This I did not do.
—Gus Grissom’s reply to the allegation that he intentionally
blew Liberty Bell 7’s escape hatch1
In a pivotal scene from the 1944 film Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Lieutenant Ted Lawson, portrayed by the matinee idol Van Johnson, stares out from a rain-swept beach at his lost B-25 Mitchell medium bomber, the aircraft used to great effect in Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle’s famous 1942 raid on Tokyo.2 Lawson’s bomber ran out of gas before it could reach the Chinese mainland and safety. Through the downpour, Lawson sees only the tail of his beloved Ruptured Duck visible in the shallows after an emergency crash landing. “I lost my ship,” the inconsolable Lawson says to no one, repeating, “I lost my ship.”
The second American manned space flight came to a similar, unexpected climax on July 21, 1961, when Captain Virgil I. Grissom’s ship vanished beneath the waves minutes after splashdown. His flight aboard the Mercury spacecraft Liberty Bell 7 was a fifteen-minute cannon shot from Cape Canaveral, peaking at 118 miles over the Atlantic Ocean, covering a distance of 302 miles before landing in the sea. The mission had gone almost exactly as planned. The pilot was calmly recording switch positions on his main instrument panel, loosening his harnesses, disconnecting his pressure suit from the ship’s oxygen supply, and stowing equipment in preparation for being picked up by recovery forces.
The astronaut was in good shape, ahead of schedule. As his spacecraft bobbed in the ocean, he unrolled a “neck dam,” a kind of turtleneck diaphragm designed to keep water from seeping into his pressure suit. Later, he recalled it was the best thing he had done all day.3 The recovery procedure called for Grissom to blow the escape hatch, exit the spacecraft, and then grab a “horse collar” that would be lowered from a waiting helicopter. The astronaut’s sealed pressure suit would be inflated, allowing him to float in the unlikely event he ended up in the water.
“His [neck ring] had been stowed in the [same] position so long that it didn’t really get tight,” noted Wayne Koons, who assisted with recovery operations at Cape Canaveral. “So when he went in the water, it was leaking, and he was taking water in through his neck dam.”4 The Mercury recovery procedures looked OK on paper. Then all hell broke loose.
As Grissom lay on his couch waiting for word that the recovery helicopter had latched onto his ship and the horse collar had been lowered, the hatch suddenly blew. The sill of the spacecraft was below the water line allowing the ocean to pour in. The short, athletic pilot, who had earlier disconnected his suit from his ship and undone his harnesses, managed somehow to get out.5 Grissom had just flown a ballistic trajectory and survived. He sure as hell was not going to drown, and he fought until the end to save his ship. The next thing he knew, he was in the water struggling to stay afloat. Minutes later, Liberty Bell 7 sank in more than three miles of water, 15,600 feet, deeper than the Titanic.6
The combat veteran and accomplished test pilot had always brought his aircraft back in one piece, had never before lost a ship. It had been a textbook mission, but the pilot ended up treading water for more than four minutes, nearly drowning, before he was finally plucked from the sea.
Grissom was shattered, acknowledging in his official account of the mission: “The loss of the spacecraft was a great blow to me, but I felt that I had completed the flight and recovery with no ill effects.”7 His otherwise successful suborbital flight was overshadowed by controversy over how the exploding hatch had prematurely detonated after splashdown. The hatch incident and the loss of his ship would dog Grissom for the rest of his life. The recovery procedures for Grissom’s mission were never used again, a tacit admission by NASA that they were flawed.
The flight of Liberty Bell 7, wedged between two historic US spaceflights by Alan Shepard and John Glenn, had been the kind of nut-and-bolts engineering mission for which Grissom came to be known. Despite nearly drowning and enduring years of second-guessing, he had accomplished nearly all the goals of his mission, paving the way for Glenn’s historic orbital flight seven months later. Down through the decades, however, all anyone seemed to remember about the flight of Liberty Bell 7 was that the pilot had lost his ship.
Grissom’s ship came in on March 7, 1961. Mercury Spacecraft Number 11, assembled ten months earlier by prime contractor McDonnell Douglas of St. Louis, was delivered to Cape Canaveral Air Station’s Hangar S for initial checkout. Once there, Grissom seldom let the spacecraft out of his sight. Technicians immediately started removing instrumentation, communications, and other equipment for testing over the next thirty-three days. The astronaut pleaded with them to stop tinkering with the machine.
Robert Gilruth had informed Grissom in January that he would likely pilot the Mercury-Redstone 4, or MR-4, with Glenn as backup pilot. During the late winter and spring of 1961, after the Americans had launched the chimp named “Ham” into space, Grissom was busy serving as Alan Shepard’s backup, practicing on mission and centrifuge trainers. He again rode the centrifuge at the US Navy’s Aviation Medical Acceleration Laboratory in Johnsville, Pennsylvania, in early April. Eight days later, on April 12, 1961, as the Americans continued to train, the Soviets shocked the world by launching cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into space for one circuit of the earth.
The Americans were suddenly behind in the first quarter of the Space Race.
After Shepard’s successful suborbital flight on May 5 and the celebrations that followed, Grissom resumed training in Hangar S at Cape Canaveral in preparation for his own flight scheduled for mid-July. A lengthy series of spacecraft systems checks began sixty days before his flight, including simulated high-altitude tests in a pressure chamber. The tests provided the pilot one of his few chances to test spacecraft systems under simulated flight conditions.8
Spacecraft Number 11 was mated to Mercury-Redstone booster Number 8 on July 1, about three weeks after its delivery to Cape Canaveral. It was agreed that each manned Mercury spacecraft should recognize the original seven astronauts. Given the ship’s bell-like shape, Grissom settled on Liberty Bell 7. An engineer suggested painting a white crack on the side of the ship to complete the historical allusion. No one gave the symbolism a second thought.
The pilot spent much of his time during the next three weeks at Launch Complex 5 poring over every spacecraft component while imploring engineers to stop fiddling with his ship. A launch escape system that would pull the spacecraft to safety if his booster failed was installed on July 5. (The day before, Grissom and Shepard had traveled “incognito” sixty miles north to the Daytona International Speedway to attend the annual Firecracker 250 stock car race.9) By mid-July, MR-4 was pronounced ready for flight. Grissom’s two years of intensive training was about to pay off.
The MR-4 launch was originally scheduled for July 18, 1961. In the days before the flight, Grissom came down with a sore throat. Remembering the doctors at Lovelace Clinic who had threatened his chances of becoming an astronaut when they discovered his hay fever symptoms, and acutely aware he could be grounded, he said nothing to the NASA flight surgeons.
