Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

The chief of the US Army’s Guided Missile Development Division was Wernher von Braun. Glenn described him:

The German-born engineer, then in his late forties, was a handsome, broad-shouldered man with thick dark hair. Von Braun had been a devoted Nazi during World War II, but his rocket expertise was valuable to the United States, and when the war ended he and members of his team of German scientists were brought to this country Other scientists went to the Soviets. Whatever anyone thought of von Braun’s previous allegiances, he had a well-deserved reputation for heading an effective rocket team. He had led the development of the German V-2 guided ballistic missiles that had rained destruction on England and Allied-held Europe near the end of the war. In the new postwar equation, the V-2 became the basis for the Redstone, which gave the United States its effective intermediate-range ballistic missile in the competition with the Soviets. Modifications would allow it to carry a Mercury capsule. Von Braun spoke of men riding the Redstone and other rockets into space and someday to the moon, of humans pitting themselves against enormous odds for the sake of discovery.

His library showed him to be a man whose interests were not confined to rocket science. I wandered into the book-lined room expecting to find nothing but tomes on engineering, astronomy, physics, and other technical matters. There were many of those. But I was impressed to find even more extensive collections in fields such as religion, comparative religion, philosophy, history, and government.

By the time of our trip to Huntsville, we were also doing parabolic flights at Edwards that gave up to a minute of weightlessness at the top of the parabola. We used two-place F-100 trainers. We’d take the rear seat while the pilot would go up to forty thousand feet, make a dive reaching Mach 1.4, and then head up again while pushing over to an angle that would make anything on the cockpit floor float up in front of you, holding that balance all the way over the top of the arc and back toward Earth again. It was like an extension, but much faster and farther, of that brief moment when your car goes over a rise in the road and you’re lifted out of your seat. While we were strapped down and couldn’t float in the cabin, it gave us the chance to try eating and drinking and manipulating equipment during weightlessness.

We had done something similar at Wright-Patterson in a C-131, a cargo plane. This gave us only about fifteen seconds, but was more fun because we were unstrapped and could float and turn flips in the cabin.

Bob Gilruth had made good on his word to involve us in all aspects of Project Mercury. We each had specific areas of responsibility. Since I had probably flown more different types of aircraft than the others, I was handed cockpit layout and instrumentation, spacecraft controls, and simulation.

Scott’s domain was communications equipment and procedures, periscope operation, and navigational aids and procedures. Gordo’s area was the Redstone booster, trajectory, aerodynamics, countdown, and flight procedures, emergency egress, and rescue. Gus was responsible for reaction control system, hand controller, autopilot, and horizon scanners. Wally had environmental control systems, pilot support and restraint, pressure suit, and aero-medical monitoring. Recovery systems, parachutes, recovery aids, recovery procedures, and range network were Al’s job. And Deke had the Atlas booster and escape system, including configuration, trajectory, aerodynamics, countdown, and flight procedures.

Oddly, we were limited in the weight we could rocket into orbit because of our advanced technology. The Soviets lifted far heavier satellites than ours. Both nations’ boosters had been designed as ICBMs, but because we had done a better job of reducing the size of our nuclear warheads we could use smaller missiles. The Soviets had failed at making smaller warheads, and so needed larger boosters. The tables were turned when it came to putting satellites, and eventually manned spacecraft, into space. Our Atlas rocket, with its 367,000 pounds of thrust, could deliver nuclear warheads from the United States to Moscow – but could barely lift the four-thousand-pound Mercury capsule into orbit; the Soviets could have orbited a house if they had wanted to.

There were still arguments for and against manned flight and the astronauts wanted a window. Glenn:

Bob Gilruth and NASA’s design team had agreed with us on the window if the weight problem could be solved. Max Faget, the capsule’s original designer, attacked the problem. If the daddy of the spacecraft thought it could be done, it could be done. Eventually Max gave the new design his go-ahead, and soon afterward we got word that McDonnell was incorporating a window in the Mercury capsule.

The ability to recognize constellations and orient the capsule in relation to them could be critical in an orbital flight. The capsule had to be lined up just right at the moment we fired the retrorockets that would slow us at reentry. Too steep a reentry would send the capsule into the atmosphere too fast, and it would burn up; too low and it could skip off the atmosphere like a stone on the surface of a pond and not be able to return. The capsule’s automatic attitude control would probably work perfectly, but knowing how to position the capsule by the stars was at the very least a good backup.

Here was an argument against both the few Air Force test pilots who claimed the astronauts would be just passengers and the heavy thinkers who thought that machines could learn as much about space as humans and for a lot less money. This was to be a different kind of flying, for sure. But machines failed, and only humans in the cockpit could take over when they did. NASA knew that from the start.

Cape Canaveral had been a military launch site since 1949 and was chosen as the project Mercury launch site. The second Atlas test was also a failure. Glenn:

The morning of July 29 was dark and rainy. The countdown proceeded anyway. NASA had assembled an audience that included the astronauts, its own officials, and executives and engineers from General Dynamics. The Atlas sat on the launch pad, topped with a simulated Mercury capsule, the package looking exactly as it would look on the day an astronaut was aboard ready to be lifted into orbit. We listened on the squawk box as the count went down. The stage was set for the debut of Mercury-Atlas 1.

The launch went perfectly. The rocket rose on a column of flame and disappeared into an orange halo in the clouds. A minute later the squawk box erupted with hurried, cryptic messages indicating that flight telemetry – the signals from the rocket to the ground – had been lost and the rocket had disappeared from radar. Another half a minute, and some people on the ground thought they heard an explosion.

The investigation that followed determined the rocket had failed structurally and blown up going through high Q at thirty-two thousand feet. The debris fell into the Atlantic. The only good news was that capsule telemetry had continued until it hit the water; and all of its shattered pieces were recovered.

I didn’t know what to think. We were much closer now to a manned flight than when we had witnessed the earlier explosion. The first flights were going to be on top of the more proven, smaller Redstone rockets, but sooner or later an astronaut was going to be riding an Atlas because only the Atlas had the power to put a spacecraft into orbit. The failure of MA-1 set NASA’s launch schedule back by months.

A test of the smaller Redstone rocket proved to be an additional discouragement. Glenn:

This time it was the test flight of Mercury-Redstone 1, the supposedly well tested Redstone rocket, topped with a Mercury capsule just as it would be for the first manned suborbital flight. Once again NASA assembled an audience of several hundred dignitaries and politicians at the Cape for the November 21 launch. The Redstone fired, rose four inches, then cut off and settled back on the pad. The three small rockets of the capsule’s escape tower worked perfectly, however. They lifted the tower – without the capsule – four thousand feet. The capsule stayed atop the rocket, but the parachutes that were supposed to bring it down activated. The drogue chute popped out and floated down, carrying the capsule’s antenna canister. Then the main and reserve chutes billowed out, settled down over the capsule and booster, and floated gently in the breeze.