’s atmosphere at this speed, which was much greater than the 17,500-mile-per-hour orbital reentry. The big spacecraft would be far heavier than the booster capacity of any planned military missile.
Von Braun’s Huntsville team already had a class of large boosters on the drawing board. Called the Saturn (after Jupiter’s neighboring planet in the solar system), the first generation of large boosters incorporated a cluster of Jupiter-type engines as the first stage, to produce 1.5 million pounds of thrust. Von Braun also envisioned a second-generation superbooster he called the Nova, whose first stage would cluster the big F-1 engines that were then being studied by the Defense Department. Each F-1 produced a thrust of 1.5 million pounds.
In December 1959, Abe Silverstein and his advanced development group went even further than von Braun’s ambitious initial plans for the Saturn class of rockets. Following conventional design philosophy, the first stage of the new boosters would use proven kerosene and LOX propellants. Silverstein, however, knew that the upper stages of any eventual moon booster would require a much higher thrustto-weight capability than LOX-kerosene technology could provide. His group recommended fueling the upper stages with supercold (cryogenic) liquid hydrogen and LOX, a high-energy combination whose use was fraught with technical problems. This was the technology that the rocket pioneers Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, and Goddard said offered the most efficient and lightweight conversion of fuel to thrust. Von Braun knew this, of course, but was hesitant to embrace this unconventional propellant technology. His years of trying unsuccessfully to interest America in spaceflight had taught him to be cautious in his recommendations. Now that senior NASA officials were backing this method of fueling the booseters, he was more than happy to follow.
The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster Page 17
