"Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today (9 page)

“All recorders to fast,” T. J. ordered. “T-minus eighteen seconds and counting. Engine start!”

“You have a firing signal,” astronaut Scott Carpenter told his friend John Glenn from the blockhouse.

O’Malley’s boss, B. G. MacNabb, came on the line. He spoke directly to the altar boy: “May the wee ones be with you, Thomas.” O’Malley managed a quick smile. He’d take the luck of the wee ones anytime. He’d been praying all day, and the tough test conductor crossed himself. “Good Lord, ride all the way,” he said prayerfully.

“GOD SPEED, JOHN GLENN!” The call boomed deep from the heart of Scott Carpenter. A quick nod of acknowledgment between O’Malley and Carpenter, and Scott began racking down the final seconds of the count.

“Ten,

Nine,

Eight,

Seven,

Six,

Five,

Four,

Three,

Two,

One…

Zero!”

The voices fell silent. Atlas was ablaze on its pad, flame pouring from its mighty engines, the vibration trembling John Glenn’s voice.

“Uh…rog-ger…the clock is operating…We’re underway….”

Atlas was now a monolith of flame and glea
ming silver with Glenn
and his black Mercury spaceship resting on thick ice from the super-cold fuels beneath it, the red escape tower standing above all, pointing the way into a welcoming blue sky.

Flaming thrust pushed the rocket and spacecraft stack toward orbit. The autopilot ticked away the commands, and Atlas and Mercury obeyed as Glenn reported, “We’re programming in roll okay.”

People. A million of them were on highways and beaches, atop buildings, and on streets. Atlas rolled thunder from its mighty throat as it pushed steadily upward and the onlookers went mad—a million voices shouting, cheering, and crying.

Tremendous air pressure squeezed Atlas, buffeted the big rocket, hammered against its steel belt strengthening its thin skin, rattled and shook the machine. It was every pilot’s old friend Max Q, and the marine along for the ride called Alan Shepard, his CapCom, short for capsule communicator, who was located in Mercury Control.

“It’s a little bumpy along here.”

Climbing out of Max Q, the engines were increased in thrust and power. Every second they burned fuel they reduced Atlas’s weight. Then, a little more than two minutes into the flight, the two booster engines were done—they burned out and fell away with the rocket’s rear skirt. This trimmed Atlas to one remaining main engine, called the sustainer.

Friendship Seven
was over one hundred miles high and still climbing when the sustainer cut off. The escape tower was gone, the separation rockets spurted, and Glenn and his Mercury capsule pushed away from the now lifeless Atlas.

“Roger, zero-g and I feel fine,” Glenn reported. “Capsule is turning around. Oh! That view is tremendous!”

John Glenn and America were in orbit. A grateful country shed its tears and screamed its cheers. Some of its lost prestige had just been restored.

Friendship Seven
set its course for the first of three planned trips around Earth, and Glenn reminded himself he had a debt to pay to American taxpayers. They were all anxious, almost desperate, to hear from him. He offered glowing descriptions of the planet sliding beneath
Friendship Seven
: the sculpted sands of the deserts, the mantle of snow covering the mountains, and closer to home, the rich deep green of Bahamian waters. He peered down volcanoes, and when it was night, he looked into the blackest of black below and saw great thunderstorms split themselves apart with lightning bolts that left trails of snarling fire.

In that blackness, only the motors and instruments of his spaceship offered any sounds and light. The remainder of the universe had gone mute, and suddenly he was staring at the brightest, most clearly defined stars and planets he had ever seen.

He was surprised by the speed and completion of his first night as he saw the thinnest crease in the darkness behind him, just a sliver of light, and then the sliver grew swiftly, growing into a shout of color and the brightest of suns as the horizon quickly transformed itself from night to day.

Half of his Mercury capsule was now lit; the other half lay in shadow and the dim reflected light from a planet below that was still in darkness. Sunrise on Earth itself was still minutes away.

Suddenly, he saw something strange out of the corner of his eye. Lightning bugs, good old-fashioned Ohio summer lightning bugs were swarming around
Friendship Seven.
Swarms of the tiny creatures. Some came right to his window, and then he realized they were frost, possibly ice dancing and swirling along with him as he moved through orbit.

Glenn had no idea what caused this stunning phenomenon, and he radioed Mercury Control. “I’ll try to describe what I’m [seeing] in here.” Every person hearing his voice snapped to, eyes wide.

“I’m in a big mass of thousands of very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they’re luminescent,” Glenn explained. “They are bright yellowish-green. About the size and intensity of a firefly on a real dark night. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Roger,
Friendship Seven
, this is Canton CapCom, can you hear any impact with the capsule? Over.”

“Negative, negative. They’re very slow. They’re not going away from me at more than maybe three or four miles an hour.”

As
Friendship Seven
moved into brighter sun, the fireflies disap
peared, and flight managers shifted their attention to an immediate urgency that could be threatening John Glenn’s life. Shining like a pit of deadly snakes on the Mercury Control’s wall-wide tracking map was Segment 51—a warning that told flight controllers
Friendship Seven
’s heat shield could be loose.

Everyone stopped. If the warning was correct, John Glenn could be cremated during reentry. Temperatures during the atmospheric plunge would reach 4,000 degrees.

Every member of Glenn’s team concentrated on the problem. They studied every idea floated, but there seemed to be only one in-flight fix: They could leave the retro-rocket pack strapped to the outside of the heat shield. This package contained six small rockets. Three had been used after Atlas shutdown to push
Friendship Seven
away from the Atlas booster; three larger rockets remained. They would be used to slow the spacecraft for reentry.