A medical issue also would arise prior to Grissom’s Gemini flight in 1965. He would again remain silent until after the three-orbit mission. As NASA physician Fred Kelly later told colleagues after a Gemini flight simulation involving a sick crew, “It’ll be a cold day in hell when Gus Grissom asks to talk to a flight surgeon.”10
Later, after many drinks at Louie’s Bar in the old Kauai Surf Hotel in Hawaii, Grissom explained to army flight surgeon Robert Moser why flyers hated doctors: “I’ll tell you, Doc. When you walk into the flight surgeon’s office you have your ticket. When you walk out, you might not.”11
Moser got to know Grissom well as they prepared to man a tracking station for Wally Schirra’s orbital flight in October 1962. Another evening at the bar, Moser asked: “Gus, if you were sitting on that big firecracker and the countdown got to about [T] minus seven and suddenly you felt the worst pain imaginable in your mid chest and radiate down inside of your left arm, what would you do? Would you let us know?” Grissom stared a long time at the bottom of his glass. “Honestly? Only if I thought I was going to die.”12
While Grissom’s mission would be a repeat of Shepard’s Freedom 7 flight in May 1961, Liberty Bell 7 would be equipped with a new centerline window and manual hand controls that were the equivalent of power steering in a car. The trapezoidal window would provide Grissom with a 30-degree vertical by 33-degree horizontal view of the earth, an eight-hundred-mile arc at peak altitude. In early June, the pilot got his first chance to test-drive the control stick.
The astronauts had lobbied for an explosive hatch that operated much like an airplane canopy blowing off when a pilot ejected from an aircraft. Liberty Bell 7’s twenty-three-pound escape hatch was much lighter than the mechanically operated side hatch flown on Shepard’s mission. Seventy quarter-inch titanium bolts secured the explosive hatch to the spacecraft. A small hole was drilled into each bolt to provide a weak point. A mild detonating fuse was installed in the channel between the outer and inner hatch seal. To blow the hatch, Grissom would remove a protective cap on the detonator, pull a steel cotter safety pin, and push a plunger with a force of at least five pounds to activate a firing pin. The weakened bolts would then fail, blowing the hatch clear of the spacecraft after a recovery helicopter had hooked onto the spacecraft and lifted its sill above the water line. The new hatch could also be activated via an external lanyard that required at least forty pounds of pressure to shear the safety pin.
In the months before his flight, Grissom observed tests of the new exploding hatch designed by Honeywell to give Mercury pilots a quick exit in an emergency. NASA film footage shows Grissom inspecting the hatch on a test stand just before it was detonated. The pilot can be seen questioning test engineers while inspecting one of the titanium bolts. Everyone seemed satisfied the device would work.
However, there had been no additional “egress training” on how to activate the hatch after April 1961. The emphasis was on familiarizing the pilot with every spacecraft component and system and flying the mission; few considered the possibility of a problem after the spacecraft splashed down.
Rather than exiting, the overriding concern was shoehorning the astronaut into the cramped spacecraft and getting him safely off the launchpad. Grissom began practicing “spacecraft insertion” procedures on July 6, including a simulated countdown to T minus forty-five minutes. The simulation also was intended to collect physiological data. Additionally, the pilot practiced an emergency evacuation that included boarding an armored vehicle parked near the pad.
As launch day approached, the recovery forces also practiced. It was routine at the height of the Cold War to spot Russian surveillance ships off Cape Canaveral. “We would always find a Russian trawler and fly by it at deck height and take pictures and they were taking pictures of us,” Jim Lewis, pilot of the prime recovery helicopter, recalled 50 years later.13
In the months before launch, Grissom had flown 120 simulations of his flight profile in the Mercury procedures trainer. The simulations also included six additional practice flights involving flight controllers and capsule communicator Shepard. With testing and one last mission simulation completed in the spacecraft, the launch date was at last set for Tuesday, July 18.
In the run-up to the Mercury launches, the astronauts and pad engineers could not resist stashing mementos in their spacecraft. These would become “flown” items that could be distributed later as gifts. Decades later, they would be sold at auction, often for large sums. Unforeseen before his launch, the rolls of souvenir “Liberty” dimes and other mementos Grissom stuffed in the leg pocket of his pressure suit would act like a sea anchor at the end of his flight.
Procedures on launch day were timed to the minute. Thirty minutes for breakfast, a half hour for the final physical exam. To save time on the eve of a launch, the astronaut would shower and shave before retiring in the crew quarters on the balcony of Hangar S. Grissom was asleep by 5 p.m. on Monday, July 17. The first launch attempt was cancelled later that night when clouds moved in. The pilot was informed, and he yawned and went back to sleep.14
The second attempt on July 19 was scrubbed at T minus ten minutes. Grissom spent four hours in the spacecraft before the launch was postponed. Despite the delays—sweating out the countdown with the booster tanked up and pressurized, the hatch sealed—this was as close to the real thing as Grissom had yet experienced.
Recycling for another launch attempt required another forty-eight hours. Grissom used the delay to run with Glenn on the beach and to study maps of the expected view from his new window. These navigation points would be used during later orbital flights. With little else to do but wait, Grissom grabbed a fishing pole, headed to the beach, landed a four-pound bass, and released it.15
Grissom watched a TV western before turning in at about 9 p.m. He “slept like a brick” until the wee hours of July 21, woke up wondering about the time and the weather, and then was roused by the astronauts’ doctor, William Douglas. While he slept, flight directors had decided to beat the weather moving across the Gulf of Mexico by moving up the launch one hour to 7 a.m. No one told the cook, and Grissom’s breakfast was not ready at the appointed time. Instead, a physical exam was completed while Grissom’s steak and eggs were prepared.
Grissom suited up, a procedure that included attaching biomedical sensors to measure heart rate, respiration, and body temperature, among other vital signs. (These sensors picked up no abnormalities during the flight.) Among the lessons learned from Shepard’s flight was the undeniable fact that when you “had to go,” you went. Therefore, Grissom’s preparations included donning a makeshift urine collection contraption hastily rigged before the launch. It consisted of a panty girdle purchased in Cocoa Beach by NASA nurse Dee O’Hara and fitted out with a condom. Primitive, uncomfortable, but effective, the relieved pilot decided.
Grissom’s pressure suit also included several other modifications, including new glove connections and a convex mirror worn on the astronaut’s chest like a “heroes medal” that allowed a spacecraft camera to record instrument readings. New noise-filtering microphones also were inserted into Grissom’s helmet along with additional foam padding on the contour couch headrest. The padding along with a redesigned fairing for the spacecraft adapter clamp that connected the ship to the booster would help dampen the vibrations that had blurred Shepard’s vision.
Suited up and wired by the flight surgeons, Grissom boarded a van to Pad 5 at 4:15 a.m. As he walked to the elevator, the engineers applauded. They understood what Grissom was about to undertake. “This choked me up a little,” Grissom recalled later, knowing that “[he] had all those people pulling for [him].”16 The skies began to clear as he rode the gantry elevator up to the spacecraft. Grissom again was crammed into the spacecraft. The hatch was sealed. The countdown was held for half an hour at T minus forty-five minutes to inspect a misaligned hatch bolt. (McDonnell and NASA engineers decided sixty-nine bolts were sufficient to secure the hatch and didn’t replace the misaligned bolt.) Another short hold was required to turn off pad lights to avoid interference with launch telemetry.
During the long delays, Grissom worked crossword puzzles. The puzzle book was Sam Beddingfield’s idea: he wanted to keep the pilot focused during the lengthy launch countdown.
With the fickle Florida weather finally cooperating, the countdown resumed at T minus fifteen minutes. Nine minutes before launch, the gantry was moved away from the spacecraft. Grissom reported later that the movement of the service structure away from the Redstone produced the illusion of falling. Thirty-five seconds before liftoff, the power and communications umbilical was jettisoned from the spacecraft and the periscope retracted.
The countdown moved backward to zero. This was it. The eighty-three-foot-high rocket and spacecraft weighing 65,940 pounds stood alone on the concrete Pad 5, the booster’s super-cold alcohol and liquid oxygen propellants hissing and steaming in the July humidity. By today’s standards, the snake-infested launchpad was surprisingly Spartan.
The final seconds of the countdown continued uninterrupted. Grissom’s heartbeat had always been higher than the other astronauts. If anything, it meant he was ready. The pilot’s pulse rose during the spacecraft oxygen purge, a procedure Grissom’s future copilot John Young later admitted made his knees shake. At last, after two launch scrubs: ignition! The pilot’s pulse doubled. At 7:20 a.m. eastern daylight time, the Redstone’s engine lit, eventually generating more than 78,000 pounds of thrust as Liberty Bell 7 rose quickly on a thin stream of alcohol rocket exhaust.
Back in Virginia, Betty Grissom nearly missed her husband’s launch while preparing breakfast for a houseful of guests that included Rene Carpenter, Jo Schirra, and Marge Slayton. Marge’s husband, Deke, communicating with the astronaut from the blockhouse during the final two minutes of the countdown, confirmed liftoff. “Roger,” replied Grissom, “this is Liberty Bell 7, the [mission elapsed time] clock is operating.”17
Referencing the astronauts’ sidekick, the comedian Bill Dana of José Jiménez fame, capsule communicator Shepard immediately chimed in, “Loud and clear, Jose! Don’t cry too much.”
“Ok-ey doke,” replied Grissom, as if expecting the quip from his buddy and rival. The booster accelerated.
“OK, it’s a nice ride up to now,” the pilot reported eighteen seconds into the flight. Passing through a thin layer of broken clouds, MR-4 pitched over at a programmed rate of about one degree per second. A contrail soon appeared over the Florida skies behind the streaking rocket as G forces began to build. The view of the vehicle was growing smaller by the second. A vapor trail hung over the beach like a sign for about a minute. Liberty Bell 7 eventually reached a maximum velocity of 5,134 miles per hour. None of the test pilots back at Edwards Air Force Base had flown this fast. Despite losing a carbon vane used to steer the booster during its ascent, the NASA television feed reported, “Straight as an arrow.” The ride was much smoother than expected.
Two minutes into the flight, at an altitude of about eighteen miles, the pilot reported spotting a star as the sky turned pitch black. Grissom thought he had just won a bet with Glenn, but the star turned out to be Venus. His eyes back on the instrument panel, the pilot reported that his cabin pressure was holding at 5.5 pounds per square inch and his suit pressure was good. The Redstone’s spent Rocketdyne engine shut down at two minutes and twenty-three seconds, and the escape tower was jettisoned with a loud bang. Grissom suddenly went from high Gs to weightlessness—the sensation was akin to the driver of a speeding car going over a rise, except in space one does not come down. The tumbling sensation was momentarily unsettling.
Ten seconds after engine shutdown, the spacecraft separated from the booster and began turning blunt-end forward. In the eerie, silent blackness of space with its blinding sunlight, the weightless astronaut reported, “There’s a lot of stuff floating around up here,” including loose wires. He had left the earth.
For the Mercury astronauts, test pilots accustomed to mostly level flight, the sensation of the “wild blue yonder” abruptly turning pitch black was, to say the least, arresting. Malcolm Scott Carpenter, the second American to orbit the earth, provided perhaps the most vivid description of leaving the gravitational bonds of the planet. The astronauts would “see the altimeter reach seventy, eighty, then ninety thousand feet and yet know that [they were] still going straight up,” Carpenter recalled while riding an Atlas rocket into orbit aboard his Aurora 7 spacecraft in May 1962.18
As Liberty Bell 7 turned around, Grissom reported: “The sun is really bright.” For a few seconds, the hard-nosed test pilot was swept up by the wonder of spaceflight. “Oh boy!” the astronaut exclaimed while gazing out the spacecraft’s big window.
Capcom Shepard, whose view had been limited to a periscope and two ten-inch side portholes, was one of only two human beings who could appreciate what Grissom was describing. “I understand,” Shepard replied.
During approximately five minutes of weightlessness at the top of the spacecraft’s arc, Grissom’s checklist called for him to test a new manual controller used to adjust the ship’s attitude. The hand controller incorporated a rate stabilization system, a kind of power steering used to control spacecraft attitude by twisting a joystick. It also served as another way to control pitch, roll, and yaw thrusters.
Shepard’s checklist had been overloaded. Grissom’s was pared down to allow him more time to test the hand controller and make observations from his new window, including identifying landmarks for navigation references. The pilot steered his space ship. “I’m trying the yaw maneuver and I’m on the window” as a navigational reference point. Observing the stark beauty out the window, it was hard to concentrate. This was something that could never be simulated in the months of training. “It’s such a fascinating view out the window [and] you just can’t help but look out that way.” Grissom found the manual controls balky; the new rate command controller was more precise but consumed more fuel.
Grissom later told reporters, “I could see the sun shining through the window and I was so fascinated by this view out the window that I had difficulty concentrating on the instruments; I kept wanting to peek out the window.”19
The spacecraft lacked the velocity required to reach orbit, and Grissom soon had to set up his spacecraft for reentry and splashdown. “The spacecraft turnaround to retrofire attitude [roughly at apogee] is quite a weird maneuver to ride through,” he recalled. “At first, I thought the spacecraft might be tumbling out of control,” but instruments verified otherwise.20 To the pilot, the maneuver felt as if his backward flight had been reversed and he was now flying nose first. Roll attitude was balky and behind schedule (off by about fifteen degrees prior to retrofire attitude). As the turnaround started and the spacecraft pitched down for reentry, Grissom tried to spot stars out his window but feared being blinded by the brightest sun he’d ever seen.
Given Liberty Bell 7’s ballistic flight path (“what goes up must come down” still applied), the firing of the reentry rockets was designed to test their performance for the benefit of later orbital flights. After completing the retrofire sequence and observing two spent retrorockets pass his periscope view, Grissom took another quick peek out the window and spotted Cape Canaveral. “Now I can see the Cape and, oh boy, that is some sight!”
Liberty Bell 7 was now descending, and the ride was becoming loud and bumpy. “Gs are starting to build,” Grissom reported, the strain of the building gravitational forces of reentry evident in the astronaut’s baritone voice. As instructed, Grissom kept relaying the mounting G forces to ground controllers so NASA flight surgeons could gauge how he was coping. “Gs are building. We’re up to six, there’s nine, there’s … about … ten.” The growing pressure on Grissom’s body was evident in the transmissions as the ship oscillated while plunging through the upper atmosphere. He had experienced worse, though, “pulling more Gs” during training runs on the Johnstown centrifuge.
At 65,000 feet and dropping like a rock, Liberty Bell 7 plunged back into the atmosphere. Condensation, smoke, and debris from its heat shield streamed by Grissom’s window. The spacecraft began to roar as the heat shield dug into the upper atmosphere. On schedule, a small drogue parachute deployed at 21,000 feet caused some pulsating motion. Finally, “There’s the main [parachute], it’s reefed. Main chute is good,” he reported. “Rate of descent is coming down to, there’s forty feet per second.”
