The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Over Zanzibar off the East African coast, the site of the fourth tracking station, I pulled thirty times on the bungee cord attached below the control panel. I had done this on the ground, and my reaction was the same: it made me tired and increased my heart rate temporarily – I pumped the blood pressure cuff again for the flight surgeon on the ground. I read the vision chart over the instrument panel with no problem, countering the doctors’ fear that the eyeballs would change shape in weightlessness and impair vision. Head movements caused no sensation, indicating that zero G didn’t attack the balance mechanism of the inner ear. I could reach and easily touch any spot I wanted to, another test of the response to weightlessness. The ease of the adjustment continued to surprise me.

The Zanzibar flight surgeon reported that my blood pressure and pulse had returned to normal after my exertion with the bungee cord. “Everything on the dials indicates excellent aeromedical status,” he said. This was what we had expected from doing similar tests on the procedures trainer.

Flying backward over the Indian Ocean, I began to fly out of daylight. I was now about forty minutes into the flight nearing the 150-mile apogee, the highest point, of my orbital track. Moving away from the sun at 17,500 miles an hour – almost eighteen times Earth’s rotational speed – sped the sunset.

This was something I had been looking forward to, a sunset in space. All my life I have remembered particularly beautiful sunrises or sunsets in the Padfic islands in World War II; the glow in the haze layer in northern China; the two thunderheads out over the Atlantic with the sun silhouetting them the morning of Gus’s launch. I’ve mentally collected them, as an art collector remembers visits to a gallery full of Picassos, Michelangelos, or Rembrandts. Wonderful as man-made art may be, it cannot compare in my mind to sunsets and sunrises, God’s masterpieces. Here on Earth we see the beautiful reds, oranges, and yellows with a luminous quality that no film can fully capture. What would it be like in space?

It was even more spectacular than I imagined, and different in that the sunlight coming through the prism of Earth’s atmosphere seemed to break out the whole spectrum, not just the colors at the red end but the blues, indigos, and violets at the other. It made spectacular an understatement for the few seconds view. From my orbiting front porch, the setting sun that would have lingered during a long earthly twilight sank eighteen times as fast. The sun was fully round and as white as a brilliant arc light, and then it swiftly disappeared and seemed to melt into a long thin line of rainbow-brilliant radiance along the curve of the horizon.

I added my first sunset from space to my collection.

I reported to the capcom aboard the ship, the Ocean Sentry, in the Indian Ocean that was my fifth tracking link, “The sunset was beautiful. I still have a brilliant blue band clear across the horizon, almost covering the whole window.

The sky above is absolutely black, completely black. I can see stars up above.”

Flying on, I could see the night horizon, the roundness of the darkened Earth, and the light of the moon on the clouds below. I needed the periscope to see the moon coming up behind me. I began to search the sky for constellations.

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.