The theory was simple. If they left the retro-pack in place after the three de-orbit rockets fired, the straps should be strong enough to hold the heat shield in place until Glenn’s dive took him deep into the atmosphere. There, the growing air pressure would keep the heat shield pressed against the Mercury capsule’s blunt end.

The other possibility was equally simple. If the retro-pack straps did not hold, the first American to orbit Earth would return as ashes.

T
he managers in Mercury Control decided not to alarm Glenn by alerting him to the problem. This pissed off Alan Shepard, and Glenn heard it in Shepard’s voice. Then, over Canton Island, the tracking station told him to leave the retro-pack in place.

“Why?” he asked.

“You’ll get the word over Texas,” Canton said.

Now, Glenn was pissed. His heart picked up a beat. For the first time in his mission he was concerned. It was not an unfamiliar role for the ace test pilot and combat veteran. He took a deep breath and relaxed his body. He would deal with it.

The Texas station confirmed he was to leave the retro-pack on
through reentry. Exactly at four hours, forty-three minutes, fifty-three seconds into the flight, he had to manually override the separation switch and retract the periscope and seal its outer doors. He passed out of radio range before he could ask questions.

Four minutes later,
Friendship Seven
was over Mercury Control at the Cape. Capcom Alan Shepard told flight director Chris Kraft and operations director Walt Williams in so many words to go to hell. He knew if he were in Glenn’s place, he would want to know. He keyed his mike and gave the whole explanation to John for retaining the retro-pack. The marine was angry he had not been informed earlier. But he understood the decision and told Shepard to pass on his thanks.

“Roger, John,” Shepard told him. “Hang tight, Marine. Navy has your back,” and right on schedule off the coast of California, the three retro-rockets fired at five-second intervals. Glenn felt three sharp thuds at the base of the craft. “I feel like I’m going back to Hawaii,” he reported.

Friendship Seven
dropped slowly, skipping over the surface of the atmosphere a bit before sinking into Earth’s protective blanket. Instantly, Glenn could sense the heat build up. The capsule swayed. There was a sudden bang behind him: part of the retro-pack breaking away. He called the Texas station. He couldn’t get through. He had already plowed into the envelope of ionized air, and the ions kept any radio communications from leaving or entering his Mercury capsule.

John Glenn held tight.

Friendship Seven
plunged deeper into the heat.

He could not have been more alone.

Alan Shepard tried to reach him. He was calling Glenn with an urgent message. He was trying to tell him to get rid of the retro-pack the moment he weighed 1g, his Earth weight, or greater. This could save Glenn’s life. It could keep the retro-pack from ripping his heat shield apart. The message banged against the ionization layer. It could not penetrate the ions and fell uselessly away, lost unheard in
Friendship Seven
’s wake.

John Glenn was cocooned inside a growing fireball, and through
Friendship Seven
’s porthole he saw this fireball devouring itself. A strap
from the retro-pack had broken or burned free and was hammering against the glass. It burst into fire and flashed away with bits of flaming chunks of metal whirling and pounding past his view.

“It was a bad moment,” Glenn would tell me later. “I just hoped that everything would not come unglued. If they didn’t,” he smiled, “I would be okay. If they did, well…”

He watched the brilliant orange blaze and burning chunks flying by his window as he had watched the flaming remains of Mig fighters he’d shot down over the Yalu.

Then, he felt the gravity forces building. He could have hugged them. It meant it was all holding together, and he called Alan Shepard in Mercury Control. He was feeling pretty damn good, but there was no way to get through the ions. Not yet.

The heat shield on his back was hanging in there. It was 4,000 degrees outside, while he enjoyed a toasty and comfortable atmosphere inside
Friendship Seven
.

In Mercury Control they chewed their nails.

Notre Dame engineer Bob Harrington stood behind Alan Shepard. He was in charge of making Mercury Control tick. “Keep talking, Alan,” he begged. Shepard clenched his teeth and called again.

“
Friendship Seven
, this is Mercury Control. How do you read? Over.”

As instantly as they had come, the ions were gone, and the words penetrated
Friendship Seven
like the voice of an angel.

Glenn’s reply was a simple mike check. “Loud and clear. How me?”

“Roger,” a grinning Shepard acknowledged. “Reading you loud and clear. How’re you doing?”

“Oh, pretty good,” Glenn said, “but that was a real fireball, boy!”

Mercury Control broke out in cheers and handshakes, and Harrington broke out with the Notre Dame fight song.

There was dancing in the aisles, but flight director Kraft yelled through the pandemonium: “Knock it off. We’ve got a pilot to land.”

Instantly, the celebration ended, and John Glenn’s team was back on the job.

He and
Friendship Seven
kept losing speed. The Mercury capsule was
now oscillating strongly from side to side, rocking badly enough for Glenn to feed corrections with his thrusters. They weren’t much good anymore in the thickening atmosphere.

In the rain, John Glenn and family rode with Vice President Lyndon Johnson in his Washington parade. Only hours later, Glenn and the vice president had moved on to New York City. They are seen here moving down the canyons of Broadway in an overwhelming ticker-tape parade.
(NASA)
.

“What’s this?” he muttered to himself, reaching for the switch to override his automatics and deploy the drogue chute early. He was at 55,000 feet and stabilization was important.

From that point on,
Friendship Seven
had a perfect splashdown. The first American to orbit Earth dropped into the water
near his recovery ship,
Noa.

J
ohn Glenn arrived in the nation’s capital a hero of Charles Lindbergh’s stature. He had lassoed the Russian lead, and the White House gave him a parade. A quarter of a million people braved heavy rain to watch the astronaut pass. He was then jetted off to New York
City, where four million screaming, cheering people greeted him with a tumultuous ovation and a ticker-tape parade.