After the main parachute deployed at 12,300 feet, Grissom radioed: “You might make a note that there is one small hole in my chute. It looks like it’s about six inches by six inches—it’s sort of a—actually it’s a triangular rip, I guess.” The pilot kept an eye on the tear, but his rate of descent continued to slow satisfactorily to about twenty-eight feet per second. He began dumping his unused peroxide fuel prior to splashdown.
At about six thousand feet, he opened the faceplate on his helmet and attempted to install the lanyard pins that would keep his hatch from flying away when detonated. “I can’t get one door pin back in,” he reported at five thousand feet. “I’ve tried and tried and can’t get it back in.”
He then inquired about the location of the recovery forces. “Getting ready for impact here, you can see the water coming right on up.” Despite the small parachute tear, all was going exactly according to plan. The landing bag designed to cushion splashdown deployed with a clunk. The pilot removed his oxygen hose but left his suit ventilation hose attached. All the while he was relaying readings on the spacecraft panels. There was not a trace of concern in his voice; Gus Grissom sounded exactly like the test pilot he was.
Liberty Bell 7 hit the water “with a good bump” fifteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds after launch, at 7:35 a.m. EST. The impact was milder than expected. The spacecraft immediately tipped over, prompting the pilot now lying on his left side to release the main parachute that was dragging him across the surface. Upright again, he jettisoned the reserve parachute and activated rescue aids that included a green dye canister and a beacon that would help recovery forces get a fix on his location. A telescoping high-frequency communications antenna deployed automatically. The “whip” antenna would provide a link between the astronaut and the recovery helicopters.
Seconds after splashdown, one of the helicopters codenamed Card File 9 radioed it had spotted Liberty Bell 7 bobbing and rolling in the Atlantic swells. It would be over the ship in about thirty seconds. Liberty Bell 7’s reentry attitude was off target, coming in long and little north of the intended landing spot, about six miles from the recovery ship, the USS Randolph.
The main recovery helicopter, Hunt Club 1, piloted by Marine Lieutenant Jim Lewis and copilot Lieutenant John Reinhard, had begun moving into position, radioing Grissom to ask if he was ready to be picked up. Grissom instructed the crew: “latch on then give me a call and I’ll power down and blow the hatch, OK?”
As he readied himself and his spacecraft for recovery, Grissom could clearly see the water line was above Liberty Bell 7’s hatch sill. Despite hearing what he thought was a “gurgling noise” in the cabin, as had Shepard, Grissom found no signs of a water leak. There was no reason Grissom would have deliberately blown the hatch before Hunt Club 1 was over him.
Before arming the hatch, Grissom was to record spacecraft switch positions. That done, he checked his pressure suit and noted the lack of a snug seal on the neck dam, the result of having been stowed too long. Nevertheless, Grissom felt he was now in “very good shape.”21 Indeed, he was ahead of his closeout schedule. He was determined to be ready for pickup. The astronaut again opened his faceplate and disconnected the oxygen hose from his helmet, then unfastened it from his pressure suit and released his chest strap, lap belt, shoulder harness, knee straps, and his medical sensors. He checked his suit one last time but neglected to close its suit oxygen hose inlet.
In his desire to be ready for “egress” and recovery, Grissom decided to arm the explosive side hatch. To do this, he had to reach up, to his right and behind his helmet—a distance of between six and eight inches—to remove the protective cover and steel cotter safety pin from the hatch detonator.22 A knurled knob had to be turned and removed to uncover the plunger used to detonate the hatch. Once the pin was out, the hatch was armed and the plunger could be pushed. Five pounds of pressure was required to blow the hatch from inside the spacecraft, and the plunger had a nasty kick. It would leave powder burns on whoever hit it.
The decades-old controversy over whether Grissom accidently blew the hatch comes down to this: “The plunger that detonates the [explosive] bolts is so far out of the way that I would have to reach for it on purpose to hit it,” Grissom insisted. “This I did not do.”23
Eleven days before his flight, Grissom had observed a demonstration of the explosive hatch. The test went off without a hitch. The astronaut and the engineers were confident the hatch would work as advertised. Moreover, they were far more concerned about what was only the second American manned spaceflight than any problems after splashdown. Still, this would be the first time the hatch was used, and the recovery procedures were less rigorous—they had been rehearsed fewer times—than other phases of the mission.
It has since been asserted with the benefit of hindsight that Grissom got “out of sequence” on his checklist by removing the detonator cover and safety pin before the recovery helicopter hooked onto the spacecraft. But the reality in July 1961 was that practically no one was concerned about these final steps on the checklist, and everyone figured the hatch would blow off only when Grissom hit the plunger—on purpose.
As the astronaut insisted, and all later efforts to simulate the hatch incident showed, it was physically impossible to have accidently blown the hatch. But something did, something that was never duplicated in the later reenactments.
The hatch now armed and a Randall survival knife attached to the hatch removed and stowed as a souvenir,24 the astronaut prepared for Lewis and Reinhard to hover over the spacecraft. “When you blow the hatch, the collar will already be down there waiting for you,” Lewis radioed. “Ah, roger,” acknowledged Grissom in his last transmission from the spacecraft.25
Once over the ship, Reinhard, at the side door of Hunt Club 1, reached down with a long pole to cut the spacecraft’s 13.7-foot communications antenna deployed at splashdown. The whip antenna had to be cut to avoid contact with the recovery helicopter’s main rotor. A “cookie cutter” device used to snip the antenna was equipped with the equivalent of pruning shears. Once in place, it used a miniature explosive called a squib to sever the antenna. A “shepherd’s hook” would then be used to latch onto a strong Dacron loop on top of the bobbing spacecraft. Lewis would rev his engines to hoist the spacecraft until the hatch sill was above the water line. Then, and only then, Grissom would hit the plunger and blow the hatch. Just as Reinhard reached down to sever the whip antenna, Liberty Bell 7’s hatch unexpectedly blew off—and with it, Grissom’s hard-earned reputation as an unflappable test pilot.
The controversy over precisely what happened after Liberty Bell 7 hit the Atlantic Ocean has lingered for decades. “The persistent myth about the hatch can be viewed in epidemiological terms,” observed Kris Stoever, space historian and daughter of Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter. “It’s a kind of disinformation virus, resistant to vaccines.” The controversy was revived in 1979 with the publication of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, which contained a fictionalized account of Grissom’s flight.26 Besides pilot error, other possible explanations ranged from a faulty hatch design to landing bag straps catching the exterior lanyard designed to blow the hatch from the outside. The official NASA account of the incident concluded that Liberty Bell 7 sank “after a faulty circuit blew the hatch before help arrived.” But a faulty circuit appears to be only one of several possible causes.
Some of Wolfe’s astronaut sources concluded that Grissom had “screwed the pooch” when he lost his ship. A few spacecraft engineers thought Grissom, moving around in his bulky spacesuit in the cramped cabin bobbing in the ocean, accidently bumped the plunger mechanism. That scenario could not be duplicated in reenactments. Grissom later said he believed the loose exterior lanyard caused the premature hatch explosion if it caught in the landing bag straps, perhaps creating enough force to shear the firing pin and blow the hatch from the outside.
