The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

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: