In accordance with the Project Mercury tradition of including ‘7’ in the name, John Glenn called his spacecraft ‘Friendship 7’, and he asked NASA artist Cecilia Bibby to paint it on the side of the capsule, allowing Bibby to become the only woman to ascend the gantry of Pad 14 at Cape Canaveral. Hearing about this, Gus Grissom dared Bibby to paint a naked woman on the spacecraft. She drew one on the inside of a cap used to cover the periscope. Glenn loved it, but Bibby almost got fired. Only the intervention of Glenn and Grissom allowed her to keep her job.
After several attempts, Glenn finally got into the capsule on 20 February 1962, intending to become the first American to orbit the Earth. The Atlas booster was unusual in its use of balloon tanks for fuel, made of very thin stainless steel with minimal rigid strength. It was the pressure in the tanks, coming from the fuel, that provided the structural rigidity required for flight. In fact an Atlas rocket would collapse under its own weight if not kept pressurized. It had to have nitrogen in the tank even when not fuelled.
‘I could hear the sound of pipes whining below me as the liquid oxygen flowed into the tanks and heard a vibrant hissing noise,’ Glenn said later. ‘The Atlas is so tall that it sways slightly in heavy gusts of wind and, in fact, I could set the whole structure to rocking a bit by moving back and forth in the couch!’
At 09.47.39 EST, with Scott Carpenter’s call of ‘Godspeed, John Glenn’, the rocket began to climb. ‘The Atlas’ thrust was barely enough to overcome its weight,’ Glenn later wrote in his autobiography. ‘I wasn’t really off until the umbilical cord that took electrical communications to the base of the rocket pulled loose. That was my last connection with Earth. It took the two boosters and the sustainer engine three seconds of fire and thunder to lift the thing that far.’
Five minutes after the launch, Glenn reported: ‘Capsule is good. Zero G and I feel fine. Oh that view is tremendous. The capsule is turning around and I can see the booster during turnaround just a couple of hundred yards behind me. It is beautiful.’
‘Roger, Seven. You have a go at least seven orbits,’ he was told.
Twenty-seven minutes after launch Glenn was traversing the Sahara: out of the window, he could see some long smoke trails right on the edge of the desert. Over the Indian Ocean on the first orbit he said, ‘The sunset is beautiful. It went down very rapidly. I still have a brilliant blue band clear across the horizon almost covering my whole window.’ After 50 minutes, concerning orbital night, ‘The only unusual thing I have noticed is a rather high, what would appear to be a haze layer up some 7 or 8 degrees above the horizon on the night side. The stars I can see through it as they go down toward the real horizon, but it is a very visible single band or layer pretty well up to the normal horizon … This is Friendship Seven. I have the Pleiades in sight out here, very clear.’
Several months earlier, while getting a haircut in Cocoa Beach, Glenn had seen, in a gift shop, a little Minolta camera in a display case, which he bought for $45. NASA technicians adapted it for space and it took the most amazing images of Earth.
Glenn went on to describe something unusual he saw outside Friendship 7: ‘I am in a big mass of some very small particles, they’re brilliantly lit up like they’re luminescent. I never saw anything like it […] they’re coming by the capsule, and they look like little stars. A whole shower of them coming by. They swirl around the capsule and go in front of the window and they’re all brilliantly lighted.’ Later they were identified as flakes of paint from his capsule.
On the third orbit a potentially serious situation occurred. A sensor on board Friendship 7 indicated that the heat shield was loose. If it broke away during re-entry Glenn would perish.
Gene Kranz, then a Procedures Officer in Mission Control, remembers the incident as a key moment in the evolution of mission operations:
What the crew was seeing, we were seeing on board the spacecraft in Mercury. It was only as we moved into Gemini that we recognized the need to move deeper into the spacecraft system. Part of this came about as a result of the John Glenn mission. Because in John Glenn, we were stuck with a very difficult decision. Did his heatshield deploy or did it not? We had a single telemetry measurement that indicated that the heatshield had come loose from the spacecraft. Now, if we believed that measurement and the heatshield had come loose, we had one set of decisions that involved sticking our neck out by retaining the retrorocket package attached during the entry phase. We didn’t know whether it would damage the heatshield. We didn’t know whether we had sufficient attitude control authority. So if the heatshield had come loose and we believed that measurement, we’d go that direction. But if the heatshield had not come loose, that measurement was wrong and we wouldn’t do anything different. So it was a very difficult decision.
I remember this one very clearly, because the engineers would come and say, ‘Nah, the heatshield can’t have come loose!’ And Chris Kraft [Mercury Flight Director] would look at them, and he’d say, ‘Well, how about this measurement we’re seeing? What’s the worst thing that would happen if it had come loose?’ And they’d always end up in a position that says, ‘Well, maybe John Glenn isn’t going to make it home.’ ‘Well then, what are we going to do about it?’ So, because of Kraft, this entire business of ground control, I think, really came into being on the Mercury–Atlas 5.
Apparently we had a bad sensor on that flight, and we thought that the heat shield had been released. Well, the arrangement was such that if the heat shield were released, the straps would have still held it on. So everybody was concerned that the heat shield had been released, because that’s what the instrumentation said. Well, they called me up – I was back in Houston – and asked me what about it, and I said, ‘Well, you can enter that way because we’ve got wind tunnel data that said the thing will be stable,’ and they did.
Now they had to tell John Glenn about the problem. But they didn’t tell him the whole story. Schirra said, ‘This is Texas Capcom, Friendship Seven. We are recommending that you leave the retropackage on through the entire re-entry.’
‘This is Friendship Seven. What is the reason for this? Do you have any reason? Over.’
‘None at this time. This is the judgement of Cape Flight.’
Six minutes before retrofire, Glenn manoeuvred Friendship 7 into a 14-degree, nose-up attitude. The first retrorocket fired. The second and third retrorocket firings came at five-second intervals, slowing the capsule sufficiently to drop it out of orbit. Once again, Schirra said, ‘Keep your retro pack on until you pass Texas.’
‘I looked around the room,’ wrote Gene Kranz in his autobiography, Failure Is Not an Option, ‘and saw faces drained of blood. John Glenn’s life was in peril.’
In Florida, Capcom Al Shepard said, ‘We feel it is possible to re-enter with the retro package on. We see no difficulty at this time with this type of re-entry.’
After the mission Glenn said he was annoyed at being kept in the dark about such a serious problem. During re-entry the retrorocket package’s three metal straps melted. A fragment struck the window. Later Glenn said he expected to feel the heat growing on his back. He did not know if the pieces that were coming away were pieces of the retrorocket package or the heat shield. ‘My condition is good, but that was a real fireball. Boy. I had great chunks of that retropack breaking off all the way through.’
Glenn became a national hero and had one of the biggest New York tickertape welcomes ever. But it seemed that the flight of Friendship 7 would be his last.
Well, after my flight I wanted to get back in rotation and go up again. Bob Gilruth, who was running the program at that time, said that he wanted me to go into some areas of management of training and so on, and I said I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to get back in line again for another flight. But he said headquarters wanted it that way, at least for a little while. And I didn’t know what the reason for this was, and I kept going back. Every month or two I’d go back and talk to him again about when do I get back in rotation again, and he’d tell me, ‘Well, not now. Headquarters doesn’t want you to do this yet.’
I don’t know whether he was afraid of the political fallout or what would happen if I got bagged on another flight. I don’t know what it was, but apparently he didn’t want me used again right away. So that’s the reason I never got another flight. Bob Gilruth kept saying, well, that he wanted me here as a training and management, plus the upcoming flights should go to people who would be useful for the early lunar landings, and that by the time those were expected to occur, I’d be over fifty, and that might be a little too old.