According to a postflight NASA investigation, other potential causes included the omission of an O-ring seal on the detonator plunger. This would have reduced the amount of pressure needed to fire the hatch. Another possibility was a vacuum, or “differential pressure,” in the plunger mechanism that could have allowed it to move by itself and blow the hatch after Grissom removed the cover and pulled the safety pin. Also considered by investigators were the chemical interactions of seawater on the hatch explosives and galvanic voltages generated when seawater came into contact with different metals used to construct the Mercury spacecraft.
Another electrical anomaly, electrostatic discharge between the Marine Corps Sikorsky HUS-1 Seahorse recovery helicopter and Grissom’s spacecraft, was considered as a cause by investigators.27 However, that scenario seems not to have been pursued very far. NASA investigators claimed they could not duplicate the hatch malfunction in dozens of postflight reenactments. Neither could they duplicate the exact weather conditions on the hot, humid morning of July 21, 1961 (Atlantic Ocean surface temperatures at the location where Liberty Bell 7 splashed down averaged at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit during the month of July in 1961). One unexamined possibility is that “prop wash” from the recovery helicopter hovering over the warm Atlantic generated sufficient static electric discharge to work its way down the “cookie cutter” attached to the pole used to sever the antenna. The static discharge may very well have detonated the armed hatch. That is what Lieutenant John Reinhard, the eyewitness closest to the spacecraft when the hatch detonated, believed.
Immediately after splashdown, Grissom radioed: “I have actuated the rescue aids, the reserve [reentry] chute has jettisoned … and the whip antenna should be up.” After Hunt Club 1 moved into position over the spacecraft, the copilot reached down to cut the antenna. Reinhard later told researcher Rick Boos that electrostatic discharge from Hunt Club 1’s rotor wash while flying over warm ocean water generated an “arc” that could have blown the hatch prematurely. Indeed, the conditions on July 21, 1961, were ideal for generating electrostatic discharge in the vortex of humid ocean air.
Hovering over the spacecraft that sticky July morning, the recovery helicopter’s prop wash was “supercharged.” Reinhard was approximately five feet above the spacecraft when the hatch suddenly blew. “When I touched the antenna [with the squib-actuated cutter], there was an arc,” Reinhard told Boos.28 The cutter’s primary and secondary squibs went off simultaneously. Static electricity generated by helicopter prop wash surged down the pole to the ungrounded spacecraft, likely detonating the hatch.
Reinhard told NASA investigators he was “preparing to cut the antenna whip (according to the new procedure) with a squib-actuated cutter at the end of a pole, when he saw the hatch cover fly off, strike the water at a distance of about five feet from the hatch, and then go skipping over the waves.”29 NASA footage of the recovery also shows the prime recovery helicopter hovering close to the Liberty Bell 7’s antenna, perhaps even touching it.30
The dangers posed by electrostatic discharge during helicopter water rescues are well understood. US Coast Guard procedures for dealing with electrostatic discharge, for example, state: “During helicopter hoist [operations], static electricity discharge is a common phenomenon between the surface (water, ground, or vessel) and the hoisting device. Over open water, this boundary layer tends to be more conducive to static discharge release than over land.” Coast guard helicopter rescue procedures are unambiguous: “Do not touch the rescue device as it is being lowered! Allow it to touch the vessel first! STATIC ELECTRICITY.”31
Similarly, US Navy guidelines dictate: “The helicopter cable or cargo hook must be grounded to discharge this electricity.” It continues, a “grounding wand is designed to protect ground personnel from static electrical shock when working with all helicopters.”32
In the instant Reinhard made contact with the antenna, Liberty Bell 7’s hatch blew off and shot across the water. Still photos from NASA recovery films confirm Reinhard’s account. The hatch blows as the antenna cutter contacts the spacecraft and before Lewis could pull its windowsill above the water line. The next thing Reinhard saw was Grissom’s head as the astronaut bolted through the narrow hatch into the water.
An untried and perhaps faulty hatch design, inadequate egress training, and Reinhard’s eyewitness account of what happened during the recovery attempt, an account confirmed by NASA footage of the recovery, points to electrostatic discharge as the likely cause of the premature hatch explosion. The astronaut was lying on his couch awaiting pickup as disaster struck.
His ship now flooding, Grissom somehow managed to toss his helmet out and disconnect his pressure suit from the spacecraft before wedging his way through the narrow hatch into the water. It all happened so quickly, the astronaut said later, that he could not remember exactly how he got out. Had he not undone his harnesses and other restraints, it is likely Grissom would have gone down with his ship. In his extreme haste, Grissom never had a chance to close his suit’s oxygen inlet valve. The resulting loss of buoyancy from the valve and a leaky neck dam added to the swamped astronaut’s struggles to stay afloat for nearly five minutes. Once in the water, Lewis and Reinhard focused on salvaging the spacecraft, unaware that Grissom was sinking. The rolls of “Liberty” dimes and other souvenirs in his pocket now weighed him down.
The pilot remembered “the only two moves I remember making were tossing my helmet off and grabbing the, eh, [right side of the] instrument panel and pulling myself out. I only remember grabbing the instrument panel; I don’t even remember going out the door.”33 Once in the water, Grissom battled the rotor wash generated by four helicopters, two marine recovery ships, and two navy choppers photographing the recovery.
After the hatch blew, Reinhard grabbed the “shepherd’s hook” and succeeded at the last possible moment in making the connection to the loop on top of the spacecraft, which was now underwater. Lewis immediately attempted to drain the landing bag in hopes of reducing the spacecraft’s weight. The flooded ship now weighed about five thousand pounds, a thousand pounds beyond the helicopter’s lifting capacity. If the landing bag could be emptied, there was still a chance Liberty Bell 7 could be retrieved and carried back to the Randolph.
Just then, the “chip detector light” flashed on Lewis’s panel, indicating—erroneously, it turned out—there was metal in the helicopter engine’s oil sump. “That’s not a good thing for engines,” Lewis observed.34 The light meant he had about five minutes of power remaining before “things [would] really start to go bad.”
Lewis said he maintained maximum power for about four minutes and forty-five seconds, with oil pressure dropping and the cylinder head temperature rising. He finally ordered Reinhard to cut Liberty Bell 7 loose. He then radioed the backup helicopter: “Come and get Gus, I’ve got a sick bird!”
In those four and a half minutes, which seemed like an eternity, Grissom was fighting the prop wash while doing all he could to help save his ship. Recovery footage shows the astronaut swimming toward—not away from—the swamped spacecraft, guiding Reinhard as he struggled to latch onto it. The footage shows Grissom bobbing in the swells while guiding Reinhard’s efforts to secure the spacecraft. Grissom confirmed that the recovery line had hooked on to the sinking spacecraft. He then signaled with a “double thumbs up” that Reinhard had succeeded as the spacecraft sank below the water line. All this time, Grissom managed to stay afloat as air was seeping from his pressure suit through the open oxygen inlet and his neck dam. Grissom was soon fighting to keep his head above water. Engaged in a tug-of-war with the sinking ship, Lewis was too preoccupied to notice Grissom’s plight.
After nearly five minutes and warning lights flashing, Lewis ended the tug-of-war. He radioed for backup and instructed Reinhard not to lower a horse collar. Both believed Grissom’s pressure suit would keep him afloat; neither realized air was leaking from it and the astronaut was in serious trouble. With no rescue sling in sight, the exhausted astronaut was getting angry.
