The news was devastating. Not only the Mercury astronauts, but all Americans felt disappointment. When a reporter asked Glenn for his reaction, he tried to sound realistic but upbeat. “Well, they just beat the pants off us, that’s all, and there’s no use kidding ourselves about that,” he said. “But now that that space age has begun, there’s going to be plenty of work for everybody.”
Luckily, no one had a chance to dwell on the missed opportunity. Al Shepard’s real launch date was coming up, and fast.
Early on the morning of May 5, 1961, Glenn woke up with Shepard in the crew quarters at Cape Canaveral. As mission backup, Glenn rode the elevator up the side of the Redstone rocket to give the capsule one last check before launch. Before he finished, he left a sign in the tiny space: “No Handball Playing in This Area.” He was sure Al would get a chuckle out of it.
Shortly after 5:00 a.m., Glenn helped squeeze Al feet-first into his capsule, Freedom 7. Then Glenn went back to Mercury Control Center to help oversee the countdown. Four times the launch was put on hold, and four times the clock started again. Hours slipped by.
Through his earphones, Glenn heard Shepard make an urgent request. He had to urinate—immediately—and didn’t know what to do. The suborbital flight was short, only fifteen minutes, and no one had bothered to plan for a rest stop on the spacecraft.
“Do it in your suit,” Glenn was forced to say.
A minute later, Shepard chuckled. ”Well, I’m a wetback now,” he reported.
At T minus 2 minutes and 40 seconds, the clock stopped again. This time engineers were worried about pressure on the liquid oxygen. Shepard got back on the mike. “I’m cooler than you are,” Al said. Glenn could hear the impatience in his voice. “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?”
The countdown resumed.
At 9:34 A.M., the rockets fired. The Redstone rocket lifted into the air. “Roger, liftoff and the clock is started,” Shepard announced.
In its historic fifteen-minute flight, Freedom 7 soared to an altitude of 115,696 miles above Earth. After just a few minutes of weightlessness, Shepard rode the capsule back down to Earth. Freedom 7 splashed into the Atlantic Ocean just 302 miles from Cape Canaveral. It was a near-perfect mission.
Tense and excited, Americans watched every suspenseful moment on TV, anxiously sweating it out along with the team at Mission Control. In the White House, President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie kept their eyes glued to the black-and-white TV in the Oval Office. After Shepard was located at sea and brought aboard a waiting aircraft carrier, Kennedy phoned to offer his congratulations.
From coast to coast, America celebrated. Finally, as Glenn wrote later, “the United States had entered the space age.”
Two weeks later, on May 25, Kennedy delivered an important speech to Congress. “Now is the time to take longer strides,” he declared, “time for a great new American enterprise. . . . I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.” The audience exploded in cheers. Everyone at NASA breathed a sigh of relief. Now they could be sure that the program for which they had worked so long and hard would continue.
Glenn still hoped he would be chosen to make the second flight. But he was passed by once more, this time in favor of Gus Grissom. Again Glenn had to grit his teeth and pretend it didn’t matter. But it did.
Gus went up in Mercury’s second suborbital flight on July 19, 1961. The night before launch, he and Glenn figured out a solution to that little bathroom problem. They glued some rubber tubing onto a plastic bag that would be taped to the astronaut’s leg. The gimmick worked.
Only this time the mission did not go exactly according to plan. After the capsule, Liberty Bell 7, fell into the ocean, the hatch blew off and water started pouring in. Quickly Grissom pulled off his helmet and hoisted himself over the edge of the capsule and into the frigid ocean. In spite of the seal, water rushed into his neck hole, and the space suit grew heavy and waterlogged. Grissom had to paddle hard to keep his head above the waves.
He heard the whirr of a helicopter hovering above. Grissom waved his arm. But strangely, no one threw down a life belt! “Well,” Grissom thought to himself, “you’ve gone through the whole flight, and now you’re going to sink right here in front of all these people.”
Finally another helicopter came in and tossed him a sling. Exhausted, Grissom hung on as they hauled him up into the copter. But Liberty Bell 7 sank too fast to be recovered. His spacecraft was gone. It would be the only Mercury capsule lost at sea.
Aboard the carrier, an officer handed Grissom his helmet. “For your information,” the officer said, “we found it floating next to a ten-foot shark.”
The team was disappointed that Liberty Bell 7 was lost, but happy that Gus was okay and the overall mission a success. They began to prepare for another suborbital flight.
Then came more unwelcome news. On August 6, the Soviets sent another cosmonaut into orbit. Gherman Titov circled the earth an incredible total of seventeen times over a twenty-five-hour period.
NASA scrambled for a response. Clearly they couldn’t just shoot another astronaut up into the air and down again. This time, the spacecraft would have travel further and longer. This time, it would have to orbit.
Glenn knew he was supposedly next in line. Still, he worried whether he would be chosen. He had just turned forty years old, after all. Would NASA decide that he was too old to fly?
NASA made its preparations. The Redstone rocket was too small; it did not have enough thrust—only 76,000 pounds—to insert a capsule into orbit. For the first orbital flight, the mighty Atlas missile, with its 360,000 pounds of thrust, would be used instead. Only the Atlas could boost the capsule up to the extraordinary speed of 18,000 miles per hour.
Over the next few months, the Atlas was tested again and again. On September 13, it successfully propelled a dummy astronaut into one orbit of the Earth. Then, on November 29, came the turn of another chimp, named Enos. He got so excited that he ripped out all the biosensors that tracked his heartbeat, blood pressure, and pulse. Still, Enos made it back safely and even had his own news conference.
Who was going to follow the chimp into orbit? one of the reporters wanted to know.
“John Glenn will make the next flight,” Bob Gilruth answered. “Scott Carpenter will be his backup.”
Finally, Glenn was going into space.