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 was 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.”