Freedom Seven
THE INVASION FORCE GATHERED OUTSIDE the home of Louise and Alan Shepard was on its own “hold,” sipping coffee and consuming pastries brought to them by the Shepard’s neighbors. Photographers, television camera crews, reporters and broadcasters, playing the waiting game, hoping Louise Shepard would emerge from her home to talk with them, tell them how she felt, what were her emotions, everything from pride to fear of—
No, she would not admit anything could go wrong to the wolves at the door. The moment was familiar but not the same. She’d waited before when Alan had flown tests closer to the earth. She knew the clammy feelings when he was late, but that was a straight road to a nervous breakdown, and she had pushed all that away from her long before now. Test planes or rockets. It didn’t matter. If danger were real Alan would have told her. They lived by that agreement. No heroics, the truth, plain and simple.
She had unquestioned faith and confidence in her husband. If the metal parts held together and the flame burned bright and true, and success hinged on the performance of Commander Alan Shepard, then he’d do his job.
Now, there was something new. She smiled at the television. They could now do more than listen. Thanks to the box that snatched pictures magically out of air and displayed them on a screen. They could hear and see what was happening.
She understood the pressure on the media to ask her questions and share her thoughts and feelings with readers and viewers and listeners throughout the world. In many ways she spoke for them all. They could transfer their own empathy for whatever it was they thought she was enduring. It was a tug of war between what people wanted to see, hear, and feel, and the intensity of her own desire to retain the integrity and privacy not only of her family but of Alan himself.
The newsmen and women waiting outside were made up of both compassionate beings and story-hungry flacks with no concern for the feelings of others. They represented the broad spectrum of a nation eager for news. But she was Mrs. Alan Shepard, and they would respect that, period. Through the long night she had heard footsteps coming up on her front porch, each time followed by a pause and the sound of retreat as the news people read the note she had left on her door:
THERE ARE NO REPORTERS INSIDE. I WILL HAVE A
STATEMENT FOR THE PRESS AFTER THE FLIGHT.
She was grateful they had chosen to respect her wishes, to accept her word there were no reporters in her home. A rumor had circulated among the gathered press that Life magazine had a reporter and photographer inside.
Louise watched the crowd, then turned from the window, lifting the small transistor radio she’d carried all morning to her ear. The station was carrying the Cape Canaveral broadcast live. She didn’t want to miss a beat.
“Louise!” Her father called from where the rest of the family was before the TV. “Better get in here! They’ve picked up the countdown!”
She caught the sudden change of voice from the radio. “This should be it,” the broadcaster said quietly. “Everything looks good. The weather is go, and Mercury Control says Alan Shepard and his Freedom Seven are go. . . ”
She joined the family, staring at the slender rocket standing alone. It looked like a marble pillar from some ancient Greek painting and she knelt before it, instinctively reaching forward to touch the live television picture of the Mercury-Redstone and Freedom Seven. She desperately wished to touch her husband.
T-minus seven.
Alan drew strength from Deke’s firm voice.
Six.
Hang in there with me, Deke . . .
Five.
He pushed his feet firmly against the capsule’s floor.
Four.
A finger on the stopwatch—must initiate time at the moment of liftoff in case the automatic clock should fail.
Three.
Hand on the abort handle. The escape tower was loaded.
Two.
Muscles tight.
One.
“Get it done, Shepard. Get it done.”
Zero.
Deke’s voice rose in pitch as he sang out, “Ignition!”
He felt rumbling. Pumps spinning at full speed. Fuel flowing. Combustion. Fire. Before he could think about what came next, a dull roar boomed through the Redstone, rushed through Freedom Seven with a surprisingly gentle touch before it grew, louder and louder.
“Liftoff!” Deke called.
Alan felt movement.
Freedom Seven swayed slightly.
His heart pounded.
He had first motion.
“You’re on your way, Jose!” Deke shouted.
“Roger, liftoff, and the clock has started,” Alan called out as the Redstone came to life gently, a slumbering giant greeting the sky with a yawn and a stretch, and now there was the power—he was on his way . . .
“This is Freedom Seven. Fuel is go. Oxygen is go. Cabin holding at 5.5 PSI.” The hard data came from Alan like a ticker tape.
