Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (44 page)

But even in the aftermath of Grissom’s tainted flight, Congress agreed to Kennedy’s funding requests. Their vote of confidence would be vindicated by the next astronaut flight, but not before a string of troubling delays.

For John Glenn, being chosen as number three instead of number one would become a blessing. The unexpected booty of losing his battle to become the first man to blast off from earth was that he’d become the first American to orbit the earth.

Shepard had hoped to gain the first orbital flight for himself. Initially, NASA planned to require each astronaut to complete a suborbital flight like Shepard’s before being considered for an orbital flight. That meant Shepard, as the first suborbital astronaut, had also been in line to become the first orbital astronaut. But, ironically, Kennedy’
s enthusiasm over Shepard’s flight inspired NASA to ditch that prerequisite and proceed right from Grissom’s flight to the orbit. John Glenn was next in line.

Delay followed delay as Glenn’s flight was bumped from December 1961 to January 1962, then February. Some days it was technical, some days it was the weather, but Glenn spent many hours across a half dozen mornings lying anxiously inside his capsule only to have the launch canceled. The delays frustrated Henri Landwirth, too—he had baked a nine-hundred-pound, capsule-shaped cake, and had to rig up an air-conditioned truck so that it wouldn’t spoil.

Glenn’s luck finally changed the morning of February 20. When he knew there would be no further delays, Glenn called his wife, Annie, who was home with their two kids in Arlington, Virginia. “Don’t be scared,” Glenn told her. “Remember, I’m just going down to the corner store to get a pack of gum.”

Glenn had said in a press conference three years earlier that he wanted to be an astronaut “because it’s the nearest to heaven I’
ll ever get.” But before the day was out, he’d come much closer to heaven than he would have preferred.

“Godspeed,” Scott Carpenter radioed his friend as he blasted off from the Cape.

Twelve minutes after liftoff, Glenn and his capsule,
Friendship7
(named by a Glenn family vote), soared weightlessly above the African coast. He pulled open an equipment pouch, shut tight with a new invention called Velcro, and a little stuffed mouse on a tether floated up toward his face. Glenn knew right away which prankster was responsible. José Jiménez often commiserated with the “leetle mice” NASA sometimes put into test rockets. Stashing one aboard was Shepard’s response to the handball sign and centerfold that Glenn had pinned up on the dash of his capsule.

During the first two of the three scheduled orbits around the globe, Glenn transmitted eloquent dispatches as he described beautiful sunsets, brilliant blue bands on the horizon, and mysterious luminescent yellow particles outside his window, which Glenn called “fireflies.” (At the time, Glenn withstood some ridicule about his “fireflies”—“What did they say, John?” someone asked—but future flights would determine them to be bits of fuel vapor turned to frost.)

At seventeen thousand miles an hour, Glenn was traveling more than three times faster than Shepard had; he was scheduled to be weightless for more than four hours, compared to Shepard’s five minutes. But as Glenn passed behind the earth on his third and final orbit, Shepard got up from his capsule communicator’s seat and walked over to flight director Chris Kraft to break some bad news. Another NASA official thought Shepard seemed “numb and in a state of disbelief.”

A flashing “segment 51” signal from
Friendship 7
indicated serious trouble ahead. The capsule’s blunt end was covered with a thick heat shield capable of withstanding the fiery friction during the capsule’s reentry. After reentering the atmosphere, the heat shield would drop a few feet below the base of the c
apsule, connected by an accordionlike landing bag—a skirt that extended from the capsule’s bottom to cushion the impact at sea. A “segment 51” signal meant that the landing bag might already have deployed. Even worse, the signal might mean that the heat shield had come loose.

Shepard told Kraft that he didn’t believe the signal. He thought it was a faulty circuit—a mistake. But this wasn’t a time to simply hope for the best—he had to be sure. So Shepard radioed one of the engineers and asked the obvious question: “What’s going to happen when we cut the retro-pack loose?”

The retro-pack was a canister of small rockets clamped onto the heat shield at the base of the capsule. The purpose of these small rockets was to slow down Glenn’s backward-flying capsule, allowing it to drop into the earth’s gravitational pull. Once those rockets were fired, the retro-pack was supposed to automatically separate from the capsule and be discarded. If the heat shield wasn’t perfectly intact, the engineers feared, the separation of the retro-pack could break the heat shield off completely. However, if the retro-pack was kept against the heat shield during the capsule’s reen
try instead of being automatically cut loose, it might hold the crucial heat shield in place. Shepard asked question after question—was he
sure?
was he
positive?—
before finally telling the engineer to find the best way to “hold the goddamn thing.”

Dozens of engineers and scientists at the Cape, in Houston, and in St. Louis, home of the capsule’s maker, McDonnell Aircraft, frantically dove into solving the problem. Shepard and Slayton talked to McDonnell’s engineers. NASA’s techies pulled out diagrams and blueprints, searching for an explanation. Tension rolled like a sickness across Mission Control—“We were in a state of shock,” one top NASA official said later—and within minutes more than a hundred people were working desperately toward a solution. The engineers tossed off their own theories on the cause of the “segment 51.” Some agreed
with Shepard that it
was a faulty signal. But they all agreed that even if the odds were minuscule that Glenn’s landing bag had actually deployed and had dislodged the heat shield, it was too risky to allow Glenn to make a normal reentry.

Shepard and Kraft decided not to tell Glenn just yet. There was nothing he could do about it, so why worry him? Instead, they’d try to fix the problem from the ground. Shepard got on the radio and talked to radio operators stationed at various points around the globe, telling them to carefully ask Glenn about his landing bag. Over the Indian Ocean Glenn received the first such message:
Make sure the landing bag switch is in the off position.
He checked. It was. But when Glenn was over Australia they asked again about the landing bag switch, and also if he heard any banging noises. At fi
rst Glenn thought they might be concerned about the source of the “fireflies,” but as he flew over the South Pacific and they asked once more about the landing bag and whether he’d heard any flapping, a “prickle of suspicion” crawled over him, as he wrote in his memoir.

Meanwhile, Shepard and the crew at Mission Control had settled on a solution, albeit one that was not unanimously supported. Shepard and the others had decided that, if the heat shield was in fact loose, leaving the retro-pack clamped on offered the best chance of keeping the heat shield in place. But it was a dangerous call, because the retro-pack wasn’t designed to survive the fiery reentry and was sure to disintegrate once temperatures climbed toward three thousand degrees. And if the heat shield
wasn’t
loose, it was possible that burning chunks of the retro-pack could damage the shield
or rip it loose.

“We want to be damn sure on this one,” Shepard told one NASA technician. “Because if that [landing] bag comes down, it’s disastrous, whereas it’s not disastrous if we make a reentry with the retros on.”

Chris Kraft at one point screamed at an en
gineer to give him a straight yes-or-no answer: “Either you give me a decision or I’m going to make one myself.”

Finally, while passing over Hawaii, Glenn was told about the “segment 51” signal, and he realized in a split second why they’d been asking about the landing bag. They were afraid the heat shield was loose—and they’d been keeping this information from him for quite some time. As he crossed high above Texas, Glenn began to prepare for reentry, and fired the retro-rockets that began to slow his capsule enough to be pulled down by earth’s gravity. Even as Glenn neared the crucial reentry stage, NASA was still arguing about how, exactly, they were going to solve the problem.

After firing the retro-rockets, Glenn prepared for the strapped-on retro-pack to be jettisoned. But now NASA had finally made its decision, and another disturbing message came through Glenn’s headset, sent from a radio operator at Corpus Christi, Texas: “We are recommending that you leave the retro package on through the entire reentry. . . . Do you read?” Now Glenn wanted answers.

“What is the reason for this?” he asked. “Do you have any reason?”

“No,” came the response. “Not at this time . . . We are recommending that the retro-package not, I say again,
not
be jettisoned.”

Even without an explanation, Glenn knew what was up. He later complained of the “cat-and-mouse game they were playing with the information,” but no one needed to tell him he was flying toward a scenario in which he might soon “burn to nothing.” With just seconds to reentry, Shepard finally explained what the ground crews had spent the past ninety minutes keeping from Glenn, even though he had figured it out. “We are not sure whether or not your landing bag has deployed,” Shepard said. “We feel it is far safer to reenter with the retro-package on. We see no difficulty at this time in that t
ype of reentry. Over.”

Out of all the tests on the capsule, leaving on the retro-pack
had never been tested. No one had ever envisioned a reason. Leaving it on was, at best, an educated guess. But there was simply no time left to mull it over any longer. Glenn, at the end of three scheduled orbits, was running low on fuel and oxygen. He had to come down.

Flight director Kraft had told Shepard to keep talking, to keep Glenn’s mind off his impending doom and focused on smaller tasks within his control. For the next two minutes, Shepard kept up a jargon-filled dialogue, offering small suggestions about how to set the capsule at the best angle for reentry, even giving a weather report. “We recommend that you do the best you can to keep a zero angle during reentry,” he said.

Then
Friendship 7
reached a thick slab of atmosphere and the heat outside the capsule began to rise, which interfered with the radio waves. Glenn would later say that he braced himself for his own incineration. “Every nerve fiber was attuned to the heat along my spine; I kept wondering, ‘Is that it? Do I feel it?’ ” Meanwhile, Scott Carpenter got on the phone to Glenn’s wife, Annie, to tell her about the heat shield. He might not make it back, Carpenter warned.

The radio transmissions began to buzz and crackle. Shepard tried to give Glenn one last message, detailing a slight change in the plan: to jettison the retro-pack once the G forces built to 1.5. The engineers had decided that 1.5 Gs of external pressure would hold the heat shield in place, even if it was loose, making it safe to jettison the retro-package.

“We recommend that you . . . ,” Shepard began, but that was all Glenn heard; the rest of the message was garbled by static.

“Cape,” Glenn said. “You’re . . . you are going out. . . .”

An eerie quiet filled Mission Control, where many wondered if they had just heard John Glenn’s final words. All they could do now was wait.

Precisely four minutes and twenty-three seconds later—the point at which Glenn should have emerged
from the near side of the atmosphere and back into radio transmission range— Shepard began calling him. “
Friendship
Seven
, this is Cape. Do you read?
Seven
, this is Cape do you read? Over.
Friendship Seven
, this is Cape. Do you read? Over.”

Shepard stared straight ahead, waiting for Glenn’s voice. One of the officials behind him—he couldn’t tell who—said, “Keep talking, Al.” So Shepard tried one more time: “
Seven
, this is Cape. How do you read? Over.”

A few seconds later a crackle of static broke through, and a moment later Glenn’s voice burst across the airwaves.

“Loud and clear—how me?”

Mission Control erupted in celebration. Shepard’s grim face exploded into a grin and he instinctively jerked his arm high to give those standing behind him a thumbs-up. “Reading you loud and clear,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“Oh, pretty good,” Glenn said.

“What is your general condition? Are you feeling pretty well?”

“My condition is good,” said Glenn. “But that was a real fireball, boy. I had great chunks of that retro-pack breaking off all the way through.”

Glenn’s flight—each moment of which was broadcast live on television—had finally pulled the United States alongside the Russians in the space race. The previous summer, a few weeks after Gus Grissom’s flight, the Soviets had sent their second cosmonaut, Gherman Titov, into space for a seventeen-orbit flight. But now, with Glenn’s flight, the United States had edged ahead: three astronauts versus two cosmonauts.