The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

The capsule was travelling at about 5,000 mph, and up to this point it had been on automatic pilot. I switched over to the manual control stick, and tried out the pitch, yaw and roll axes in that order. Each time I moved the stick, the little jets of hydrogen peroxide rushed through the nozzles on the outside of the capsule and pushed it or twisted it the way I wanted it to go. When the nozzles were on at full blast, I could hear them spurting away over the background noise in my headset. I found out that I could easily use the pitch axis to raise or lower the blunt end of the capsule. This movement was very smooth and precise, just as it had been on our ALFA trainer. I fed the yaw axis, and this manoeuvre worked, too. I could make the capsule twist slightly from left to right and back again, just as I wanted it to. Finally I took over control of the roll motion and I was flying Freedom 7 on my own. This was a big moment for me, for it proved that our control system was sound and that it worked under real space-flight conditions.

It was now time to go to the periscope. I had been well briefed on what to expect, and I had some idea of the huge variety of colour and land masses and cloud cover which I would see from a hundred miles up. But no one could be briefed well enough to be completely prepared for the astonishing view that I got. My exclamation back to Deke about the “beautiful sight” was completely spontaneous. It was breathtaking. To the south I could see where the cloud cover stopped at about Fort Lauderdale, and that the weather was clear all the way down past the Florida Keys. To the north I could see up the coast of the Carolinas to where the clouds just obscured Cape Hatteras. Across Florida to the west I could spot Lake Okeechobee and Tampa Bay. Because there were some scattered clouds far beneath me I was not able to see some of the Bahamas that I had been briefed to look for. So I shifted to an open area and identified Andros Island and Bimini. The colours around these ocean islands were brilliantly clear, and I could see sharp variations between the blue of deep water and the light green of the shoal areas near the reefs. It was really stunning.

But I did not just admire the view. I found that I could actually use it to help keep the capsule in the proper attitude. By looking through the periscope and focusing down on Cape Canaveral as the zero reference point for the yaw control axis, I discovered that this system would provide a fine backup in case the instruments and the auto-pilot happened to go out together on some future flight. It was good to know that we could count on handling the capsule this extra way – provided, of course, that we had a clear view and knew exactly what we were looking at. Fortunately, I could look back and see the Cape very clearly. It was a fine reference.

All through this period, the capsule and I remained weightless. And though we had had a lot of free advice on how this would feel – some of it rather dire – the sensation was just what I expected it would be: pleasant and relaxing. It had absolutely no effect on my movements or my efficiency. I was completely comfortable, and it was something of a relief not to feel the pressure and weight of my body against the couch. The ends of my straps floated around a little, and there was some dust drifting around in the cockpit with me. But these were unimportant and peripheral indications that I was at Zero G.

At about 115 miles up – very near the apogee of my flight – Deke Slayton started to give me the countdown for the retro-firing manoeuvre. This had nothing to do directly with my flight from a technical standpoint. I was established on a ballistic path and there was nothing the retro-rockets could do to sway me from it. But we would be using these rockets as brakes on the big orbital flights to start the capsule back towards earth. We wanted to try them on my trip just to see how well they worked. We also wanted to test my reactions to them and check on the pilot’s ability to keep the capsule under control as they went off. I used the manual control stick to tilt the blunt end of the capsule up to an angle of 34° above the horizontal – the correct attitude for getting the most out of the retros on an orbital re-entry. At 5 minutes 14 seconds after launch, the first of the three rockets went off, right on schedule. The other two went off at the prescribed five-second intervals. There was a small upsetting motion as our speed was reduced, and I was pushed back into the couch a bit by the sudden change in Gs. But each time the capsule started to get pushed out of its proper angle by one of the retros going off I found that I could bring it back again with no trouble at all. I was able to stay on top of the flight by using the manual controls, and this was perhaps the most encouraging product of the entire mission.