“I understand, cabin holding at five-point-five,” Deke responded.
How incredible. The calmest two people along the entire space coast this day were Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton.
Even before the first swaying movement of Freedom Seven, other machines were out in force in preparation for Alan Shepard’s liftoff. Military helicopters with rescue teams moved to the west of the launch pad while others skimmed the ocean offshore. Streaking toward the pad in F-106 jets were astronauts Wally Schirra and Scott Carpenter, primed to chase and observe the Redstone as long as they could before it sped from sight. Tracking and search planes cruised from low-level to stratospheric heights, and the sea was dotted with swift crash boats and Navy ships, all coiled to spring to Freedom Seven in the event the unlikely, the unthinkable, might happen.
Every road and pathway leading to and from the launch pad showed the flashing lights of fire trucks, ambulances, crash trucks, security teams, communications teams, and whatever might be needed to back up that one man already slicing into high flight.
At the center of Cape Canaveral’s fifteen thousand acres was a press site thrown together of trailers, television trucks, prefab offices, bleachers, high viewing stands, camera mounts, a blizzard of antennae, and a snake forest of cabling along the ground. Tension on the site was as strained as anywhere else, for the fourth estate was hooked up to receiving facilities not only in the United States but also throughout the world. Of the thousand or so newsmen and women who’d sweated out this first manned launch, working down to split-second timing, proud of their self-discipline in telling the world Alan Shepard was on his way, many simply and plainly blew their cool.
They were screaming, “Go! Go! Go!” without regard for timing or microphones or anything save watching the Redstone liftoff from the ground. Tough and grizzled news veterans lifted faces unashamedly showing tears as they pounded fists on wooden railings, against their equipment, against defenseless backs of their compatriots.
Beyond the Cape, down along the causeways, on the beaches, and lining the roads and highways, a great army had assembled to witness an epochal moment in history. Five hundred thousand men, women, and children, in cars, trucks, motorcycles, trailers, motor homes, anything that would roll and move, had gathered, nudged, pushed, shoved, and squeezed as close as they could get to the security perimeter of the Cape to watch and shout encouragement.
They went mad at the sight of the Redstone breaking above the tree line; their combined chorus of hope and prayer was almost as mighty as the roar of the rocket.
This was pure, naked, uninhibited emotion. It gathered substance over the ocean surface, along the beaches, in the palmetto scrub, from every point in the compass beyond this space community.
In Cocoa Beach, people left their homes to stand outside and look toward the Cape. They went to balconies and front lawns and back lawns. They stood atop cars and trucks and rooftops. They left their morning coffee and bacon and eggs in restaurants to walk outside on the street or on the sands of the beach. They left beauty parlors and barbershops with sheets around their bodies. Policemen stopped their cars and stood outside, the better to see and hear. Along the water, the surfers ceased their pursuit of the waves and stood, transfixed, swept up in the snap of time.
It was a moment when a town stood still.
Fire was born, the dragon howled, and the Redstone levitated with its precious human cargo.
That was but the beginning. When the bright flame came into view, even before the deep pure sound washed across the town, something happened.
Something . . . wonderful.
Men and women sank slowly to their knees. Praying.
Others stood praying.
Crying.
There was no holding back.
All that moved in Cocoa Beach were beating hearts and falling tears.
Flame lifted Freedom Seven higher, faster.
Not bad at all, he thought to himself. Damn, Shepard, this is smoother than anything you ever expected. Hang in there. It’s going beautifully.
“This is Freedom Seven. Two-point-five-g. Cabin five-point-five. Oxygen is go. The main buss is twenty-four, and the isolated battery is twenty-nine.”
A comfortable, assured “Roger” came back from Deke.
Shepard was at two and a half times his normal weight. So far the flight had been a piece of cake. Flame beneath the Redstone grew longer within the thin air.
Shepard was through the smoothest part of powered ascent, and then he reached the rutted road, the barrier he must defeat before he would leave the atmosphere behind.
Redstone was pushing, pulsing, hammering at shock waves gathering stubbornly before its passage. Alan was slicing from below the speed of sound through the barrier to supersonic flight. Now he was in the reefs of Max Q, the zone of maximum dynamic pressure where forces of flight and the need to keep flying straight up challenged the Redstone’s strength.
