3

“GOD SPEED, JOHN GLENN”

We consumed large quantities of beer and barbecue at Fat Boy’s in honor of Al, and reveled in the day’s headlines: “U.S. SCORES SUCCESS IN FIRST TRY TO PUT MAN IN SPACE.” “ALL AMERICANS ARE REJOICING, SAYS KENNEDY.” Alan Shepard had become America’s hero, but more so he was uniquely our hero.

The Space Task Group had little time to savor the wine and smell the roses before we had to do it all over again. In two months the second astronaut would go up. This gave Kraft’s team an opportunity to apply the lessons we had learned during the turnaround to our next mission. The combination of our technical successes and President Kennedy’s vow to land a man on the Moon in this decade spurred us on. When I read Kennedy’s speech, delivered to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, “A Special Message from the President on Urgent National Needs,” I found it almost impossible to grasp that our nation had established the lunar target as the prize in the space race. I had always yearned to be involved in an undertaking that would challenge the imagination of man. Any doubt I ever had about moving into space vanished.

To those of us who had watched our rockets keel over, spin out of control, or blow up, the idea of putting a man on the Moon seemed almost too breathtakingly ambitious. Word about the speech spread like wildfire through our offices at Langley; all work virtually came to a halt and people began to offer various opinions. Most wondered if this was for real. It seemed, at that moment, like a pipe dream. I thought, “Well, let them get on with their great plans; I’m gonna get a man into orbit first.” But it became real for us in the months that followed, particularly when Kennedy gave a speech sixteen months later at Rice University affirming his commitment to a lunar landing. I saw Kennedy when he came to visit Mercury Control at the Cape with Shepard and Glenn. His energy and charisma were electrifying; he made believers out of all of us, even the most skeptical. Our hopes had been renewed; maybe Kennedy really understood the towering odds we faced—and were willing to overcome.

When Kennedy first announced this ambitious goal we were back at Langley, preparing for the second manned Mercury mission, which would be flown by Gus Grissom, who had been Shepard’s backup. For a change we had a breathing space of almost two months before we deployed to the Cape. Now that we had flown Shepard successfully, the pressure eased for a while. Then, on July 21, 1961, at 7:20 Eastern Standard Time, Grissom made the second suborbital flight on another Redstone, his capsule bearing the name Liberty Bell 7. His flight was virtually a carbon copy of Alan’s. This launch doubled our manned time in space; we reached one half hour.

Grissom was a likable guy, seasoned, decisive, and taciturn. An Air Force cadet at eighteen, he had flown a hundred combat missions in Korea. When he first arrived in Korea, he found that until they had been shot at by a MiG, pilots were not allowed a seat on the bus to the flight line. Gus stood only once. On his first mission, he went looking for a MiG, found one, shot it out, and qualified for a seat on the bus.

Everything went well during the flight but shortly after Grissom’s splashdown, the hatch inadvertently released. With the hatch open, the capsule started to take on water. In his silver space suit, Gus fought his way to the surface and swam a short distance away. In Mission Control, we sat helpless as a nearby helicopter grappled the loop at the top of the capsule to prevent it from sinking. By the time the helicopter took up the slack in the lift cable, the capsule had partially submerged. With the capsule under water and sinking fast, a tug-of-war began between the helicopter and the sinking spacecraft.

Almost unnoticed, Grissom was struggling as the downwash from the chopper’s rotor blades whipped the sea to a froth. I was sweating bullets, as I recalled the times I stood near the runway, or sat in my aircraft watching and listening as a squadron pilot called “Mayday . . . Mayday” and attempted to nurse a damaged or flamed-out (no engine power) aircraft back to the runway. The feeling of utter helplessness gets you in the gut. I had seen a student pilot in jet training try to make the runway, finally ejecting too late when he realized he was short. I had that same sick feeling now watching Gus struggling in the water. Water was leaking through the suit inlet hose fitting, and as the seconds passed the space suit buoyancy was no longer supporting him. I kept murmuring aloud at the console, “Dammit, get Gus, forget the damn spacecraft.” As a second helicopter went to Grissom’s rescue, the drama of the capsule recovery seemed to play out forever on our television sets in the control room. The helicopter strained against the load, briefly lifting the capsule almost clear of the water, only to lose the battle as the engine began to overheat. (Through a remarkable feat in deep sea exploration technology, the capsule was located and recovered in extraordinarily good shape in July of 1999.)

The Liberty Bell 7 mission was perfect until the very end and then it turned to worms. Rookies and veterans alike were once again reminded: there are no free rides in a flight test.

A rumor soon circulated that Gus had panicked when a small amount of seawater entered the capsule. I thought that was baloney. Everything I had seen of Gus and the astronauts indicated that they had the “right stuff.” Grissom’s hatch was the first flown with an explosive primer. Shepard’s had had a mechanical design. Something must have screwed up in the new hatch.

I returned to Virginia from the Cape the next day, and Marta greeted me with a sigh of relief, and a holiday of hugs and kisses. “Thank God, you’re here,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d ever get that thing off the pad. How did you make it so fast? Did you write your report on the plane?”

As a rule, we spent most of a day writing the post-mission report and did not leave until it was finished. I made quick work of this one. I had to because I was racing the stork. The next day I drove Marta to the hospital and, after a brief countdown, we were blessed with our third daughter, Joan Frances. Marta’s timing was impeccable. But she didn’t leave much to chance. With the births of each of our children, she had labor induced to assure that I would be on hand.