The recovery line was cut and Liberty Bell 7 sank. Lewis pulled away and made for the Randolph. Another recovery helicopter moved in and at last lowered a horse collar. After being dunked twice more, Grissom was plucked from the ocean. He slipped on the collar backward. By now, he was utterly unconcerned with procedures or appearances. Aboard the backup recovery helicopter, the waterlogged astronaut immediately donned a life vest and asked for something to blow his nose with. Nearly drowned, his only concern now was reaching the primary recovery ship.
Grissom had managed somehow to keep his nose above water; NASA had survived its first emergency in manned spaceflight. Spacecraft recovery procedures were quickly revised. Future Mercury astronauts detonated their spacecraft hatches from the safety of a carrier deck. John Glenn and Wally Schirra both sustained minor hand injuries from the recoil of the hatch detonator. Grissom sustained no such injury, indicating that he never touched the plunger.
Contrary to popular accounts of Grissom’s suborbital flight, most notably The Right Stuff and the cartoonish 1983 film version of the book, those who knew the pilot and his spacecraft understood that the pilot had not panicked nor had he intentionally pushed the plunger that detonated Liberty Bell 7’s hatch. Having just flown a 302-mile ballistic arc, pulling more than eleven Gs in a fiery descent and splashdown, safely back on the earth, the astronaut was, if anything, exhilarated, not panicked, as he sat on his couch waiting to be picked up. None of his transmissions after splashdown indicated panic. The only doubt in the astronaut’s mind was whether to stow his survival knife as a souvenir.
The hatch incident unfairly tagged the second American in space as a screw up. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the “hatch crap” would dog Grissom for the rest of his life.35 The second-guessing that followed would steel him in his dealings with NASA managers, the media, and his fellow astronauts in the coming competitions to command orbital flights and the first moon landing.
During a humiliating postflight press conference on July 22 at the Starlite Motel in Cocoa Beach, Grissom provided skeptical reporters with his version of what had happened: “I was just [lying] there minding my own business, and POW! the hatch went. I looked up and I saw nothing but blue sky and water starting to come in over the sill. So I tossed my helmet off and my first thought was, ‘Get out!’ The capsule actually sank and went below the water … and so I was getting water in the suit and getting lower and lower in the water all the time, and having to fight quite hard to stay afloat.”36
As always, Grissom was straightforward while masking his growing anger at the doubters in the press corps. Keenly aware that the hatch controversy could damage his future flying prospects, the astronaut was direct and succinct with the reporters, calmly describing his actions in the split seconds after the hatch blew. He had been operating on instinct, and the objective was to survive, keep his head above water, and avoid drowning in front of the entire world.
In his detailed account of the mission for the record, Grissom recalled pondering whether to take the survival knife as a souvenir when “[he] heard the hatch blow—the noise was a dull thud.” Remembering the egress procedures, he continued, “I lifted the helmet from my head and dropped it, reached for the right side of the instrument panel, and pulled myself through the hatch.”37
Near the end of the postflight press conference, a reporter asked: “Did you feel you were in danger at any time?” Without hesitation Grissom replied, “Well, I was scared a good portion of the time. I guess that’s a pretty good indication.” “You were what?” the reporter persisted. “Scared. OK?” Grissom shot back, turning to NASA boss Robert Gilruth on his right as they both nervously laughed. But the astronaut was seething inside while being skewered by the reporters.
A NASA photo shows a grim Betty Grissom and her sons in the audience observing helplessly. What should have been a joyous recounting of an otherwise successful spaceflight instead turned out to be another in a series of postflight ordeals for the astronaut and his family. The expression on Betty’s face seems to be saying to NASA officials on stage “You owe me.”
Surviving America’s first space emergency was one thing. The indignity of having to defend his actions with little or no backing from his NASA superiors was another, a reality that would color Grissom’s view of the press, and perhaps his NASA bosses, for the remainder of his life.
As network news anchor Walter Cronkite noted later, the reticent astronaut faced the mandatory news conferences “with considerable more trepidation than the flights themselves, and his response to questions was cryptic and laconic. It was this that undoubtedly contributed to considerable misunderstanding between the press and Gus which followed the loss of Grissom’s Mercury capsule after the second successful suborbital flight.”38
Grissom’s fellow astronauts rushed to his defense. They and several NASA engineers insisted that he was further exonerated by the fact that his hand had not been bruised by the plunger’s recoil, as was Schirra’s when he blew the hatch aboard the recovery ship after his Sigma 7 flight in October 1962. “Every time the astronaut hit that damned plunger he got a wound on his wrist. Gus did not have a wound on his wrist,” Flight Director Christopher Columbus Kraft repeated in a 1999 interview.39
“The recoil on that plunger cut through the glove of my spacesuit and cut into my hand,” added Schirra. When Grissom met Schirra after his orbital flight, “he had the biggest smile on his face when [he] showed him this cut hand because there was not a mark on his body after his problem with his hatch. So he couldn’t have hit it with an elbow or a leg or something. He would have had a terrible bruise. “I said, ‘Gus, look at my hand, it really kind of hurts.’ He knew exactly what I was telling him.”
Robert Thompson, the Project Mercury recovery chief, insisted the absence of a wound proved nothing. “That makes a good story but that’s really a bunch of nonsense,” Thompson asserted fifty years after Grissom’s flight. “It’s kind of like you’re shooting a shotgun. You shoot a shotgun and put it against your eye, the side of your head, pull the trigger, it’ll cut you. And, yes, any time you shoot a shotgun you should have a bloody eye. But if you put the shotgun against the fat of your arm and shoot it you won’t have a bloody eye.”
Nevertheless, Grissom and the engineers with a thorough understanding of his Mercury spacecraft believed the most likely explanation for the premature hatch release was the exterior lanyard designed to blow the hatch from the outside. Few considered static electricity a likely cause, except for Reinhard, the person closest to the spacecraft when the hatch blew. Reinhard was convinced the arc created when his cookie cutter device touched the spacecraft had blown the hatch.
Indeed, NASA had experienced catastrophic accidents involving static electricity in the earliest days of spaceflight, at a time when engineers frequently operated blind. According to McDonnell Aircraft engineer and Project Mercury “Pad Fuehrer” Guenter Wendt:40
We did many things right, but we also goofed many things. The biggest scare I had was what we call the spin test facility where one satellite [undergoing testing] blew up and killed four people. What made it blow up turned out to be static electricity from the plastic the thing was covered with. And when I heard that, I found out what plastic it was. It was exactly the same plastic we covered our escape rockets with. So, you see, we didn’t know that a little static, a spark from the static, can set off an igniter. That’s a thing that you learned, plus the fact, in the very early days when we started running Mercury the facilities were rather primitive.41
Then there was Grissom’s state of mind at the end of his flight. Wolfe implied that Grissom’s elevated heart and respiratory rates indicated panic that somehow led the astronaut to blow the hatch too soon. (It should be noted that Grissom, broiling and seasick, his faceplate punctured after a rough reentry and splashdown at the end of his Gemini mission in March 1965, refused to open the hatches until navy frogmen had attached a floatation device.)