Buffeting began, an upward dash over invisible deep and jagged potholes. His helmet slammed against his contour couch. He had the mental picture of a terrier shaking a rat in its jaws, and the rat was called Shepard.
Eighteen inches before him the instrument panel became a blur, almost impossible to read.
A thousand pounds of pressure for every square foot of Freedom Seven was trying to crack the capsule like a brittle walnut.
“Hang in there.” His own voice reminding him, “This is what you signed up for.”
He started to call Deke far below, changed his mind. No matter that he was being rattled violently, it was time to keep the mouth shut.
A garbled transmission at this point could send Mercury Control into a wide-eyed flap. It might even trigger an abort by someone overzealously guarding his safety.
No calls, no mistaken abort. “Shut up. If I need an abort, I’ll tell Deke.”
As if in answer to a silent plea to the flame beneath him, the Redstone slipped through the hammering blows of Max Q into the smoothness beyond. Shepard grinned and keyed his mike.
“Okay, it’s a lot smoother now. A lot smoother.”
If nothing else, Deke was the original laconic man. “Roger,” he said calmly.
Louise Shepard stared at her television, watching the rocket lifting magically from its launch pad. On the screen the flame seemed as tiny as it was bright. She tried desperately to listen to the words being exchanged between Mercury Control and her husband. She would have been grateful to hear the Redstone’s roar, but the girls in the Shepard household were ecstatic, excited, wild, cheering and shrieking at the top of their lungs. Louise didn’t even think of trying to quiet them. That was their father in that rocket. This was their moment, too.
And hers. She smiled to herself welcoming the tears as she brought a hand to her lips. “Go, Alan,” she said quietly, unheard in the din of the room. “Go, sweetheart.”
Mercury Control called out the time hack. “Plus two minutes . . . ”
Alan Shepard was now twenty-five miles high and accelerating through twenty-seven hundred miles an hour.
Increasing g-forces mashed him down into his couch. It hurt and it felt terrific.
What a ride!
“All systems are go,” he called down to Deke.
Every moment of prelaunch and ascent was prime time for news coverage of the flight of Freedom Seven. Merrill Mueller and Jay Barbree of NBC News were broadcasting across the length and breadth of America and through a far-flung international network covering the globe. Mueller was the veteran, the voice of confidence, unflappable, unshakable. Jay Barbree was the neophyte, learning from the master. Mueller had done his newscasts through raging battles of war, and he’d been the voice that issued forth from the deck of the USS Missouri when the Japanese surrendered in Tokyo Bay. He never lost his cool, he was magnificently composed, and now he was describing to the world the launch of America’s first man to hurtle into space.
He and Barbree had had a thousand things to say about the astronaut, his family, the mission, the Redstone, the oddly shaped cone in which Alan Shepard rode. Mueller could do play-by-play on a live broadcast as though he’d rehearsed it for a week. Barbree could only stand in awe.
But Mueller had never seen a man disappearing in the bright sunlit sky as a single source point of silvery flame.
The master felt his voice fading. He tried desperately to regain control. Finally the dean of broadcast description swallowed hard. He could think of only one thing to say.
“He looks so lonely up there . . . ”
Then Merrill Mueller for a first fell silent.
Redstone increased Shepard’s weight to a thousand pounds as he called out the force of six times gravity to Deke. He found it difficult to talk as the g-forces squeezed his throat and vocal cords. He drew on the techniques of fighting these loads he’d perfected in test flying. They heard him clearly in Mercury Control.
Another moment of truth was at hand.
Cutoff!
As quickly as it had ignited, the Redstone engine shut down. The rocket was inert, an empty tube from which Shepard had to separate.
Above his head the no longer needed escape tower ignited. A single, large, solid propellant rocket blazed to life, spewing back flame from three canted nozzles. These broke connecting links to yank the tall tower away from the Freedom Seven and send it racing along a safe departure angle.
Systems functioned precisely and on a rapid schedule.
Three small separation rockets at the base of the capsule ignited. Freedom Seven pulled away from the Redstone.
A new light flashed on the instrument panel before Shepard.
“This is Seven. Cap sep is green.”
Shepard was on his own, slicing high above earth along a great ballistic arc.
“Roger,” Deke confirmed.
Alan called out the programmed reports. Then he took time to drink in the sensations of being separated from his planet.
Moments before he had weighed a thousand pounds. Now a feather on the surface of the earth had more weight than he. He simply had none.
“Go Navy,” he permitted himself one cheer of celebration.
Being weightless was simply a miracle in comfort.
The tiny capsule seemed to expand magically as pressure points vanished. Were he not strapped to the couch he would have floated about in total relaxation. No up, no down, no lying or sitting or standing.
A missing washer and bits of dust drifted before his eyes. He laughed at the sight.
He had expected silence at this point. Atmosphere was something far below. No rush of wind despite speeding through space so many thousands of miles an hour. No friction. No turbulence. It should have been the silence of ghosts.
But it wasn’t. These ghosts were real. They made their own sounds—the sounds of Freedom Seven. It was as if a brook were running mechanically through his space capsule’s structure. Inverters moaned, gyroscopes whirred, cooling fans had their own sound, cameras hummed, radios crackled and emitted their tones before and after conversational exchanges. The sounds flowed together, some dulled, others sharper—a miniature mechanical orchestral chorus. Shepard smiled. He was hearing the Concert of Freedom Seven, a strange and unexpected company to remain with him as he hurtled through the soundlessness of space.
“Welcome sounds,” he smiled. They meant things were working, doing, pushing, and repeating. They were the new age sounds of life.
Weightlessness was still new, refreshing, exciting, but this was a romance kick-started by a great rocket. Shepard took to zero-g with fierce pleasure, bonding not only naturally but eagerly with this new world without weight.
He felt Freedom Seven initiate its slow turnaround. Still more new sounds! Of course, the attitude control jets firing in vacuum. But within Freedom Seven’s contained atmosphere they exerted pressure, and that pressure came to him as thuds, dimmed bangs carrying wonderful satisfaction. His ship was obeying its autopilot-commanded flight plan, turning on schedule, rotating into a position that would assure the blunt end of the capsule facing in the direction of reentry.
Reality reached in through the capsule’s titanium shell, an invisible hand to tap him on the shoulder. Shepard grinned with the realization that this sense of comfort and freedom, the humming sounds of the spacecraft, had blanked out the fact that he was zinging along high above the planet’s atmosphere.
But there was nothing by which to judge speed. You need relative comparison for that—a tree, a building, passing spacecraft. His view of the outside universe was restricted to what he could see through the capsule’s two small portholes, and through those he saw that almost jet-black sky. Only one reference point was available to him. He had to look at the earth below. Otherwise every sense he had told him he wasn’t moving.
He hesitated. That look at earth would have to wait. The mission checklist came first. “Got to go flying, guy,” he said. Until now Freedom Seven had flown its profile on autopilot. The only aspect of the flight different for Shepard than for the chimp that preceded him was that he could give a verbal report of events.
Now he wrapped the gloved fingers of his right hand about the three-axis control stick. He reached out to switch from autopilot mode to manual control. One axis at a time, he warned himself.
“Switching to manual pitch,” he announced to Deke.
Major Laconic was right there. “Roger.”
He squeezed the stick to one side. Tiny jets of hydrogen peroxide gas spat into space from exterior ports on the spacecraft. Instantly he felt the reaction as Seven’s blunt end raised and lowered in response to his hand commands. He couldn’t believe the incredibly smooth movements of his small spaceship. It was doing precisely what he demanded.
“Pitch is okay,” he said briefly. “Switching to manual yaw.”
“Roger. Manual yaw.”
Alan fed in reaction thrust to the yaw axis, and again Seven danced slickly to his tune, shifting left or right.
“Yaw is okay. Shifting to manual roll.”
“Roger. Roll.”
Again Seven moved on invisible silken threads. Shepard was elated. Finally, he shouted within his mind, we’re doing something first—manual control of a spaceship!
Not for an instant would Shepard even think of degrading the sensational orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin in that heavy Vostok he called Swallow. He’d gone higher and faster and had raced all the way around the planet, but the Russians had played it very safe. Yuri Gagarin had been only a fascinated passenger.