That happy event was in stark contrast to my on-the-job progress. Anger has always served me well, and I had been smoldering with anger and frustration for months at the Cape. I was largely angry with myself. I knew what to do but did not have the hands-on knowledge to do it. I felt I was not carrying my share of the load. My first step was to learn every detail of every system in the Mercury spacecraft and boosters. Then I intended to help Kraft train members of the mission teams to make sure we had the competence and knowledge that I knew we needed to carry out our mission.

I believed Kraft had several problems looming on the horizon. His systems controllers were good engineers, but as I had learned at Holloman, engineers needed to become operators. There was a hell of a difference. An engineer can explain how a system should work (in theory) but an operator has to know what the engineer knows and then has to know how the systems tie together to get the mission accomplished. If the systems break down the operator must make rapid decisions on fixing or working around the problem to keep the mission moving.

We also had to change the way we were thinking. We had not crossed the bridge from an aircraft test mentality to one suited to space flight. Aircraft pilots have an option to get to a runway or else to eject. In space, we were always hours away from a landing site. If there was some kind of glitch, Mission Control had to be prepared to develop options to keep the spacecraft going until it could be returned from orbit.

The third problem that I identified would take time to solve. Mission Control was a new idea to the astronauts. They responded directly to Kraft because of his authority, but were generally cool to the controllers. They would double-and triple-check what the controllers said and did. We had to earn their respect and trust. To do that we had to be smarter than they were in each of our technical specialties, and we had to be utterly precise and timely in every action. This was a hell of a chore when we were writing the book as we went along.

After returning to Langley from the Cape following the Grissom mission I was assigned the responsibility for the remote site teams, with eight NASA civil servants and sixteen technical reps from the pioneer electronics company Philco. The technical challenge was to develop the remote site team skills sufficiently so that any one of the site teams could take the actions required to keep the mission going when things went wrong. The Philco personnel were from across America, virtually self-taught with an incredible mastery of communications, electronics, and data systems. They had staffed the tracking stations in Alaska, California, and at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific for the early Air Force satellite missions. The civil service recruits were mostly fresh college graduates. The shotgun wedding between the young scholars and the Philco controllers was just what we needed to bring instant maturity and poise to the fledgling remote site teams.

The bible on the Mercury capsule was the pocket checklist, a five-by-seven-inch set of schematics sized to fit in the pocket of the astronaut’s flight suit. I knew from my own flight test experience that this wasn’t adequate. Based on everything I had learned at Holloman, you lived or died by the data at your fingertips. This slim volume was the sum total of our knowledge, and it reflected the naïveté of the engineers who produced it. I wanted to build a data set like the one I had had at Holloman. I got two engineers from McDonnell assigned to work directly with me at the Cape and at Langley. They would get the engineering data and test reports for me from McDonnell Aircraft’s St. Louis plant and help me boil it all down to information that was useful and instantly accessible.

Kraft was skeptical but gave me the benefit of the doubt. Two fine engineers, Ed Nieman and Dana Boatman, joined my remote site group. I would have my people train themselves in the same way I came up to speed as a flight test engineer. Each controller would research a capsule system to get a deep understanding of it, with the contractor’s help. When you are sitting at the console, you want a set of handbooks with certified correct data, formatted so the information can be accessed and used in seconds. We needed to separate the “nice to know” from the “must know.” We had to get the data that would enable us to work problems that were workable, and discard all the data that applied to problems that could not be solved by the crew or controller.

To manage this large mass of information, I assigned a single capsule system to each controller. He had to grind through it and digest it, put it in a readily usable format, and cross-check it with test reports and specifications. We built a comprehensive handbook out of this data. Once we had the words on paper, each controller taught the entire team about the system he had studied. This gave us a common frame of reference among the crew, the remote site controllers, and those in the control center. Once we got the data right then, in similar fashion, we wrote the troubleshooting procedures the crew would use, and from there we moved on to codify all the operational rules.

The potential for a superb real-time team was realized as the controllers fanned out to the remote tracking sites. Each mission was a final exam for the controllers; some passed the test and some didn’t. Those who survived the early missions became leaders in the rapidly developing art of space flight operations.

September 1961, Mercury-Atlas 4

The next mission would use the capsule recovered from the flight that had been snuffed by the RSO on the third Mercury-Atlas mission. We had lost the booster but saved the capsule. When the destruct signal was sent, the escape tower fired and pulled the capsule away from the explosion. Then the tower separated from the capsule, the parachutes deployed, and the capsule landed safe and sound in the ocean.

Mercury-Atlas 4 was a simple orbital test of the Mercury spacecraft and control teams prior to a three-orbit mission with a chimpanzee. But there was a greater significance. This would be the first worldwide mission deployment since the global network had been completed five months earlier. For us, it was like planning the Normandy invasion. Thirteen teams of three controllers were sent, in those days mostly by slow prop-driven aircraft, to the distant corners of the Earth to function as self-contained mini-control centers. The teams had to be self-sufficient, so they carried everything needed for mission support, often including maintenance manuals and spare parts. The teams were mostly made up of men in their twenties; only one of the CapCom’s team leaders had been overseas before.

The controllers assigned to the converted, aging merchant ships deployed first and had the toughest and loneliest assignments, wallowing haplessly in the ocean swells and occasionally hanging on for dear life during severe storms, fighting forty-five-foot waves and losing deck gear and communications antennas in the process.

The African sites were extremely risky. The young controllers found themselves in the middle of internal conflicts and were not warmly welcomed by many of the local citizenry. But the mission could not be done without them manning these remote and isolated sites. Throughout much of the mission, the remote tracking stations were the only sites in radio and telemetry communications with our crews. If communications were good with Mercury Control, the sites would report capsule and crew status to the MCC flight director and then receive instructions. If the communications were poor, as often was the case, they were out there on their own, improvising as they went along, dealing with often marginal technology and keeping their cool when things were falling apart.

A prime example was John Llewellyn, a stocky, square-jawed former Marine and an early member of the Space Task Group. He was chosen to lead the control team at the Zanzibar site, on the large island off the east coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean. John had fought through the First Marine Division’s bitter retreat from the Chosin Reservoir in Korea in December of 1950. After discharge he went to the College of William and Mary. A couple of years older than the rest of my controllers, John thrived in the crisis atmosphere of Zanzibar and drank many a toast with the Gordon Highlanders, the British unit stationed there during the period when, as British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan put it, “winds of change” were blowing through Africa.

This first deployment of a fully global network was a time of trial, the first test during a mission. Hundreds of people were learning to work together as a team for the first time and had had only a few weeks to put it all together. Things were particularly tense in Zanzibar, which was in turmoil. After a particularly bad day of rioting there the day before launch, I received a cryptic Teletype from the site: “MY TEAM WILL REMAIN AT SITE UNTIL TOMORROW’S TEST. WE HAVE THEM WHERE WE WANT THEM. SIGNED, LLEWELLYN.” It took me a while to realize that John’s team was surrounded. John was not going to take a chance that he could not get to the site the next day to support the mission. (Many of those who survived the hazards of remote site conditions would become the leaders in the Apollo program.)

After we accomplished a successful one-orbit mission, the remote site control teams returned to Langley to prepare for John Glenn’s orbital flight, scheduled for December 19. The final tune-up with the network and control teams was a planned three-orbit mission with a chimpanzee named Enos.

November 29, 1961, Mercury-Atlas 5

Walt Williams was the toughest leader I have ever known. A bit of a brawler, with the build of a barroom bouncer, he manned the console behind Kraft’s, surrounded by a blue haze from his chain-smoking. Walt had to be a tough customer—over the years he would have Presidents, members of Congress, the media, and prima donna astronauts to contend with. Because he had to be on top of everything, briefing him was a scary experience. God help you if you were unprepared. Here was a man who must have never slept. In the middle of a briefing he would start snoring, then grab a handful of his favorite Necco mints, chomp a few, and go back to sleep. Then, after the briefing, he would crisply summarize every key point in your presentation, isolate the important issues, and say, “Okay, let’s do it.”

On the crucial day when we were sending up Enos for the pre-Glenn shot, the launch countdown was ragged, with numerous holds for missed procedures and repairs to the data system. The telemetry was noisy, the glitches were visible on the console meters and recorders. I think Williams was moments away from calling it off when the Atlas finally lifted off. Then, after liftoff, Gus Grissom, at the CapCom console in Mercury Control, used his override switches to correct erroneous liftoff and booster engine shutdown data that had been fed into the Goddard computers by noisy data lines from the launch pad.

During the second orbit, several of the sites saw an increase in cabin temperatures and unexpected attitude control jet firings. The reports poured in by voice and Teletype as the hapless chimp sailed across Africa. The rate of fuel usage increased rapidly on the second orbit. The cabin temperature conditions were triggering an increase in Enos’s body temperature. With the capsule moving five miles closer to the deorbit point each second, decision time was rapidly approaching. Kraft knew that if he got Enos home alive, even if the mission was one orbit short, he could declare it a success and clear the way for Glenn’s launch. He didn’t dare try to imagine the headlines if Enos was left stranded and died in orbit.

When Chris couldn’t get a clear Go or NoGo from his systems monitor, he ordered the California site to go ahead with the retrofire. California then crisply reported, “Retro one fired . . . retro two fired . . . retro three. All fired and capsule attitudes were good.” Enos was coming home. After confirming that the retros had fired, Kraft turned to me, smiled, and said, “That’s a good show!” I knew then that Kraft would build a team, his team. The real-time role of the flight director and Mission Control had been demonstrated. For the first time, the control team had intervened in a deteriorating situation, made time-critical decisions, and saved the mission.

And now the team would have a new, permanent home: the decision had been made to relocate the controllers, the crews, and their families to what would become the permanent Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. Gilruth’s staff and the logistics and engineering people would be the first to move in the new year. Then when they were in place, Kraft’s operations organization would begin relocating. I could not believe we would relocate the operations teams at the peak point of manned missions. But the launch pressure eased slightly when the agency backed off the December 19, 1961, date for John Glenn’s first American orbital flight. A postponement of up to five weeks would allow time for refurbishing and upgrading the launch pad and give the flight teams a needed rest. We had flown seven missions in 1961, weathered a few crises, put Shepard and Grissom into space, and brought them back alive. It was one hell of a first year for America’s manned space program, but we still had a long way to go. We wanted to be the leading rather than the trailing edge in spaceflight.

January 1962

Trouble with hardware caused NASA to scrub Glenn’s flight, reset for January 27. We returned to Langley and landed in a blinding snow-storm. As we got off the aircraft, we were told to return to the Cape; the Atlas problem had been found. Air travel was out of the question, so we were driven to Richmond, Virginia, where we boarded a train and rode through the night to Orlando.