By a curious twist of fate John Glenn did get into space again – 36 years later! It was on the Space Shuttle and Glenn, then aged 77, conducted tests to see the difference between his adaptation to zero gravity and his younger crew members.
Deke Slayton was the obvious choice for the second orbital Mercury mission but doctors discovered he had a slightly irregular heartbeat, so he was grounded. The rest of the Mercury crew appealed to President Kennedy to overrule the doctors; Kennedy assigned this hot potato to his Vice President, who invited the astronauts, along with Gilruth, to a weekend at the LBJ ranch to thrash out this complaint and others. Deke remained grounded but his comrades elected him their leader, thereby conferring on him (with Gilruth’s approval) the power that would control the destinies of all astronauts for the next decade.
Slayton’s back up was Wally Schirra, but instead the mission went to Scott Carpenter, John Glenn’s back up for the first US orbital flight. He went into space in May. His flight, in ‘Aurora 7’, has been unfairly criticized as a poor flight. It was planned to be a scientific mission as well as conducting the most thorough workout of the Mercury capsule to date. However, various malfunctions resulted in the need for frequent attitude corrections and a heavy use of fuel. Carpenter also made a serious error in not turning off the automatic orientation system when he switched to manual control prior to re-entry; the result was a critical waste of fuel. Further malfunctions and the low level of fuel meant that Carpenter did not align Aurora 7 correctly for retrofire, which he also activated five seconds too late. Re-entry itself was dramatic with the capsule oscillating wildly. It overshot the landing zone by 400 km. Carpenter eventually left NASA.
Meanwhile, the Russians had approved the hiring of 60 new cosmonaut trainees including five women: Tatyana D. Kuznetsova, 20; Valentina L. Ponomareva, 28; Irina B. Solovyeva, 24; Valentina V. Tereshkova, 24; and Zhanna D. Yerkina, 22. Solovyeva had 900 parachute jumps to her credit, followed by Tereshkova with 78 and Ponomareva ten. Although Ponomareva was clearly the most accomplished pilot, Gagarin opposed her inclusion because she was a mother. Tereshkova, did not have any academic honours but had been an active member of the local Young Communist League.
Cosmonauts Nikolayev and Popovich were the obvious candidates for the two missions. One of the few bachelors in the team, 32-year-old Nikolayev began his career as a lumberjack before joining the Soviet Air Force, receiving his pilot’s wings in 1954. Popovich, 31, had had a distinguished career in the Soviet Air Force before receiving the Order of the Red Star for an assignment in the Arctic. His wife Marina was one of the most accomplished female test pilots in the USSR.
On 11 August Nikolayev took off. Korolev was nervous throughout the ascent phase and held tightly to the red telephone with which he would give the order to abort the mission in case of a booster failure. Khrushchev spoke to Nikolayev four hours into the mission, and the world saw Nikolayev smile on TV. As Vostok 3 passed over Baikonur at 11.02 a day afterwards, Vostok 4 climbed after it. It was the first time that more than one piloted spacecraft, or indeed more than one human, had been in orbit. Western media was surprised by the second launch, speculating that there would be a docking. There was talk that the mission was a rehearsal for a Moon flight but careful commentators noticed that this was not a true rendezvous, just two spacecraft launched into similar orbits neither of which could alter them. Both Vostoks fired their retrorockets within six minutes of each other on 15 August. Nikolayev landed after a three-day, 22-hour, 22-minute flight, during which he had circled Earth 64 times. Popovich landed 200 km away after a two-day, 22-hour, 57-minute flight and 48 orbits.
Korolev breathed a sigh of relief; his political masters were satisfied. But his health was worsening. He had been in poor condition for years: the privations of the labour camps had never left him. His busy work schedule aggravated matters; it was common for him to work eighteen hours a day for several weeks. He found it hard to delegate, often involving himself in trivial matters he should have left to others. Soon after the return of the twin Vostoks he experienced intestinal bleeding. After a stay in the hospital, he was ordered to take a holiday at the seaside resort of Sochi – but he took his work with him and was constantly on the telephone.
