Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

It was time to open the ditty bag. Stowed on my right, it contained the equipment and the space food for the flight. First out was the camera, for I needed to catch the sunlight on the slowly tumbling booster still following the capsule. The camera had a large patch of Velcro on its side. I could slap it on the capsule wall when it wasn’t in use. Velcro was the great zero-gravity tamer. Without it, the equipment would have been a welter of tether lines – my idea, incidentally, and not a very good one, for John’s flight. He had ended up in a virtual spaghetti bowl full of tether lines and equipment floating through his small cabin.

Also in the ditty bag were the air-glow filter, for measuring the frequency of light emitted by the air-glow layer, star navigation cards, the world orbital and weather charts-adjuncts to the earth path indicator (EPI) globe mounted on the instrument panel. The EPI was mechanically driven at the orbital rate so that it always showed the approximate spacecraft position over the earth. There were also bags of solid food I was to eat (a space first), and the densitometer.

But the most important items at this point in the flight were probably the flight plan cards. I had been tracking the booster since separation, maneuvering the capsule with the very good fly-by-wire system: “I have the booster in the center of the window now,” I reported, “tumbling very slowly.” It was still visible ten minutes later, when I acquired voice contact with Canary capcom.

Carpenter: “I have, west of your station, many whirls and vortices of cloud patterns. [Taking] pictures at this time – 2, 3, 4, 5. Control mode is automatic. I have the booster directly beneath me.”

The brilliance of the horizon to the west made the stars too dim to see in the black sky. But I could see the moon and, below me, beautiful weather patterns. But something was wrong. The spacecraft had a scribe line etched on the window, showing where the horizon should be in retro-attitude. But it was now above the actual horizon I checked my gyros and told Canary capcom my pitch attitude was faulty.

Carpenter reported: “I think my attitude is not in agreement with the instruments.”

Then I added an explanation – it was “probably because of that gyro-free period” – and dismissed it. There were too many other things to do.

John had also had problems with his gyro reference system. Kraft described it in an MA-6 postflight paper, where he wrote that the astronaut “had no trouble in maintaining the proper [pitch] attitude” when he so desired “by using the visual reference.” All pilots do this – revert to what their eyes tell them when their on-board tools fail. But future flights, he said, would be free of such “spurious attitude outputs” because astronauts would be able to “disconnect the horizon scanner slaving system,” called “caging the gyros” in these future flights. Because my flight plan for the follow-on mission called for so many large deviations from normal orbital attitude (minus-34-degree pitch, 0-degree roll, 0-degree yaw), I was often caging the gyros when they weren’t needed for attitude control.

The Canary Capcom picked up on my report, and asked me to “confirm orientation.” Were my autopilot (ASCS) and fly-by-wire operating normally?

Carpenter reported: “Roger, Canary. The manual and automatic control systems are satisfactory, all axes…”

The procedure for voice reports on the attitude control system did not call for determining agreement in pitch attitude as shown by (a) the instrument and (b) the pilot’s visual reference out the window. The reporting procedure also assumed a properly functioning pitch horizon scanner, in the case of MA-7 a false assumption. Because of the scanner’s wild variations careening from readings of plus 50 degrees at one place over the horizon and then lurching back to minus-20 over another, without any discernible pattern – I might have gotten a close-to-nominal, or normal, reading at any given moment in the flight.

A thorough ASCS check, early in the flight, could have identified the malfunction. Ground control could have insisted on it, when the first anomalous readings were reported. Such a check would have required anywhere from two to six minutes of intense and continuous attention on the part of the pilot. A simple enough matter but a prodigious block of time in a science flight – and in fact the very reason ASCS checks weren’t included in the flight plan. On the contrary, large spacecraft maneuvers, accomplished off ASCS, were specified, in addition to how many minutes the MA-7 pilot would spend in each of the three control modes-fly-by-wire, manual proportional, and ASCS. Because of this, I would not report another problem with the ASCS until the second orbit. I had photographs to take and the balky camera to load.

When I spoke with Kano Capcom, over Nigeria, on that first pass, I was able to relay a lot of valuable orbital information as well as data on the control and capsule systems. I also checked out the radios and, as ordered by the flight surgeon, telemetered my blood pressure reading. While preparing to take the M.I.T. pictures of the “flattened sun” halfway through that pass, I saw I was getting behind in the flight plan and reported that I wouldn’t be able to complete the pictures on that pass. Just as I was making that report, I figured out the problem, managed to install the film, and was able to take the pictures after all.

Before I lost voice contact with Kano Capcom, I was able to get horizon pictures with the M.I.T. film. The first picture was at f8 and 1/125 taken to the south directly into the sun. The second picture was taken directly down my flight path, and the third was 15 degrees north of west at “capsule elapsed time” (elapsed time since launch) of 00 30 17.1 was very busy.

Tom Wolfe wrote in The Right Stuff that I was having “a picnic” during my flight and “had a grand time” with the capsule maneuvers and experiments. He kindly noted that my pulse rate before liftoff, during the launch and in orbit, was even lower than Glenn’s admirably calm readings. The second part, about my pulse rate, may be true, perhaps because nature wired me that way (and Wally, too, for that matter, if you look at his telemetered readouts). But Wally and I were also following in John’s historic steps, had been fully briefed, and knew pretty much what to expect. Knowledge and training create confidence.

MA-7 was no picnic. I had trained a long time, first as John’s backup, and then for my own surprise assignment to the follow-on flight. To the extent that training creates certain comfort levels with high-performance duties like spaceflight, then, yes, I was prepared for, and at times may even have enjoyed, some of my duties aboard Aurora 7. But I was deadly earnest about the success of the mission, intent on observing as much as humanly possible, and committed to conducting all the experiments entrusted to me. I made strenuous efforts to adhere to a very crowded flight plan.

The cabin became noticeably hot during the first orbit, when I was over the Mozambique channel, forty-five minutes into the flight. I wasn’t the first astronaut to be bothered by a hot cabin, and all of us were prepared for varying degrees of discomfort, and even pain, while we trained for and went through actual space flight. During the selection process, we ran the treadmill at 100 percent humidity and 115 degrees Fahrenheit – and gladly – just to be chosen.

So the term “tolerable temperature,” something the NASA medics determined was endurable with little loss in performance, is relative. You need to know how long the discomfort will likely last, how hard you have to work during that time, and how badly you need to withstand it. It also helps to have an idea of when you believe relief will come. So after giving the Indian Ocean capcom all the normal voice reports, I explained for the record what I was doing inside to bring the high cabin temperatures down.