Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

His next posting was testing combat aircraft for Grumman. By the end of the war he had been promoted to captain and was offered a regular commission which he accepted. He joined a US mission to the Nationalist Chinese, in support of the Marshall peace initiative, flying reconnaissance patrols. By 1948 Glenn was serving as an instructor in an advanced training unit based at Corpus Christi, Texas, flying jets, the Lockheed P80 Shooting Star. He was sent to Korea in October 1952 where he flew F9 Panthers on close support missions. In 1953 he was attached to the USAF, flying fighter interceptors, the F-86. In the final days of the war he shot down three Chinese MIG jet fighters.

Posted to the Naval Air Test Centre (NATC) at Patuxent River, Maryland, he graduated as a test pilot in July 1954 and was transferred to the fighter design branch of the Naval Aeronautics Department. In 1957 he personally broke the existing supersonic transcontinental speed record, flying 2,445 miles from coast to coast of the United States. His flight involved air-to-air refuelling three times and broke the record by 21 minutes.

Early in 1958 Glenn voluntered for part-time work on an experimental programme based at the NACA research centre at Langley. When NASA was formed from NACA, Glenn was well placed to learn that he fitted the profile for manned space flight. His age, weight, height, education and experience were suitable although he had to lose 30 lb. On 17 December 1958 NASA announced the name of the project: Mercury.

NASA was looking for test pilots on active duty, preferably with combat experience and clean records. Glenn reported for tests at the Lovelace Clinic, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Glenn:

Lovelace was a diagnostic hospital specializing in aerospace medicine. It had been founded by Dr W. Randolph Lovelace II, a prominent space scientist and chairman of the NASA life sciences committee, who had conducted high-altitude and pressure suit experimental work at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The clinic was private, but there was a strong military flavor to its administration, which was directed by Dr A.H. Schwichtenberg, a retired Air Force general. The doctors, led by Lovelace, were a hard-nosed group, or so it seemed to those of us they were poking, probing, and evaluating.

For over a week they made every kind of measurement and did every kind of test on the human body, inside and out, that medical science knew of or could imagine. Nobody really knew what that body would go through in space, so Lovelace and his team tried everything. They drew blood, took urine and stool samples, scraped our throats, measured the contents of our stomachs, gave us barium enemas, and submerged us in water tanks to record our total body volume. They shone lights into our eyes, ears, noses, and everywhere else. They measured our heart and pulse rates, blood pressure, brain waves, and muscular reactions to electric current. Their examination of the lower bowel was the most uncomfortable procedure I had ever experienced, a sigmoidal probe with a device those of us who were tested nicknamed the “Steel Eel.” Wires and tubes dangled from us like tentacles from jellyfish. Nobody wanted to tell us what some of the stranger tests were for.

Doctors are the natural enemies of pilots. Pilots like to fly; and doctors frequently turn up reasons why they can’t. I didn’t find the tests as humiliating or infuriating as some of the other candidates did. Pete Conrad was so incensed by having to rush through the hospital’s public hallways “in distress” that he told General Schwichtenberg he wasn’t giving himself any more enemas – and deposited his enema bag on the general’s desk for emphasis. He didn’t get chosen for the space program until later. But I thought the tests, obnoxious as they were, were fascinating for the most part. It was all in the interests of science, and going into space was going to be one of the greatest scientific adventures of all time.

After eight days at Lovelace, one candidate washed out for medical reasons and the rest of us, again in small groups, received orders sending us to Wright-Patterson and the Wright Air Development Center’s Aeromedical Laboratories. We traveled separately, as we had to Lovelace, to preserve secrecy.

The tests at Wright-Patterson were more familiar. They subjected us to the kinds of stresses test pilots could be expected to endure, heightening some of them in an attempt to simulate the thin reaches of space. Again, the doctors were guessing. They injected cold water into our ears as a way to create a condition called nystagmus, in which you can’t keep your eyes focused on one spot, then measured how long it took us to recover. They measured body fat content and rated our body types as endomorphic, ectomorphic, or mesomorphic. They inserted a rectal thermometer; sat us in heat chambers, ran the temperature to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and clocked the rise in our body temperature and heart rate. We walked on treadmills, stepped repeatedly on and off a twenty-inch step, and rode stationary bicycles. We blew into tubes that measured lung capacity and held our breath as long as we could. We plunged our feet into buckets of ice water while the doctors took blood pressure and pulse measurements. We sat strapped into chairs that shook us like rag dolls. We were assaulted with sound of shifting amplitudes and frequencies that made our flight suits quiver and produced sensations in our bones. We endured blinking strobe lights at frequencies designed to irritate the nervous system. We entered an altitude chamber that simulated sixty-five thousand feet of altitude, with only partial pressure suits and oxygen. We lay on a table that tilted like a slow-motion carnival ride. We pushed buttons and pulled levers in response to flashing lights to test our reaction times. We sat in an anechoic isolation chamber to see how we might endure the vast blackness and silence of space. All the while sensors plastered on our heads and bodies recorded our reactions.

The isolation chamber was simply a dark soundproof room. A technician led me in, seated me at a desk, and turned out the lights when he left. I had no idea if I would be there for fifteen minutes or fifteen hours. I knew the easiest way to make the time pass would be to put my head down and go to sleep. But I suspected that the doctors wanted mental alertness. I opened the desk drawer after a while and found a writing tablet. I had a pencil in my pocket. “Will attempt to keep record of the run,” I wrote on the first page.

By the time the door opened Glenn had scrawled 18 pages. Glenn:

I had moved on to summarizing my thoughts on the isolation experience when the door opened after three hours and the lights came on.

I had been back in Washington two weeks when the phone rang at my desk at BuAer. I answered it and heard Charles Doulan say, “Major Glenn, you’ve been through all the tests. Are you still interested in the program?”

“Yes, I am. Very much,” I said, and held my breath. “Well, congratulations. You’ve made it.”

I don’t remember my response. I know I felt a swell of pride – that I couldn’t help – but I also felt humble at being a small part of a program that was so full of scientific talent and of such importance to the nation.

Hanging up the phone, I was struck by the fact that the call had come on the day it did. It was April 6, my wedding anniversary. Annie and I had been married sixteen years, and that night we had planned to go to dinner at Evans Farm Inn in McLean and a play in downtown Washington in celebration. There was no greater celebration than sharing the news with her. I told her I had no idea where all this would lead, but wherever it was, we were in it together.

The Mercury Astronauts met for the first time at Langley Air Force Base on April 8, 1959. We were seven pilots, three from the Air Force, three from the Navy, and one from the Marines, but none of us were in uniform, and at that time we were still anonymous. I had just received a routine promotion from major to lieutenant colonel, but as astronauts, we all ranked equally. We wore suits, the uniform of our new service, as we milled about with NASA officials and discreetly tried to check out the other men who had been chosen for this new assignment.