NASA needed new astronauts, the ones who would undertake the Moon missions. In September 1962 Tom Stafford met Pete Conrad and John Young in the lobby of the Rice Hotel in Texas. All were Navy men. They had all been given instructions to fly to Houston Hobby Airport. There, NASA security officers would pick them up and take them downtown to the hotel, where they were all registered under the name of the manager, Max Peck. This was to confuse reporters who were on the prowl. The three had a few beers and noted that Jim Lovell and Ed White had been seen in the hotel. Conrad and Lovell had actually been in the running to be finalists for the Mercury program but had been dropped for some minor medical issue. Soon Frank Borman and Jim McDivitt arrived as well, and Elliot See, one of two civilians selected. The other was Neil Armstrong.
On the morning of 16 September the new recruits travelled to Ellington Air Force Base to meet Deke Slayton and Al Shepard, along with the director of the Manned Spacecraft Center Robert Gilruth, Walt Williams, head of flight operations, and Shorty Powers, the public affairs officer. ‘There’ll be plenty of missions for all of you,’ said Gilruth. Deke Slayton spoke about the new pressures they would all face, especially business dealings and freebies. ‘With regard to gratuities,’ Deke said, ‘If there is any question, just follow the old test pilot’s creed: Anything you can eat, drink, or screw within twenty-four hours is perfectly acceptable.’ Gilruth was said to have blushed at this and Walt Williams choked, holding up his hand, ‘Within reason, within reason.’ But no one was thinking of the goodies that day; what they were thinking was, which one of us is going to be first on the Moon?
Once they had settled into their training they were given technical assignments – areas of the Gemini program that they were to monitor and take part in the development of. Frank Borman was assigned to the Saturn rocket; Jim McDivitt was allocated guidance and control; John Young got environmental controls and pressure suits; Jim Lovell got recovery and re-entry matters; Elliot See got electrical systems and mission planning; Pete Conrad would oversee cockpit layout, and Neil Armstrong got trainers and simulators.
The Mercury program was gaining momentum with the launch of Walter Schirra in the ‘Sigma 7’ capsule in October 1962. He intended to fly a technically perfect mission. He said:
Not to criticize John and Scott, but the mission was designed to have a chimpanzee in there. They replaced the chimp. But that meant they had to have a lot of automatic manoeuvres. Automatic manoeuvres took a tremendous amount of attitude control fuel. I said, ‘I don’t want to do that. I just want to save that.’ And as a result, I ended up, I think, about retrofire, about 80% of my attitude fuel was still remaining.
Schirra talked about ‘fireflies’ – a phenomenon that Glenn had observed:
As water came out of the spacecraft it froze instantaneously into one snowflake, but a very tiny, tiny snowflake. These stuck on the outside of the spacecraft. They drifted around. This was what John called fireflies, is what Scott got involved with banging the spacecraft and watching them come off. And as a result, both of them lost sight of the fact they had to have fuel enough to fly the mission. John got a little wrapped up; I did, too, because I was his Capcom in California, on the retro-rocket package that had to be kept on because of a false signal that said his heatshield had detached, when in fact it turned out it had not. But at any rate, that became kind of a traumatic part of John’s mission. But in both cases, they almost ran out of attitude control fuel; and that kind of shook me up, because there’s no reason to do that. In fact, I alienated some of the flight controllers because, after drifting for a while, I put it back into automatic control: ‘I’m in chimp mode now’; it didn’t go over too well.