Robert Moser, a NASA flight surgeon on loan from the army during the Mercury and Gemini programs, worked closely with Grissom at the NASA tracking station in Hawaii. “I never believed that Gus panicked and hit the chicken switch,” Moser wrote in a 2002 memoir. “He was just too cool for such foolishness.”42
The proof of Moser’s assertion is that Grissom survived a potentially deadly sequence of events that no one had anticipated. Having somehow squeezed out of the spacecraft as seawater poured in, Grissom barely had a chance to roll up the neck ring on his suit designed to keep him dry and buoyant. Normally, this and the fact that the Mercury pressure suit contained enough oxygen for buoyancy would have been sufficient to keep an astronaut comfortably afloat in the ocean. But Grissom either forgot or never had a chance to close an oxygen valve that also allowed air to escape.
Grissom finally was plucked from the sea by a backup recovery helicopter responding to Lewis’s distress call. During his initial debriefing with Thompson and Koons, the astronaut remembered looking up and seeing recovery helicopter copilot George Cox: “That was really comforting because George and I had done most of the training for this.” Among the most enduring images of the flight of Liberty Bell 7 was the silhouette of a sodden Grissom hanging backward in the horse collar as Cox hauled him aboard the backup recovery helicopter. The image would later be used to great effect in the film version of Wolfe’s book.
A mere thirty-five minutes had elapsed from liftoff until the moment Grissom was at last safely aboard the Randolph. Back at the Cape, Gilruth asked Recovery Chief Thompson what the hell had happened after splashdown. Thompson said he didn’t know but would leave immediately for the Grand Bahamas where Grissom was taken for debriefing, find out, and report back.
Five decades after the flight of Liberty Bell 7, Thompson remembered it this way. Arriving at the barracks where Grissom would be debriefed:
I said, “Gus, come with me,” and we went into a building there that had a little side room, it had two twin beds in it. Gus sat down on one bed and I sat down on the other. And he took his boot off and poured some water out.
I said, “Gus, tell me now step by step what went on out there.” He said, “Well everything was going fine, the flight went well, parachute opened, I was in the water. I decided to get everything ready so I could be sure I had everything on time. So I took my helmet off and then put it back on, then I took the cap off the door activation mechanism and pulled the pin but I didn’t push the plunger in.”43
Thompson asked Grissom to repeat what happened: “He said, ‘I just wanted to be ready. I took the cap off, pulled the retaining pin, but I didn’t push the plunger.’ I said, ‘OK Gus, that’s fine.’”
Thompson also spoke with Lewis and Reinhard before returning to the Cape about 10 p.m. By then, he knew the postflight celebrations would be under way, and the biggest party would be at the Starlite Motel with its distinctive roadside sign that included a soaring rocket. Thompson found Gilruth at the bar.
In the parking lot, Thompson told the NASA director:
Bob, it’s pretty clear to me that Gus got ahead of the checklist. He took the cap off [the detonator] and pulled the retaining pin before the helicopter got hooked on and got everything stable. And, no, he didn’t push the plunger in but he’s sitting in a small capsule, the plunger is right at his shoulder, it’s blowing and rocking around … easiest thing in the world for him to touch that thing and push it in—I’m not even sure he even had to push it in because once you took the cap off and pull the safety pin, the only thing that held the rod that went in and out were two O-rings. So I’m not even sure that the bobbing of the capsule wouldn’t have ultimately worked that plunger in toward that firing pin.
In retrospect, Thompson emphasized: “Our training program was not as solid back then as it should have been. The checklist was not as disciplined as it should have been. And Gus was just trying to do a good job and be ready. And he didn’t quite understand enough about the mechanism. Otherwise he would never have taken the cap off and never pulled that pin until we were ready for the [hatch] to blow…. He was just trying to do a good job.”44
Gilruth immediately decided to have spacecraft manufacturer McDonnell Aircraft conduct tests to eliminate a “sneak circuit” in the firing mechanism, that is, an unexpected electrical pathway that could have caused the blown hatch. Soon to be named the first director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Gilruth was looking for a way to quickly resolve the hatch issue so he could move to the next step: John Glenn’s orbital flight.
Satisfied that Grissom hadn’t intentionally hit the plunger, investigators then turned to the question of how exactly the armed hatch detonated. There were several possible explanations, including Thompson’s assertion that waves tossing the spacecraft alone could have activated the detonator.
Sam Beddingfield, a NASA engineer and Grissom’s buddy from the astronaut’s test pilot days at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, worked the hardest to find the cause. Grissom participated in tests in which he intentionally bumped the plunger, failing to blow the hatch.
After studying the parachutes, the engineers’ focus turned to the external release lanyard. It was held in place by a small shingle secured by a single screw and two clips. During the harsh reentry, the screw may have popped loose, causing both clips to let go. The suspicion was the shingle had flown off the hatch handle and ripped the chute, causing the small tear Grissom reported during his descent. After splashdown, the exterior hatch handle extended by a cable assembly may have caught in the landing bag straps. As the spacecraft moved up and down in the swells, the cord could have pulled against the handle with sufficient force to detonate the explosive hatch, Beddingfield concluded.
During their initial debriefing in the Grand Bahamas, Koons said he and Thompson decided to reverse the order of their questions. Koons and Thompson asked the exhausted, dispirited astronaut—“he was pretty tired and pretty uncomfortable”—to begin the debriefing at the end of the flight. NASA engineers used cue cards and a tape recorder during debriefings to help the amped-up astronauts collect their thoughts. “Gus, help us out here,” Thompson recalled asking. “Would you mind doing the last card first?”
Grissom explained again that after splashdown he was “moving around, getting things stowed and getting ready to get out.” He then removed the cover on the primer and pulled the safety pin.
“The way that thing’s configured, there’s a ring around that button, and it just doesn’t seem possible that he made contact with that,” Koons concluded. “Certainly, based on his debrief, he certainly didn’t do it deliberately, and it’s hard to see how he could have possibly done it accidentally, because the way that button is down inside a ring, a cylindrical protector, you have to be very deliberate about it to make that thing go off.”45
Others, including Maxime Faget, the chief designer of the Mercury spacecraft, nevertheless clung to the belief that Grissom had indeed blown the hatch. Perhaps it was unintentional. Schirra, Carpenter, and Grissom’s friends at the Cape, such as Wendt and Beddingfield, defended him to the hilt.
The veteran Life magazine photographer Ralph Morse, who earned the Mercury astronauts’ trust through his sheer tenacity, was among those who also defended Grissom. The hatch incident “hurt him very, very much. It’s easy to blame the astronaut, but that wasn’t Gus. Gus was much too great an engineer, and too serious a pilot,” Morse concluded after observing his subject in ways few had.46
Later, too late for Grissom to undo the damage to his reputation, it became clear that the Mercury hatch was poorly designed and not sufficiently tested. Robert Voas, a navy psychologist and member of NASA’s first Space Task Group, described the hatch incident as a “human engineering failure.” The escape hatch had been developed too late for Shepard’s flight and, it turned out, was not yet fully wrung out for Grissom’s.
