Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

The appearance of a small hole in the clouds, however, gave Walt Williams, the Operations Director, enough confidence to carry on, and the meteorologists reported that the clouds would soon blow away and that the sky would be clear again within about thirty minutes. Walt decided to recycle the count – or set it back – to allow for this delay, and he let the mission proceed.

Then another problem cropped up. During the delay for weather, a small inverter located near the top of the Redstone began to overheat. Inverters are used to convert the DC current which comes from the batteries into the AC current required to power some of the systems in the booster. This particular inverter provided 400-cycle power which was needed to get the missile into operation and off the pad. It had to be replaced. This involved bringing the gantry back into position around the Redstone so that the technicians could get at it, and eighty-six minutes went by before the Control Centre could resume the count.

I continued to feel fine, however. The doctors could tell how I was doing by looking at their instrument panels and talking it over with me. When the inverter was fixed, the gantry moved away, the cherrypicker manoeuvred its cab back outside the capsule, and the count went along smoothly for twenty-one minutes before it suddenly stopped again. This time the technicians wanted to doublecheck a computer which would help predict the trajectory of the capsule and its impact point in the recovery area.

I think that my basic metabolism started to speed up along about this point. Everything – pulse rate, carbon dioxide production, blood pressure – began to climb. I suppose that my adrenalin was flowing pretty fast, too. I was not really aware of it at the time. But once or twice I had to warn myself – “You’re building up too fast. Slow down. Relax.” Whenever I though that my heart was palpitating a little, I would try to stop whatever I was doing and look out through the periscope at the pad crews or at the waves along the beach before I went back to work.

The last hold came at T minus 2 minutes 40 seconds. This time the people in the blockhouse were worried about the pressure on the supply of lox in the Redstone which we would need to feed the rocket engines. The pressure on the fuel read a hundred psi too high on the blockhouse gauge, and if this meant resetting the pressure valve inside the booster manually, the mission would have to be scrubbed for at least another forty-eight hours. Fortunately, the technicians found they were able to bleed off the excess pressure by turning some of the valves by remote control, and the final count resumed at 9:23. I had become slightly and I think understandably impatient at this point. I had been locked inside the capsule for nearly four hours now, and as I listened to the engineers chattering to one another over the radio and debating about whether or not to repair the trouble, I began to get the impression that they were being too cautious just for my sake and might wind up taking too long. It wasn’t really fair of me, but “I’m cooler than you are,” I said into my mike. “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?” They fixed their “little problem” and the orange cherrypicker moved away from the capsule for the last time.

In contrast, after the days of postponement and the holds, the last few minutes leading up to 9:34 a.m. EST (2:43 p.m. GMT) went perfectly. Everyone was prompt in his reports. I could feel that all the training we had gone through with the blockhouse crew and booster crew was really paying off down there. I had no concern at all. I knew how things were supposed to go, and that is how they went. About three minutes before lift-off, the blockhouse turned off the flow of cooling freon gas – I knew it would shut off anyway at T-35 seconds when the umbilical fell away. At two minutes before launch, I set the control valves for the suit and cabin temperature, shifted to the voice circuit and had a quick radio check with Deke Slayton at the Capsule Communicator (Cap Com) desk in Mercury Control Centre. I also contacted Chase One and Chase Two Wally Shirra and Scott Carpenter in the chase planes – and heard them loud and clear. They were in the air, ready to take a high-level look at me as I went past them after the launch.

Electronically speaking, my colleagues were all around me at this moment.

Deke gave me the count at T-90 seconds and again at T-60. I had nothing to do just then but maintain my communications, so I rogered both messages. At T-35 seconds I watched through the periscope as the umbilical which had fed Freon and power into the capsule snapped out and fell away. Then the periscope came in and the little door which protected it in flight closed shut. The red light on my instrument panel went out to signal this event, which was the last critical function the capsule had to perform automatically before we were ready to go. I reported this to Deke, and then I reported the power readings. Both were in a “Go” condition. I heard Deke roger my message, and then I listened as he read the final count: 10-9-8-7… At the count of “5” I put my right hand on the stopwatch button which I had to push at lift-off to time the flight. I put my left hand on the abort handle which I would move in a hurry only if something went seriously wrong and I had to activate the escape tower.

Just after the count of “Zero”, Deke said “Lift-off”.

I think I braced myself a bit too much while Deke was giving me the final count. Nobody knew, of course, how much shock and vibration I would really feel when the Redstone took off.

There was no one around who had tried it and could tell me; and we had not heard from Moscow how it felt. I was probably a little too tense. But I was really exhilarated and pleasantly surprised when I answered, “Lift-off and the clock is started”.

There was a lot less vibration and noise rumble than I had expected. It was extremely smooth – a subtle, gentle, gradual rise off the ground. There was nothing rough or abrupt about it. But there was no question that I was going, either. I could see it on the instruments, hear it on the headphones, feel it, all around me.

It was a strange and exciting sensation. And yet it was so mild and easy – much like the rides we had experienced in our trainers – that it somehow seemed very familiar. I felt as if I had experienced the whole thing before. But nothing could possibly simulate in every detail the real thing that I was going through at that moment, so I tried very hard to figure out all the sensations and to pin them down in my mind in words which I could use later. I knew that the people back on the ground – the engineers, doctors and psychiatrists – would be very curious about how I was affected by each sensation and that they would ask me quite a lot of questions when I got back. I tried to anticipate these questions and have some answers ready.

For the first minute, the ride continued to be very smooth. My main job just then was to keep the people on the ground as relaxed and informed as possible. It was no good for them to have a test pilot up there unless they knew fairly precisely what he was doing, what he saw and how he felt every thirty seconds or so along the way. So I did quite a bit of reporting over the radio about oxygen pressure and fuel consumption and cabin temperature and how the Gs were mounting slowly, just as we had predicted they would. I do not imagine that future spacemen will have to bother quite so much about some of these items. This was the first time, so we were being cautious.

I was scheduled to communicate about something or other for a total of seventy-eight times during the fifteen minutes that I was up. And I had to manage or at least monitor a total of twenty-seven major events in the capsule. This kept me rather busy. But we wanted to get our money’s worth when we planned this flight, and we filled the flight plan and the schedule with all the things we wanted to do and learn. We rigged two movie cameras inside the capsule, for example, one of which was focused on the instrument panel to keep a running record of how the system behaved. The other one was aimed at me to see how I reacted. The scientists used the film to compile a chart of all my eye movements, which they related to the position of the instruments I had to watch as each moment and event transpired. On the basis of this data they later moved a couple of the instruments closer together on the panel so that future pilots would not have to move their eyes so often to keep up with things.