It emerged that a battle had gone on in the control center over whether they should tell me. Deke and Chris Kraft had argued that they ought to tell me, and others had argued against it, but I didn’t learn that until many years later. I don’t know who had made the decision, but they changed the policy after that to establish that all information about the condition of the spacecraft was to be shared with the pilot.
I was describing the luminous particles I saw at each sunrise when George Ruff, the psychiatrist, broke up everyone in the debriefing by asking, “What did they say, John?” (The particles proved to be a short-lived phenomenon. The Soviets called them the Glenn effect; NASA learned from later flights that they were droplets of frozen water vapor from the capsule’s heat exchanger system, but their firefly-like glow remains a mystery.)
George also had a catch-all question tagged on at the end of the standard form we filled out at the end of each day’s training. It was, Was there any unusual activity during this period?
“No,” I wrote, “just the normal day in space.”
Grand Turk was an interlude, in which morning medical checks and debriefing sessions were followed by afternoons of play. Scott, as my backup, stuck with me as I had Al and Gus after their flights. We went scuba diving and spearfishing, and Scott rescued a diver who had blacked out eighty feet down, giving him some of his own air as he brought him to the surface. There were no crowds, since the debriefing site was closed.
Annie had tried to give me some idea of the overwhelming public reaction to the flight. Shorty Powers had said there was a mood afoot for public celebration. But I was only faintly aware of the groundswell that was building.
Project Mercury returned to space on May 24, with Scott’s three-orbit flight in Aurora 7. Deke had been scheduled to make the flight, but the doctors had grounded him after detecting a slight heart murmur.
Malfunctions aboard Scott Carpenter’s orbital flight
Scott Carpenter was born in Boulder, Colorado, on 1 May 1925. He joined the US Navy in 1943 but was discharged at the end of the Second World War. He rejoined the US Navy and was commissioned in 1949. He was given flight training at Pensacola, Florida and Corpus Christi, Texas and designated a naval aviator in April 1951. During the Korean War he flew anti-submarine, ship surveillance, and aerial mining missions in the Yellow Sea, South China Sea and the Formosa Straits. In 1954 he attended the Navy Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland, and subsequently was assigned to the Electronics Test Division of the Naval Air Test Center, where he flew tests in every type of naval aircraft including multi-and single-engine jet and propeller-driven fighters, attack planes, patrol bombers, transports, and seaplanes.
From 1957 to 1959 Carpenter attended the Navy General Line School and the Navy Air Intelligence School and was then assigned as Air Intelligence Officer to the aircraft carrier, USS Hornet. In April 1959 he was selected as one of the original seven Mercury Astronauts.
Robert B. Voas was a US Navy psychologist posted to NASA, whose first job was to select suitable men for space duty. Warren North was chief of manned space flight. At an early briefing North confirmed that the potential spacemen would be chosen from pilots:
They would monitor and adjust the cabin environment. They would operate the communications system. They would make physiological, astronomical, and meteorological observations that could not be made by instruments. Most important, they would be able to operate the reaction controls in space and be capable of initiating descent from orbit. This was the key part, that the astronaut could take over control of the spacecraft itself.
Carpenter endured 30 hours of tests at the Lovelace & Wright-Patterson Centre in 1959.
The chosen seven had shown emotional maturity, engineering, flight experience and motivation. Eighteen others were unreservedly recommended.
On 27 April 1959 they began work at Langley Air Force Base. NASA was considering 10 flights carrying chimpanzees but this changed on 12 April 1961. The Soviets made the first manned flight. Shepard followed on 5 May 1961. On 25 May President Kennedy presented his vision to Congress.
A couple of weeks later, Gilruth and Webb were aboard one of NASA’s R4Ds when over the radio the president was addressing Congress, pledging NASA to a lunar expedition. Gilruth was “aghast.” He looked at Webb, who knew all about it. In his special message to Congress, delivered on May 25, 1961, President Kennedy set out his vision on a number of “urgent national needs,” one of them the conquest of space. In a resonant call to arms, the president asked the nation to “commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” No other space project, Kennedy declared, would be “more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space.”
Glenn’s flight had been launched by the Mercury Atlas 6 (MA-6) which carried 122 tons of kerosene and liquid oxygen, more than four times the fuel load of the Redstone rockets which had powered Shepard and Grissom’s sub-orbital flights. Scott Carpenter had been the back-up to Glenn, who had left the face plate of his helmet open on re-entry. At the formal inquiry he was cleared of the charge of panicking. Deke Slayton was scheduled to make the next orbital flight but during a G force test in August 1959 it had been noticed that his heartbeat was erratic. In January 1962 an Airforce cardiologist recommended that he should be grounded and Carpenter was given the next flight, designated MA-7. Carpenter named his capsule Aurora 7.
Carpenter’s daughter, Kris Stoever, was six years old at the time and later helped her father write his account. Carpenter’s wife’s name was Rene. Kris Stoever:
Finally, at a little after seven forty-five, the great Atlas engine were fired, sending out billows of steam, flames, dust, smoke, fumes and heat. At this signal, all four Carpenter children abandoned their posts in front of the television, where all three networks were covering the launch live, and dashed out to the beach. Already the pale morning sky was streaked with contrails, and in the distance they could see the Atlas lifting off. Against the low slant of the sun, Rene saw the Atlas streak into the sky and then disappear.
Just before liftoff, Scott had been thinking about his grandfather, Vic Noxon. “At last I’ll know the great secret,” the old man had told Dr Gilbert on a golden Sunday morning on the Front Range. He was dying. He knew he was dying. He wasn’t afraid. Scott was confident that May morning, like his Grandpa Noxon, that everything was going to be all right – that this experience so long anticipated had finally arrived. As the rocket engines began to rumble and vibrate beneath him, he became preternaturally alert to the many sounds and sensations of liftoff.
There was surprisingly little vibration, although the engines made a big racket and he felt the rocket swaying as it rose. The ride was gentler than he expected. He looked out his window, placed directly overhead, to see the escape tower streaking away like a scalded cat. One especially odd thing, for one accustomed to level flight after the required climb, was to see the altimeter reach seventy, eighty, then ninety thousand feet and yet know that he was still going straight up.
No one noticed at the time – there was no dial to measure its functioning – but the capsule’s pitch horizon scanner (PHS) had already started malfunctioning. The Mercury capsule was chockfull of automatic navigational instruments, among them the PHS, which does just what the name implies: it scans the horizon for the purposes of maintaining, automatically, the pitch attitude of the capsule. For MA-7, however, the PHS immediately began feeding erroneous data into the Automatic Stabilization and Control System (ASCS), or autopilot. When this erroneous data was fed into the ASCS, the autopilot responded, as designed, to fire the pitch thruster to correct the perceived error. This in turn caused the spacecraft to spew precious fuel from the automatic tanks. Fuel was a finite commodity.