The hatch “had been developed so rapidly that there had not been much time to train on it or to test it,” Voas concluded. “So from the human engineering standpoint, we had a not optimally designed hatch, and the result was that Gus hit it inadvertently and it blew when it wasn’t supposed to, and we lost that spacecraft.”47
Stephen Clemmons, a North American Aviation technician who would play a central role in the Apollo 1 fire in January 1967, explained: “There was a major design change on the emergency hatch system before the flight of John Glenn. I talked to one of the McDonnell engineers on Mercury and he admitted that it was a defective design. A new fail safe system was incorporated that would only fire when the astronaut really meant for it to happen.”48 He added, “We now know that the system on Mercury had a flaw and if it hadn’t happened with Gus, it would have happened sooner or later, and later would have been disastrous.”49 Regardless, Grissom had to deal with the consequences, much like any captain who had lost his ship. The recovery fiasco would shape the public’s perception of the second American in space, particularly given the avalanche of press coverage the incident received, including the astronaut’s denial on the front page of the New York Times.50 What is seldom remembered is that Grissom otherwise flew a flawless mission. His flight showed that the Mercury capsule was indeed space-worthy and that an astronaut could fly the spacecraft—he was more than just a passenger.
Grissom’s near drowning also highlighted shortcomings in the Mercury training program, particularly during the recovery phase. Those training mistakes would be fixed, just as the tragic lessons of the Apollo 1 fire six-and-a-half years later would put the lunar landing program back on track.
The flight of Liberty Bell 7 ultimately illustrated Grissom’s notion of the test pilot–turned-astronaut’s role in the early days of the Space Race. The Mercury spacecraft may have been “man-rated,” but it still needed to be wrung out in flight. This Grissom did do, thereby laying the foundation for future US space successes. Shepard and Glenn, the other members of the “Astronaut First Team,” would be celebrated. Grissom would spend the rest of his life burying the myth that he was the “hard luck” astronaut.
Those who knew astronaut Grissom best understood immediately that, having just ridden a rocket into space and descended at supersonic speed to the ocean, it made no sense that he would suddenly panic at the end of a successful mission. “Some people are concerned about getting the hatch and proving one way or another what made it blow,” Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter observed after Liberty Bell 7 was recovered in 1999. “It isn’t important to me. I’m convinced that Gus was not responsible.”51
Others who worked with Grissom and had less reason to circle the wagons in his defense said much the same. “Occasionally, maybe two or three times, I went down [from the mountain in Hawaii] with him and we went to the bar … and we’d have a few drinks and sit around and chat. I got to know him pretty well and I really got to like him,” recalled Moser, the army flight surgeon. Moser remembered “a regular guy. He worked hard and he played hard.”
To Moser, Grissom was unflappable. “When you got to know him, you realized [the prospect of Grissom panicking] was all baloney. He was just a cool guy…. He was not the kind of guy who would panic.”52
Aboard the Randolph, a World War II carrier that had launched air raids against Tokyo, the waterlogged astronaut spoke briefly by radiophone with President Kennedy. Seeking to highlight another American space success, Kennedy called from the Oval Office and finally reached Grissom over a poor ship-to-shore connection. It is unclear exactly what the president knew that morning about Grissom’s near drowning. “Captain, I want to congratulate you,” Kennedy declared after both men could finally hear each other. “I’ve been watching your flight on TV here and I’m delighted that you got through alright.” Grissom immediately downplayed his rescue, reminding the president of the fact that “we lost the capsule” and that, according to a hard-to-decipher audio tape of the conversation, “I’m shattered a bit.”
Grissom later wrote about the botched recovery: “[It] was especially hard for me, as a professional pilot. In all of my years of flying—including combat in Korea—this was the first time that my aircraft and I had not come back together. In my entire career as a pilot, Liberty Bell was the first thing I had ever lost.”53 Kennedy would have none of it, again emphasizing: “It was a wonderful job and we really are delighted that it worked out well for you.”
Grateful for the encouraging words and happy to be alive, Grissom told the president he hoped his flight would provide the administration another boost in its effort to sell the space program: “I hope it does something for you, like Commander Shepard said.” This was a reference to the domestic political opening Shepard’s successful flight in May had provided, allowing Kennedy to press Congress to fund a manned lunar landing “before this decade is out.”
“Oh, well, it’s a big help, I’ll tell you that,” the president responded before signaling the end of the call.
Kennedy closed with a vague promise of “seeing you sometime soon.” But there would be no White House ceremony for the Grissom family, no private audience for Betty with the first lady, none of the VIP treatment Shepard and Glenn received after their flights. Grissom would not see the president again until after Glenn’s historic orbital flight in February 1962. “Good luck, captain,” Kennedy said before signing off. The congratulatory call lasted less than a minute.54
Later that day, Kennedy signed into law a NASA budget bill that would significantly expand the space agency’s spending authority, and with it the American space effort. In brief remarks before signing the measure, Kennedy praised Grissom’s courage and noted that his flight was conducted, unlike the Russians, in full view of the world.
The legislation would boost NASA’s budget for research and development along with funding the construction of the Apollo infrastructure in Houston and Cape Canaveral. Kennedy claimed there was now “overwhelming support” in Congress for the American manned space program, “committed as we all are to seeing to it that the United States occupies an important position in the race into the far reaches of space.” The political reality was that the administration had won a round in the budget skirmish, but congressional support would remain something less than “overwhelming.”55
Kennedy went on to say, “It is especially fitting that this bill should be signed on the day that our second astronaut, Captain Virgil Grissom, who I spoke to this morning after he had made his successful flight—I think it is most important that we should have once again this emphasis on the leadership which our fellow Americans are showing in this field, their courage and also the strong scientific support that they’ve received from the entire American scientific community.”56 The president made no direct reference in his signing statement to the fact that Grissom’s ship had been lost, instead stressing that his flight had been “made before the eyes of the watching world with all the hazards that that entails.”
Whenever the Mercury astronauts gathered at the White House for later postflight celebrations, photos showed most of the astronauts standing up front, next to President Kennedy. Perhaps because he was the shortest of the group, Grissom often is hard to spot in films and photos. He was hanging back, staying as far from the limelight as possible. “I didn’t give a good goddamn about the White House,” he said in the weeks before his death. “But my boys did. Betty did.”57 These images became a metaphor for Grissom’s entire career as an astronaut. He was an engineer, a test pilot. Public relations were a chore, something to be endured.
Grissom was now also an explorer, making the first true Earth observations of the Mercury program. Little could be seen through the spacecraft periscope, but when the horizon came into view through a relatively large centerline window, “the sight was truly breathtaking,” he remembered, particularly since he could detect the curvature of the earth.58 “I could make out brilliant gradations of color, the blue of the water, the white of the beaches and the brown of the land.”59 Indeed, the coastline looked just like the maps.
Grissom spent much of the rest of 1961 licking his wounds, indulging in a bout of self-pity in the aftermath of his flight and “all that investigation bullshit” he was forced to endure over the blown hatch.60 Still, he was now an authentic “astronaut,” a test pilot who had climbed on top of a rocket, rode it into space, and survived. Grissom would emerge from the hatch ordeal tougher, wiser, and utterly single-minded. Glenn orbited the earth three times in February 1962, instantly becoming an American hero. Project Mercury would end in May 1963. A new batch of nine astronauts was introduced the previous fall, all hotshot test pilots, most with engineering degrees. There would be a scramble for missions to fly a new two-man spacecraft called Gemini. The Americans would use this new ship to catch and surpass the daring Russians. Emerging from his funk, Grissom threw himself into the design, the guts of the new machine.
His fortune would soon change. More hard work and circumstances would combine to hand Grissom command of the maiden flight of a new and splendid ship. This one he would not lose.