During their few hours at Langley, several of the controllers had picked up their wives and children. After getting the order to return, they had the wives and children frantically pack for the trip to the Cape. Our families met us at Langley to get on the buses that would take us to the train in Richmond. The wives and kids were assigned chair cars. The rest of us had no places reserved to sit or sleep, so we sat through the night in the dining car, playing poker or rehashing how we would resume our support to the launch countdown. By the time we got to Glenn’s mission, we started bringing families down to stay during the time we were deployed at the Cape. It worked out pretty well; we would work through the night and return to our motel and go to bed in the early morning hours. The wives would take the kids to the pool for the day while we slept. Then we would get up late in the afternoon, find some food, go to work, and the wives and kids would take our places in the motel rooms. The only trouble was that the per diem we got for deployment to the Cape was so meager that after our families left and we were just down there on our own we slept two guys to a room to make ends meet.

After all this, the countdown had to be scrubbed again, this time for repair of a leaking tank bulkhead on the Atlas. It seemed that we would never get Glenn’s rocket off the launch pad.

Back to Langley. Next deployment to the Cape was for a Valentine’s Day launch, and, once more, we scrubbed it, this time for weather. At the Cape, we were focused and on top of the job, but the ups and downs of the launch preparation were nibbling at us. Tempers started to fray. The delays were hard to endure; we knew the stakes were enormous, both for the country and for John Glenn, but we were eager to move to launch and ready to go at a moment’s notice.

February 20, 1962, Mercury-Atlas 6

When I look back, I find it hard to believe that when we launched John Glenn we had had a total of three orbits’ worth of experience during the two preceding missions. Two of the Mercury-Atlas rockets had failed. As formidable as the Atlas appeared, it was essentially a pressurized metal balloon. If pressurization was lost while the rocket was on the pad, the rocket would have collapsed. We were rolling the dice in a way that would not be allowed in today’s space program.

After ten postponements and eighty-two days of delays, this countdown had the usual glitches. The pad crew broke a bolt in the hatch while inserting Glenn and had to scurry off to get a new one. Watching from Kraft’s TV, I was amazed as always by the close quarters of the Mercury capsule. The cockpit was smaller than any fighter aircraft I had flown. Glenn entered the capsule feet first, through a hatch less than two feet square, assisted by the pad crew, then ducked under the instrument panel. In the silver space suit, gloves, and helmet, Glenn was the modern-day explorer ready to embark to a new world.

During the hold, Kraft had his customary pint of milk to settle his stomach, and Williams made increasingly frequent trips outside to look at the weather. After the hatch was repaired, the countdown resumed.

Williams polled the mission team, receiving a solid Go from Kraft and the Mercury capsule and Atlas booster test conductors. With each succeeding Go the energy level in the control room threatened to burst through the doors. Scott Carpenter called from the blockhouse, “God speed, John Glenn.” Then he counted down: “Three seconds . . . two . . . one . . . zero.”

As the umbilical cables were ejected, I filled in the liftoff message and started a continuous voice briefing for the Bermuda site team. My hand was trembling as I jotted 14:14:39Z on my notepad. When I heard Glenn’s report, “Roger, the clock is running, we are underway,” I took off for the Teletype room. This time, I remembered to remove my headset.

Returning, I continued to brief Bermuda via the Teletype order wire until they acquired data at three minutes. Other than during the high-G periods, Glenn’s reporting was just like his training runs. I consciously had to fight to keep doing my job and avoid being mesmerized by the words.

Shortly after five minutes, Glenn calmly said, “Sustainer engine cut-off, and the posigrades have fired.” The posigrades provided the thrust to separate the capsule from the Atlas booster.

The room hushed as Kraft and Tec Roberts engaged in the Go NoGo dialogue. The answer came swiftly and, after checking with John Hodge, the Bermuda flight director, Kraft nodded to Shepard, who gave Glenn a resounding, “Go! You are Go for at least seven orbits.” (The orbital trajectory was designed to provide more orbit lifetime than needed for the mission plan in case we had problems and could not come down at the planned end of mission time.)

Glenn, now in the element of the test pilot, was reporting the control system status, closing out the checklist items, and continually reassuring the doctors that he felt fine. It was a jam-packed ten minutes, but everything had gotten done as Friendship 7 left Bermuda for the Canary Islands site, the next in our chain of tracking stations girdling the Earth.

For the first time I was nervous. My site controllers were going to see a manned spacecraft for the first time, and now they would have to communicate with an astronaut, run the site, and direct their team. This was it, real-time and pretty heady work for a bunch of young guys. Communications were clear and I listened intently as Glenn reported his status to Llewellyn: “Control check complete. I have the booster in sight out the window. It’s probably about one mile away, going down under my position and a bit to the left.”

Llewellyn stammered a bit in his first communication, “Friendship 7, what is your space . . . spacecraft station . . . status report?” I had to smile that even a tough, hard-ass Marine gets clanked up at times.

After all of the attempts to get Glenn off the ground, this one seemed unbelievably easy. When it finally happened, it was smooth as apple butter. John kept clipping through the first orbit without a glitch. Teletype messages and occasional voice contacts indicated that the controllers’ adrenaline was pumping. It was difficult at such times to maintain my focus. I felt a strong urge to yell out, “We’ve got an American in orbit!” My remote site controllers were working well and the lines were humming. I felt a burst of pride for our team and how it had progressed in the fifteen months since we had bungled our Four-Inch Flight back in November of 1960.

