The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

At other places around the Cape at this point, the other astronauts were taking up their positions to back me up in any way they could. Deke Slayton sat at the Capsule Communicator desk in Mercury Control Centre. He would do most of the talking with me during the countdown and flight so that both the lingo and the spirit behind it would be clear and familiar. John and Gus joined Deke as soon as I was firmly locked in and there was nothing more they could do at the pad. Wally and Scott stood by at Patrick Air Force Base, ready to take off in two F-106jets to chase the Redstone and capsule as far as they could and observe the flight. Gordon stayed in the blockhouse, monitoring the weather and standing by to help put into effect the rescue operations he had worked on which would get me out of the capsule in a hurry if we had an emergency while we were still on the pad. Inside the Mercury Control Centre itself, all the lights were green. All conditions were “Go”. The gantry rolled back at 6:34, and I lay on my back seventy feet above the ground checking the straps and switches and waiting for the countdown to proceed.

I passed some of the time looking through the periscope. I could see clouds up above and people far beneath me on the ground. The view was fascinating – and I had a long, long time to admire it. There were four holds in all, the first at 7:14 when the count stood at T-15 minutes. A thick, muggy layer of clouds had begun to drift in over the launch site, and a hold was called to give the Control Centre an opportunity to check on the weather. Cape Canaveral sits on a narrow spit of land with the Gulf Stream close by to the east and the Gulf of Mexico only 130 miles to the west. The weather is likely to change rapidly between these two bodies of water. The day can be bright and sunny one minute, cloudy and breezy the next. It is fickle and difficult to keep track of, and in order to follow the capsule and the booster closely, photograph their performance and watch for possible emergencies, the men in the Control Centre require a clear view of the first part of a flight.

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.