On 2 November President Kennedy met with space officials at the White House. A recording of it exists in the J.F. Kennedy Presidential Library. His science advisor Jerome Wiesner said, ‘We don’t know a damn thing about the surface of the Moon. And we’re making some wild guesses about how we’re going to land on the Moon and we could get a terrible disaster from putting something down on the Moon.’ Kennedy took this in but he was thinking of the international situation: ‘Everything that we do ought to really be tied into getting onto the Moon ahead of the Russians.’ Webb didn’t want this, he wanted a NASA that was more than a Moon program: ‘Why can’t it be tied to pre-eminence in space, which are your own—’ Kennedy interjected, ‘Because, by God, we keep – we’ve been telling everybody we’re preeminent in space for five years and nobody believes it because they have the booster and the satellite.’ Later Webb returned to the point: ‘I think it is one of the top-priority programs.’ Kennedy let him speak, then again made his original point. ‘Jim, I think it is top priority. I think we ought to have that very clear … this is, whether we like it or not, in a sense a race. If we get second to the Moon, it’s nice, but it’s like being second any time.’
On 27 March 1963, three unflown cosmonauts, Nelyubov, Anikeyev, and Filatev, were returning to their training centre after an evening in Moscow. They had been drinking and became involved in an altercation with a military patrol at a railway station. Nelyubov threatened to go over the head of the offended officers if they filed a formal report against the three of them. Later officials at the Cosmonaut Training Centre requested that the duty officer not file a report against the three. He agreed, provided they apologize for their behaviour. Although Anikeyev and Filatev agreed to make peace, Nelyubov refused so the offended duty officer filed a report against the three of them, and within a week all three were dismissed from the cosmonaut team. Nelyubov was one of the brightest and most qualified cosmonauts, he had served as Gagarin’s second backup during the first Vostok mission, and he certainly would have gone into space soon.
There was some discussion among Kamanin and the cosmonauts in later months about bringing Nelyubov back. However, presumably facing the prospect of never going into space, Nelyubov suffered from a psychological crisis made worse as cosmonauts who were junior to him started flying their space missions. By 1966, he was despondent. The final Air Force report on him states: ‘On February 18th while in a state of drunkenness, he was killed by a passing train on a railroad bridge at Ippolitovka station on the Far Eastern Railroad.’ He was 31 years old.
The final Mercury flight occurred in May 1963 when the relaxed Gordon Cooper flew in his capsule, ‘Faith 7’. He had to put up with what was becoming a common problem on Mercury flights – spacesuit overheating. The flight went well and he remarked at how much detail he could see down on the ground. He deployed a flashing beacon from the nose of his capsule to test how far he could see it as it drifted away, important for future rendezvous missions. Then there was trouble, as he later described:
On the 19th orbit a warning light came on. The .05 G green warning light came on, which is the light that tells you you’re starting to re-enter. I was sure that I wasn’t re-entering, because there had been nothing to slow down my speed at all. And, of course, as usually happened on these missions, we had long spaces that we were out of radio contact; and I was out of radio contact when this happened. So when I got in radio contact first time, the Cape was kind of concerned when they heard about this light on. Then we proceeded on the next orbit or so to try to analyse, go through various procedures to try to find what it was. And we realized I was, slowly but surely, having an electrical fire from my relays; and they did short out the inverters. So, eventually I lost my total electrical system.
‘It meant that I had the manual push/pull rods to activate the jets for attitude control. I had eyeballs out the window for my attitude – my pitch, roll, and yaw attitude. I had a wristwatch for timing. And I had to activate each and every one of the relays, and I’d have to manually fire the retros while manually flying the spacecraft. So, everything had to be done manually. I’d have to control the spacecraft all the way through re-entry. I’d have to put my drogue out manually. And I’d have to deploy my parachute manually. I’d have to deploy the landing bag manually.
In the end it was a perfect splashdown just 7,000 yards from the USS Kearsarge in the Pacific.
Mercury ended with a total of two days, five hours and 55 minutes cumulative space time from six missions. It might not have sounded much but it was a sound start, verifying the technology necessary to maintain a human in Earth orbit for a short period of time.