I had sat next to Chris Kraft since the first mission and was amazed at his aplomb now that he finally had an American in orbit. High-risk leadership beckons many, but few accept the call.

The Teletype post-pass reports filled the gaps when we could not listen to Glenn. The messages, when pieced together, indicated he was on the flight plan and the capsule was performing well. At the completion of each site pass, controllers prepared a systems summary message containing the values of sixteen key systems measurements, recorded during the pass. The short time intervals between tracking sites did not allow the MCC and site controllers to plot the measurements, so the Teletype messages were cut into strips and aligned with the measurements from the preceding sites, then taped together. Trend predictions from this data were rough but this was the best we could do.

The control team at Canton Island in the South Pacific received Glenn’s report of a brilliant “bright red” sunrise, then were startled as he continued, “I am in the middle of a mass of thousands of very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they are luminescent. They are a bright yellowish green, about the size and intensity of a firefly on a real dark night. I have never seen anything like it. They look like little stars. They swirl around the capsule and go in front of the window.”

I showed the Teletype of Glenn’s finding to Kraft. He nodded, then said, “Keep me advised.”

Other than modest increases in temperature, there were no concerns as we approached the end of the first orbit. The only unusual occurrence was Glenn’s report of the “fireflies” he spotted at sunrise over the Pacific.

Before the Cape pass, Kraft walked over to me and said, “Shorty [Powers] has confirmed that President Kennedy will make a call through the Cape at the end of the first orbit. Get with the communications people and make sure everything is set up.” When caught off guard I tend to be inflexible, particularly when I am distracted from the business at hand by details that could have been worked out earlier. This was one of those times. Kraft saw the expression on my face, frowned, and then chided, “The President is the boss!”

The presidential call did not surprise the audio technicians; they had been advised of the call by the White House switchboard the night before launch, and I was assured everything was already checked out. I had a lot to learn about the politics of space.

As the capsule passed over the Cape, Shepard, the Cape CapCom, called, “Seven, this is the Cape. The President will be talking to you.” Caught by surprise himself, Glenn stammered, “Ah . . . the President? This is Friendship 7, standing by.”

Shepard said, “Go ahead, Mr. President.” The communications loop was dead; the call came early and the phone line was not yet patched in.

George Metcalf picked up the phone when it rang at his backroom console. He thought it was a gag when the voice at the other end said, “This is the White House, stand by for the President.” Attending other duties and unaware of the planned phone call, George stuttered, “Hello, hello, Mr. President!” Then Metcalf stood up, wildly gesturing for other technicians to come help him set up the patch.

In the control room, a more crucial event now intruded on the team’s attention. A warning light had flashed on the instrument panels in Mercury Control. Moments later, Don Arabian, the systems monitor, called out, “Chris, I don’t know what to make of this, but I am showing an indication on Segment 51.”

Kraft looked perplexed. I overheard the call and immediately pulled out the telemetry listing from my console drawer. “Chris,” Arabian went on, “Segment 51 is the impact [landing] bag deploy.”

Quickly, I called John Hatcher, the facility team boss. “John, forget the [President’s] phone call and verify the patching of Segment 51.” Then I broadcast an all-site Teletype message: “Confirm patching instructions for spacecraft telemetry and report the readings on Segment 51, ASAP.” The chilling implication of the telemetry that Don Arabian was reporting was that the impact bag had deployed—which in turn meant that the heat shield had somehow come loose. The heat shield protects the capsule from the fire of reentry. After reentry is complete and the parachute is deployed, the heat shield is released. A rubberized bag which is attached to the capsule structure is stowed behind the heat shield. After the capsule’s parachute deploys the heat shield is automatically released and the rubber landing bag extends to cushion the landing impact. On the water the landing bag acts like a sea anchor to stabilize the capsule in the upright position and minimize drift.

If the telemetry indication being reported was correct and the heat shield had come loose in orbit John Glenn would have no protection from the 3,000-degree F reentry temperatures. The capsule would become a meteor that flashed for but a few brief seconds during reentry before burning up.

Kraft and the team were now faced with a grim set of choices. Controllers, distrustful of solitary measurements, immediately started digging out the details of the switch and how it was rigged. The phone system came alive as the problem was pursued. Precious time was lost trying to track down engineers at the blockhouse and Hangar S. Kraft’s controllers had no provisions for emergency access to the total design, manufacturing, and assembly team. I jotted a note to myself to set up a hot line to McDonnell Aircraft for the next mission—if there was one.

Unaware of the crisis unfolding around him, John Glenn coasted over the Atlantic. He was oblivious to the uncertainty over Segment 51, but he was now having an unrelated problem with the attitude control. The capsule was drifting sideways to the right until it hit the attitude limit, then the big yaw thruster would kick in.

The mood inside Mercury Control had changed with the suddenness of a thunderclap. Metcalf, still holding the line to the White House, found no easy way to disengage. “Mr. President,” he blurted, “we’ve gotten pretty busy down here now. I don’t think we’ve got time to talk.” The President responded, “Give me a call if you get a chance.” George hung up and turned to more urgent problems.

As the spacecraft passed over Central Africa, Glenn reported that he was departing from the flight plan and was troubleshooting the attitude control problems. It appeared to him and those on the ground that the problem was a random movement from left to right, possibly caused by one of the small thrusters working intermittently.

Glenn interrupted his troubleshooting with reports on the flight plan as he moved across the Indian Ocean, continuing his assurances to the doctors that he felt fine. The medical community’s anxieties, although reduced by Yuri Gagarin’s one-orbit mission, persisted. Kraft and the rest of the control team were elated with Glenn’s performance. It was obvious that he was on schedule and had no problems adapting. As John passed over Australia, he embraced the attitude control problem with an energized can-do spirit.

On the ground the story was far different. The blockhouse had reviewed their measurements and verified that they had had no Segment 51 indications during launch. But when the spacecraft passed overhead at the end of the first orbit, the blockhouse had seen the indication also. The data I was receiving from the remote sites was not much help. Half of the CapCom reports indicated they were seeing Segment 51, and the others were not.

The limitations of the Mercury communications system now became evident. The response to each of the Teletype queries took ten to fifteen minutes. The answers often prompted another query.

Chris was now on the phone with the blockhouse, trying to get answers, while I had gone to a small office behind the Teletype room seeking out Ed Nieman and Dana Boatman, the two McDonnell engineers who were developing the system schematics. Both of us were seeking answers to the same question: if Segment 51 is valid, what are we going to do about it?

Chris was not having much luck and his frustration level was rising. The design engineers, in the heat of real-time crisis, weren’t quick at coming up with options. One of them suggested, “Let’s make sure Glenn keeps the landing bag switch off and we should ask him if he hears any banging noises when he maneuvers at a high rate.”

Kraft relayed the messages to Gordo Cooper in Australia, who first verified the landing bag switch position. Cooper asked, “John, you haven’t heard any banging noises or anything of that kind, have you? Maybe when you maneuver at a high rate?” Glenn replied, “Negative,” and let the question drop. If he found it strange, he gave no indication.

Walt Williams, Max Faget, the capsule designer, and John Yardley from McDonnell now joined Kraft at the console. In short order, the words came tumbling out, like objects falling from a filled closet. Faget proposed to hold the heat shield in place for the early part of reentry with the retropack.

The retropack is a cluster of three solid rockets used to reduce the orbital velocity sufficiently to allow gravity to pull the spacecraft into a safe reentry trajectory. The timing of the retrorocket firing and the spacecraft attitudes are key to hitting the planned landing zone. The retropack is located behind and in the center of the heat shield and is attached to the capsule by three metal straps. After the retrorockets are fired, an electrical signal pyrotechnically cuts the three straps and a small spring pushes the empty retropack away from the heat shield. With the capsule oriented blunt end forward during reentry, the heat shield protects the capsule by dissipating the heat as the capsule enters the atmosphere. The heat shield literally melts away (ablates) on reentry. If the heat shield was not firmly attached to the capsule the aerodynamic forces would tear it off during reentry, leaving the capsule unprotected. If after retrofire, however, the retropack was not jettisoned, it was in a position to hold the heat shield during the reentry until the retropack melted away. When the retropack melted it was believed the aerodynamic forces would hold the heatshield in position during the remainder of the reentry.

I looked around the room and saw faces drained of blood. John Glenn’s life was in peril. We were desperate to find a solution, without being sure we knew the problem.

Kraft said, “This is the wrong way to go. It’s too damn risky for something that is probably an instrument error.” Fighting to avoid a premature decision, Kraft fired off a barrage of questions: “Does anyone know the aerodynamic effects of reentering with the retropackage attached? Do we have sufficient control with the attitude jets to keep us oriented in reentry attitude? Will we damage the heat shield to the point where it cannot protect the capsule as the retropack melts away during reentry?” Faget and Yardley scratched their heads. They were well beyond the bounds of their design knowledge.

Faget, quietly muttering in his Cajun accent, tried to reassure Kraft. “Chris, it should be okay. We designed the heat shield with plenty of margin.” His words did not sound convincing. Kraft’s gut feeling indicated just the opposite. He believed Segment 51 was a false telemetry indication and the risks of an unproven, untested entry technique with the retropack were too high. Kraft exclaimed, “Dammit, we’ve got to find other pieces of data to confirm this before we jump to the conclusion to enter with the retropack.”

Slayton and Shepard had plugged into Kraft’s console for the telephone conversation with the blockhouse. Returning to his console, Williams leaned over and asked, “What should we tell John?” Kraft ignored the question for the moment.

Faget, the consummate engineer, could not ignore the telemetry. Engineers like Max live by their data. Asking one of them to consider that the telemetry information may be wrong borders on the heretical. Kraft was at the opposite end of the spectrum. “Max, dammit,” he barked, “we only got one piece of instrumentation. My guys tell me it would take a dual electrical failure for the heat shield to come loose. The way it is stacked, a mechanical failure is out of the question.”

Yardley, who had been conferring with Williams, posed the fatal question: “Chris, what happens if it is valid?”

With only a single data point, the discussion was at an impasse. Williams joined in: “If we come in with the retropack attached, what is the worst thing that can happen to us?” (I could imagine Glenn’s reaction, if he only knew: “What’s this us crap?”) No new information was forthcoming, but at least there was now a grudging acceptance for Kraft’s position that the telemetry indicator could be wrong.

The debate at the console broke off again as Cooper came on the conference loop to offer his impression of the problems reported by Glenn over Australia. Kraft knew the discussions were bothering his controllers on the floor and motioned the entourage to return to their seats. I noted the clock. The mission was half over and the team needed to make a decision in less than two hours. I made one more trip to my McDonnell engineers, who had been on the phone back to the plant in St. Louis. I doubted they would have any answers prior to entry.

Kraft was again seated at his console when I returned. For a few moments, it seemed that everything had settled down. My console was flooded with Teletype messages and I scanned the most recent arrivals first. The message from the Canton site brought me to my feet and I handed it to Kraft. The message said:

ALL

DE CTN

FM CAPCOM

CTN ADVISED S/C NO INDICATIONS LDG BAG DEPLOY.

S/C RESP DID SOMEONE ASK IF THE LDG BAG WAS DOWN?

CTN RESP WE HAVE BEEN ASKED TO MONITOR LDG BAG AND ASK

IF YOU HEARD NOISES WHEN MANEUVERING.

S/C RESPONSE NEG.

Teletype messages between the tracking stations and MCC are always abbreviated and terse to save transmission time. This message was painfully clear. The Canton Island CapCom (CTN) had inadvertently informed Glenn (S/C or spacecraft) of our concerns.

Kraft had staked out his position long ago: “I don’t worry about things I can’t do something about.” But in this case, he was worrying a great deal. The impasse on entry techniques bothered him. Left to his own he would press on with a normal entry, ignoring the alarm, but Yardley and Faget were two damned good engineers arrayed against him. Williams also had flight test savvy. They were all telling him he should take a different path.

Still, Kraft had picked up the scent. He believed he was on the right track and wanted to buy more time. “I want to give John a complete story,” he explained, “and I need more answers.”

Over Hawaii, Glenn was given the Go for the final orbit. After the discussion with Canton, I was surprised John did not mention his conversation with the CapCom. During his last stateside pass, he continued discussing his attitude control problems, and we provided him with a recommendation for backing up the automatic attitude control.

My roommate, Carl Huss, updated the capsule retrosequence clock to the correct retrofire time for the planned end of the mission landing area. The clocks would automatically initiate the retrofire sequence if the spacecraft attitude was correct when the clock timed out. The mission now coasted into the third and final orbit. Under other circumstances, Huss and Tec Roberts would have been delighted. Their tracking data was solid and the planned retrofire times had not changed by even a second during the last orbit. With the decision time now down to less than an hour, I believed we had all the data we were going to get. Kraft and Williams were facing the lonesome task of deciding what to do. John Glenn’s life, the Mercury program, and America’s future in space were in the balance.

Looking back on this episode, and the other Mercury missions, I find it hard to believe that we did so well. The systems operators did not have the benefit of the massive analytical tools available today. The only computing resources available during the mission were used to process radar tracking data. Compared to the present technology, our computers were the equivalent of a rusty adding machine.

A controller lives or dies based on the information he has at his console. If you lack what you need at liftoff, there is little hope that you will get new information that you would trust during a mission. This realization was the most profound impression branded on me from the Glenn mission. During the final orbit I witnessed the agony and the frustration faced by the controllers and engineers wrestling to help Kraft make the best decision.

There was no right decision that day, nothing in black and white. We could only try to obtain the best answer. At that moment, I also realized that learning by doing was the only way a controller could ever become smart enough to succeed in the tough and unforgiving environment of spaceflight operations.

The last orbit was a stalemate. No more data was coming. The best judgment of the engineers was that there was sufficient attitude control for reentry with the retropack attached. The straps would burn off during entry and should not induce any landing position errors. Kraft restated his position: “It is an instrumentation problem. The heat shield is still attached. If we burn a hole in the damned heat shield we are going to kill Glenn!” Williams, rising to the emotion of the decision, chimed in: “Chris, if you’re wrong we are going to kill him, too.”

The engineers cautioned that if we kept the retropack attached, we needed to confirm that all three retros had fired. If one did not, there was a good chance it would detonate during reentry. Kraft did not comment on this last prediction.

Kraft was still holding out until the last moment, so that he had a complete understanding of the final instructions before he radioed up to John Glenn. The mission was turning into a horse race. Kraft wanted answers from one final test to be performed over Hawaii before he turned the discussion to the entry procedures modifications.

At capsule acquisition, the Hawaii CapCom advised Glenn, “Friendship 7, we have been reading an indication on the ground of Segment 51, which is heat shield deploy. We suspect this is an erroneous signal and would like to check it out. Place the landing bag switch in auto and see if you get a light.”

Glenn responded, “Negative. In automatic position did not get a light and I’m back in the off position now, over.”

Kraft turned again to Williams. “Walt, this is the best damned data we can get. The test was negative. We should go ahead with the normal reentry sequence.”

Without waiting for a response, Kraft advised Hawaii, “Tell Glenn we will go ahead with the normal reentry sequence.”

Kraft’s instruction to the Hawaii CapCom surprised Williams. Still not satisfied that the test was valid, Walt continued to question the engineers over the telephone. He was getting a mixed input—the design engineers had conflicting feelings. Stormily closing off the final conference call, he said, “If reentry with the retropack is safe, what do we lose by coming in with the pack on?”

While the debate continued, Glenn had now made contact with the California site, and Huss started the countdown to retro sequence. The count was relayed to the capsule at California by Wally Schirra: “Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . MARK.”

Glenn responded, “Retro sequence green.”

Thirty seconds later the retros fired and John Glenn was heading back to Earth. All that was needed was the final decision on whether to retain the retropackage to keep the heat shield in place during the reentry. Schirra said, “Attitude looked good, John. Keep your retros on until you pass Texas.”

Glenn asked several times during the pass about the retropack jettison time. Schirra advised him, “You’ll get the final word over Texas.”