Shepard smiled as he reported, “Roll is okay.”
Deke almost made a speech as he responded. “Roll is okay,” he confirmed from his console. “It looked good here.”
Alan Shepard took a deep breath. Now, let’s take a good look at the earth.
His portholes still looked outward, toward the blackness. So he moved his head to look downward through the periscope. He cursed aloud. While still on the pad, looking through the scope, he’d stared into a bright sun. Immediately he had moved in filters to cut down the glare. He’d forgotten to remove those filters and now, looking through the scope, instead of a brilliant blue round earth he saw his planet only in shades of gray.
He reached for the filter knob and, as he did, the pressure gauge on his left wrist bumped against the abort handle. His suited body had shifted in weightlessness. He quickly stopped that movement. Sure, the escape tower was gone, and hitting the abort handle might not have caused any great bother, but this was still a test flight and he wasn’t about to guess.
He looked again through the periscope. Even through the gray the sight was breathtaking. The sun’s reflection from the world below was strong enough to give him a picture.
“On the periscope,” he radioed. Then, with great excitement, “What a beautiful view!”
“Roger.”
“Cloud cover over Florida, three to four-tenths on the eastern coast, obscured up through Hatteras.”
He drank it all in, amazed to look down on the world from his seat with the gods. He watched the curving edge of the planet fall away below the southeastern United States.
Clouds obscured the Florida coastline south to Fort Lauderdale, then yielded to sunshine and the rich green of Lake Okeechobee’s shores and down to the spindly curve of the Florida Keys. He shifted slightly to see the Florida Panhandle extending west, saw Pensacola clearly. The horizon arced away to offer a tantalizingly bare glimpse of Mobile, beyond which, just out of visual reach, laid New Orleans.
He looked northward across Georgia, at the Carolinas, and saw the coastline of Cape Hatteras and beyond.
He looked down, beneath the tight little craft, studied Andros Island and Bimini and saw other Bahamian islands through broken cloud cover. “What I’d give,” he said, “to have that filter out so I could see the beautiful waters and coral formations.”
He was now at his highest point, 116 miles. Freedom Seven, obeying the intractable laws of celestial mechanics, was swinging into its downward curve, calculated to carry Shepard directly to the Navy recovery teams waiting for him in the waters near Grand Bahama Island, some three hundred miles southeast of the Cape.
He worked the controls to the proper angle to test-fire the three retro-rockets. They weren’t necessary for descent on this suborbital, up-and-down mission, but they had to be proven for orbital flights to follow. For return to earth, they would be critical to decelerate Mercury spaceships from orbital speed.
Deke remained with him every second of the way and began the countdown from Mission Control. “Five, four, three, two, one, retro angle,” Deke confirmed.
Retro sequence was set. “In retro attitude,” Shepard announced. “All green.”
“Roger.”
“Control is smooth,” came the words from space.
“Roger, understand. All going smooth.”
“Retro one,” Alan sang out. The first rocket fired and shoved him back against his couch. “Very smooth,” he added.
“Roger, roger.”
“Retro two.” Another blast shoving him backward.
“Retro three. All three retros have fired.”
“All fired on the button,” Deke said with satisfaction.
The weightless wonderland vanished almost as swiftly as it had appeared.
Gravity was back. His weight increased with every mile Freedom Seven plunged into the atmosphere. Alan switched to manual control to get as much experience flying a spacecraft as he could while the forces of gravity gradually increased. He worked the controls until the small thrusters were no longer effective and he switched to automatic mode. He’d ride the rest of the trip down.
Deke was on the horn. “Do you see the booster?” There was a touch of concern in his voice.
Before launch, some engineers had worried that when Shepard fired the retros, his speed would be slowed enough that the empty Redstone, following its own ballistic arc, might catch up and bump Freedom Seven off its reentry track.
Shepard judged the issue as trying to fix something that wasn’t broken. Even though the Mercury and the Redstone had boosted out of the atmosphere, there was still some drag associated with upward lofting after burnout of fuel. The Redstone was so much larger and its mass was so much greater that even remnants of atmosphere would slow its ballistic arc more than Freedom Seven’s. This should keep it well below his space capsule, and soon it should slam into denser atmosphere on its plunged into the ocean.
Shepard’s calculations proved correct. Well below Freedom Seven, the Redstone was tumbling wildly out of control, increasing its drag and imposing terrible forces on the rocket’s structure. The Redstone was like a helpless, frightened whale attacked by invisible sharks of reentry, pieces being torn from its body, chunks hurled away as the metal structure heated swiftly from friction. Behind, Redstone’s sputum of its destruction fled backward in an ionized trail.
Below, a freighter plowed northward through calm seas on an uneventful journey. Until the first American-manned space flight entered the scene. Both the Mercury and the Redstone were whipping huge sonic waves through the atmosphere. Without warning, shock waves ripped downward through the sky to smash against the vessel. The windows on the bridge rattled and flexed wildly from the sonic boom howling across the water. A shock wave cutting the sky at the speed of sound is a fearsome thing especially when you have no idea the sky is about to scream.
The terrified crew thought their ship had exploded. The captain jerked his head around. “Damn, what the hell was that?” he shouted.
Before anyone could answer, a whirlwind of ear-piercing whistling and howling force tore across the ship. Someone pointed up and screamed, “Omigod! Look!”
A white and black shape, the charred and still burning Redstone, tumbling crazily, crashed out of the sky, sailed high over the ship’s deck, and smashed into the Atlantic several miles east of the freighter, sending multiple water geysers into the air. The Redstone didn’t die easily and seemed determined to end its time with a spectacular water ballet. It skipped across the water’s surface, twice parting the sea, sending up two towering walls of water. Then a final careening plunge into the waves, and it settled forever into the ocean.
The crew stared, stunned. They stood frozen in place until they heard the shouts of their radio operator. “Hey, on deck! Everybody! Listen!”
He placed the microphone by his radio calling in the blind for anyone who could tell them what insanity was going on. NBC radio engineer Joe Sturniola was at his short-wave gear on Grand Bahama Island. He picked up the freighter’s call, heard clearly the operator saying, “It couldn’t have been an airplane. Not from what we saw. We don’t know what it was!”
Sturniola answered immediately. “You people have just been missed by the rocket that carried the first American astronaut into space.”
“Rocket?”
“Affirmative.”
“Astronaut?”
Sturniola grinned. “That’s right. This is Grand Bahama Island, and astronaut Alan Shepard will be arriving here shortly.”
“Okay this is Freedom Seven . . . my g-build-up is three . . . six . . . ” His voice faltered as a great invisible hand squeezed him with brutal force.
“Nine . . . ” he grunted, using the proven system of body tightening and muscle rigidity to force the words through a tortured throat. Words still spoken under control. Grunt talk that worked.
“Rog.”
Deke didn’t want to miss a word from the plunging spacecraft.
“Okay . . . Okay . . . ” Alan’s voice rose as the intensity of the struggle increased. Eleven times the normal force of gravity, getting close to “weighing” a full earth ton. But he had pulled 11g in the centrifuge, and he knew he could keep right on working now.
He did.
Deke stabbed into the silence after his last call. “Coming through loud and clear, Seven.”
“Okay,” came the grunted oath from what was now high atmosphere instead of space. No matter how severe the punishment, so long as he kept repeating at least that one word they knew he was on top of the situation.
“Okay . . . ” They noticed the change in his voice. Less quaver. Lower pitch. They tracked him on radar, knew his changing altitude, but hearing the man’s voice was what really counted. The capsule slowed rapidly, and the g-loads were fading.
“Okay . . . this is Seven. Okay forty-five thousand feet. Uh, now forty thousand feet.”
Shepard was through the gauntlet of punishing g-forces and deceleration and blazing heat of reentry. He felt great. Right behind his back the temperature had soared to 1,230 degrees, a critical test for the spacecraft and no small feat for the man inside. Under the worst-case conditions of the scorching dive, his cabin temperature hit a peak of 102 degrees. Inside his suit the reading topped at 85 degrees. Not at all bad, he grinned. Nice and toasty. An E ticket ride on one of Mr. Disney’s best.
His altimeter showed thirty-one thousand feet when Deke’s voice reached him again. “Seven, your impact will be right on the button.”
Great news. Flight computations were as close to perfect as could be, and so were the performances of the Redstone and the spacecraft. The Mercury was heading directly for the center of its Atlantic recovery area bullseye. The Cape lay three hundred miles to the northwest, and with Alan’s loss of altitude it soon would be out of radio contact. No time for long good-byes as he signed off with Deke, telling him he was going to the new frequency.
“Roger, Seven, read you switching to GBI.”
Deke was eager to get the hell out of Mercury Control as fast as he could. Shepard almost laughed aloud. He knew Gus would be right there with Deke, and the two of them would clamber into a NASA jet and burn sky, blazing their way to GBI so they could be on the ground waiting for him when Shepard was delivered by helicopter from the recovery vessel.
“Seven, do you read?” came a new voice, using the GBI line.
“I read,” Alan called back, starting to look for the recovery fleet.
But this game wasn’t quite over. He still had to reach that fleet and in good shape. That meant the parachute system had to work.
Perfectly.
Or all that had gone so beautifully up to this moment would mean nothing.
He stared through the periscope. Above him, panel covers snapped away in the wind as the spacecraft fell.
“The drogue is green at twenty-one,” Shepard reported, “and the periscope is out.”
Down went Freedom Seven and Alan Shepard.
The altimeter kept unwinding, aiming for ten thousand feet where the main chute was to open. If it failed, well, he already had a finger on the “pull-like-hell ring” which would haul a reserve.
“Standing by for main.”
Freedom Seven continued performing like a champ. Through the periscope he saw the most beautiful sight of the mission. “That big orange-and-white monster blossomed above me so beautifully,” Shepard later said. “It told me I was safe, all was well, I had done it, all of us had done it, I was home free.”
“Main on green,” he reported. “Main chute is reefed, and it looks good.”
Freedom Seven swayed back and forth as it dropped lower. The main chute unreefed and blossomed into a magnificent orange-and-white paneled flower. In contrast to moments in his immediate past, Alan Shepard tiptoed gently toward the ocean.
He opened his helmet faceplate. Quickly he disconnected life-support hoses to his suit and then released the straps that had kept him properly snared within the cabin. He wanted nothing to impede a hasty exit, just in case the last few minutes of the mission held surprises for him.
From a thousand feet up he saw the water clearly below him. The heat shield had dropped four feet as intended, to deploy the perforated-skirt landing bag, which would act as an air cushion when the Mercury and the ocean met.
He braced himself for—
Splashdown!
“Into the water we went with a good pop! Abrupt, but not bad,” Shepard would later say, “No worse than the kick in the ass when catapulted off a carrier deck.”
The spacecraft tipped on its side, bringing water over the right porthole. He smacked the switch to release the reserve parachute that kept the capsule top-heavy. While he waited for the shifted balance to right his small space capsule (and lousy boat), he kept in mind the chimp’s near disappearance beneath the ocean and checked the cabin for leaks, ready to punch out.
He stayed dry. Shifting the center of gravity worked, and the capsule came back upright.
Planes roared overhead. “Cardfile Two Three,” he called. “This is Freedom Seven. Would you please relay all is okay?”
“This is Two Three. Roger that.”
“This is Seven. Dye marker is out. Everything is okay. Ready for recovery.”
Green dye spread brilliantly across the ocean surface from the capsule.
“Seven, this is Two Three. Rescue One will be at your location momentarily.”
It went like another practice run. Within minutes Rescue One, a powerful helicopter, was overhead. Alan opened the hatch, clutched a harness dropped from the chopper and was hoisted aboard.
Rescue One zeroed in on a waiting aircraft carrier, the USS Lake Champlain. Sailors lined the deck, cheering and waving wildly. “This is one of the best carrier landings I’ve ever made,” he told a chopper crewman.
Until this moment, when he stepped out on the deck of the aircraft carrier festooned everywhere with red, white, and blue decorations, “I had not realized the intensity of the emotions and feelings that so many people had for me, the other astronauts, the whole damned manned space program. This was the first sense of adulation, a sense of public response, a sense of public expression of thanks for what we were doing. I got all choked up.”
With moisture in his eyes, he thought it’s no longer just our fight to get “out there.” The struggle belongs to everyone in America. That was the best of it. From now on there was no one turning back.