Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

Gordo Cooper’s familiar voice came over the headset as Friendship 7 neared Australia. He was the capcom at the station at Muchea, on the west coast just north of Perth. “That sure was a short day,” I told him.

“Say again, Friendship Seven.”

“That was about the shortest day I’ve ever run into.”

“Kinda passes rapidly, huh?”

“Yes, sir.”

I spotted the Pleiades, a cluster of seven stars. Gordo asked me for a blood pressure reading, and I pumped the cuff again. He told me to look for lights, and I reported, “I see the outline of a town, and a very bright light just to the south of it?” The elapsed-time clock read 54:39. It was midnight on the west coast of Australia.

“Perth and Rockingham, you’re seeing there,” Gordo told me.

“Roger. The lights show up very well, and thank everybody for turning them on, will you?”

“We sure will, John.”

The capcom at Woomera, in south-central Australia, radioed that my blood pressure was 126over 90. I replied that I still felt fine, with no vision problems and no nausea or vertigo from the head movements I made periodically.

The experiments continued. Over the next tracking station, on a tiny coral atoll called Canton Island, midway between Australia and Hawaii, I lifted the visor of my helmet and ate for the first time, squeezing some apple sauce from a toothpaste-like tube into my mouth to see if weightlessness interfered with swallowing. It didn’t.

It was all so new. An hour and fourteen minutes into the flight, I was approaching day again. I didn’t have time to reflect on the magnitude of my experience, only to record its components as I reeled off the readings and performed the tests. The capcom on Canton Island helped me put it in perspective after I reported seeing through the periscope “the brilliant blue horizon coming up behind me, approaching sunrise.”

“Roger, Friendship Seven. You are very lucky.”

“You’re right. Man, this is beautiful.”

The sun rose as quickly as it had set. Suddenly there it was, a brilliant red in my view through the periscope. It was blinding, and I added a dark filter to the clear lens so I could watch it. Suddenly I saw around the capsule a huge field of particles that looked like tiny yellow stars that seemed to travel with the capsule, but more slowly. There were thousands of them, like swirling fireflies. I talked into the cockpit recorder about this mysterious phenomenon as I flew out of range of Canton Island and into a dead zone before the station at Guaymas, Mexico, on the Gulf of California, picked me up. We thought we had foreseen everything, but this was entirely new. I tried to describe them again, but Guaymas seemed interested only in giving me the retro sequence time, the precise moment the capsule’s retro-rockets would have to be fired in case I had to come down after one orbit.

Changing film in the camera, I discovered a pitfall of weightlessness when I inadvertently batted a canister of film out of sight behind the instrument panel. I waited a few seconds for it to drop into view and then realised that it wouldn’t.

I was an hour and a half into the flight, and in range of the station at Point Arguello, California, where Wally Schirra was acting as capcom. I had just picked him up and was looking for a sight of land beneath the clouds when the capsule drifted out of yaw limits about twenty degrees to the right. One of the large thrusters kicked it back. It swung to the left until it triggered the opposite large thruster; which brought it back to the right again. I went to fly-by-wire and oriented the capsule manually.

The “fireflies” diminished in number as I flew east into brighter sunlight. I switched back to automatic attitude control. The capsule swung to the right again, and I switched back to manual. I picked up Al at the Cape and gave him my diagnosis. The one-pound thruster to correct outward drift was out, so the drift continued until the five-pound thruster activated, and it pushed the capsule too far into left yaw, activating the larger thruster there. The thrusters were setting up a back-and-forth cycle that, if it persisted, would diminish their fuel supply and maybe jeopardize the mission.

“Roger, Seven, we concur. Recommending you remain fly-by-wire.”

“Roger. Remaining fly-by-wire.”

Al said that President Kennedy would be talking to me by way of a radio hookup, but it didn’t come through and Al asked for my detailed thirty-minute report instead. I reported at 1:36:54 that controlling the capsule manually was smooth and easy, and the fuses and switches were all normal. I paused to ask about the presidential hookup. “Are we in communication yet? Over.”

“Say again, Seven.”

“Roger. I’ll be out of communication fairly soon. I thought if the other call was in, I would stop the check. Over.”

“Not as yet. We’ll get you next time.”

“Roger. Continuing report.” I ran through conditions in the cabin and added, “Only really one unusual thing so far besides ASCS [the automatic attitude control] trouble were the little particles, luminous particles around the capsule, just thousands of them right at sunrise over the Pacific. Over.”

“Roger, Seven, we have all that. Looks like you’re in good shape. Remain on fly-by-wire for the moment.”

As the second orbit began, I thought I could see a long wake from a recovery ship in the Atlantic. One of the tracking stations was aboard the ship Rose Knot , off the West African coast at the equator. I moved into its range and reported a reversal of the thruster problem. Now I seemed to have no low right thrust in yaw, to correct leftward drift. I performed a set maneuver, turning the capsule 180 degrees in yaw so that I was flying facing forward. “I like this attitude very much, so you can see where you’re going,” I radioed. I also reported seeing a loose bolt floating inside the periscope.

I passed the two-hour mark of the flight over Africa, with the capsule back in its original attitude. The second sunset was as brilliant as the first, the light again departing in a band of rainbow colors that extended on each side of the sunfall. Over Zanzibar, my eyeballs still held their shape; I reported, “I have no problem reading the charts, no problem with astigmatism at all. I am having no trouble at all holding attitudes, either. I’m still on fly-by-wire.”

The Coastal Sentry , in the Indian Ocean, relayed a strange message from mission control. “Keep your landing bag switch in off position. Landing bag switch in off position. Over.”

I glanced at the switch. It was off.

I returned to ASCS to see if the system was working. But now the capsule began to have pitch and roll as well as yaw problems in its automatic setting. The gyroscope-governed instruments showed the capsule was flying in its proper attitude, but what my eyes told me disagreed. The Indian Ocean capcom asked if I had noticed any constellations yet.

“This is Friendship Seven. Negative. I have some problems here with ASCS. My attitudes are not matching what I see out the window. I’ve been paying pretty close attention to that. I’ve not been identifying stars.”

The ASCS fuel supply was down to 60 percent, so I cut it off and started flying manually. Gordo, in Muchea, asked me to confirm that the landing bag switch was off.

“That is affirmative. Landing bag switch is in the center off position.”

“You haven’t had any banging noises or anything of this type at higher rates?” He meant the rate of movement in roll, pitch, or yaw.

“Negative.”

“They wanted this answer.”

I flew on, feeling no vertigo or nausea or other ill effects from weightlessness, being able to read the same lines on the eye chart I could at the beginning. I pumped the blood pressure cuff for another check and gave the readings in the regular half-hour reports. Flying the capsule with the one-stick hand controller was taking most of my attention. The second dawn produced another flurry of the luminescent partides. “They’re all over the sky,” I reported. “Way out I can see them, as far as I can see in each direction, almost.”