Kraft called Schirra: “California, can you confirm that all three retros fired?” Wally: “Affirmative, Chris.”

In his role as the operations director, Williams leaned toward Kraft, and quietly but firmly said, “That settles it, we’re coming in with the pack on.” Kraft nodded. Williams was the boss and the final decision was made.

Chris got on the voice loop to the Texas CapCom: “Tell John to keep the retros on through entry.”

I had anticipated the decision and had a Teletype message with the procedures already at the site. Glenn would have to override the .05G signal, which changed capsule attitude control modes when capsule reentry accelerations were sensed, and he would need to retract the periscope manually. I handed Kraft the message. Alan Shepard, the MCC CapCom, standing in front of Kraft’s console, nodded affirmatively at its content. Kraft then asked the Texas CapCom, “Texas, do you have the message on entry procedures?”

At acquisition, Texas called the capsule. “This is Texas CapCom, Friendship 7. We are recommending that you leave the retropackage on through the entire reentry. This means that you will have to override the .05G switch expected at 04:43:53. This also means you will have to manually retract the scope. Do you read?”

Glenn’s response was tart. He wanted answers. “Texas, Friendship 7. What is the reason for this? Do you have a reason? Over.”

Caught in the middle, and without the benefit of the discussions in Mercury Control, Texas passed the buck to the Cape. “Friendship 7, Texas. Cape Flight will give you the reasons for this action when you are in view.”

When Glenn passed over the Cape during reentry, Shepard calmly recommended the periscope retraction. He then added: “John, while you’re doing that, we are not sure whether or not your landing bag has deployed. We feel it is possible to reenter with the retropackage on. We see no difficulty at this time with this type of reentry. Over.” Glenn’s response on hearing it from Shepard was simply, “Roger, understand.”

As the capsule plunges toward the Earth, a sheath of superheated ionized particles surrounds it, causing a communications blackout with the ground stations. This blackout is accompanied by a rapid increase in external temperatures and G (gravity) buildup. The astronaut is literally in the center of a fireball.

Glenn watched as his world turned to a very bright orange as the external temperatures reached toward 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Flaming pieces of metal broke off and passed behind him, and for a moment Glenn had visions that they were chunks of the heat shield, but he could only wait to know for sure. The reentry Gs had him virtually immobilized, his body now weighing seven times his Earth weight.

Exiting communications blackout, the spacecraft started to oscillate, and Glenn tried every control mode. As the oscillations started to diverge, and he could finally lift his arm against the G forces, he reached up to deploy the drogue parachute just as the automatic system sent the command.

We listened in Mercury Control as the final events unfolded. I continued the Teletype and voice briefings for the control teams around the world. It was hard to contain my glee. Today we had put an American in orbit and returned him safely, in spite of a grave and, at the time, a life-threatening uncertainty.

The destroyer Noa sighted the spacecraft as it descended through a broken cloud layer at 5,000 feet for a landing five miles off the bow. The cheering sailors who plucked him out of the sea painted Glenn’s footprints on the deck.

There were a hellacious number of rough spots and much to rethink before the next mission, but this was our day. There was no doubt about the team. Kraft’s Brotherhood had pulled it off. The joyous chatter among the consoles as the controllers stowed their headsets and documents belied the rip-roaring party we would throw that night. I sent the final message to the remote sites. I was damned proud of my guys. They had kept on top of a spacecraft traveling at five miles a second with a low-speed Teletype network. It isn’t equipment that wins the battles; it is the quality and the determination of the people fighting for a cause in which they believe.

And, of course, it was John Glenn’s day.

None of us could have predicted the emotional reaction to John Glenn’s flight: parades in Cape Canaveral, New York, and Washington. Miles of ticker tape. An invitation to speak to Congress. Dinner and touch football with the Kennedys. Half a million letters and telegrams in the first month after his flight. And Glenn tried to answer them all.

He had left college to join the Marines during World War II. He was a decorated hero in Korea, a jet fighter pilot nicknamed “Ol’ Magnet Tail” by his buddies because his plane took so many hits. In 1957 he set a transcontinental speed record for jet aircraft.

Glenn was simply an old-fashioned, star-spangled hero. He spoke of God and country and the flag and the bravery of his fellow astronauts, and he actually meant what he said. Even a cynic like Shorty Powers was moved to say, “This guy is for real. I’d say he’s the most decent human being I’ve ever met.”

The post-mission analysis confirmed that the telemetry reading had been invalid.

John Glenn’s mission was the turning point in Flight Control and in Kraft’s evolution as a flight director. Walt’s direction rankled Kraft, and Kraft vowed never to be placed in a similar position again. Kraft believed his neophyte team was superior to the designers at real-time integrated spacecraft systems analysis. Learning by doing equipped the controllers with a gut-level knowledge of spacecraft design and operations. When this knowledge was combined with the multidisciplinary skills of the mission team and the integrated risk assessments developed through the mission rules, the Flight Control team had the foundation needed to succeed in the new environment of space. Flight Control rapidly became the dominant systems engineering cadre in the U.S. space program.

There was, of course, a remarkable sequel to Glenn’s flight. He retired from the astronaut corps to run for the Senate, withdrawing once after an accident, losing a second race to big money, and getting elected on his third try. No one ever accused John Glenn of being a quitter. He served in the Senate, representing Ohio, then retired after four terms. Thirty-six years after he had made space history he flew again, this time on the Space Shuttle in October 1998. His second flight helped close the chapters in history books that cover the first four decades of America’s space program.