The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

It was all so new. An hour and fourteen minutes into the flight, I was approaching day again. I didn’t have time to reflect on the magnitude of my experience, only to record its components as I reeled off the readings and performed the tests. The capcom on Canton Island helped me put it in perspective after I reported seeing through the periscope “the brilliant blue horizon coming up behind me, approaching sunrise.”

“Roger, Friendship Seven. You are very lucky.”

“You’re right. Man, this is beautiful.”

The sun rose as quickly as it had set. Suddenly there it was, a brilliant red in my view through the periscope. It was blinding, and I added a dark filter to the clear lens so I could watch it. Suddenly I saw around the capsule a huge field of particles that looked like tiny yellow stars that seemed to travel with the capsule, but more slowly. There were thousands of them, like swirling fireflies. I talked into the cockpit recorder about this mysterious phenomenon as I flew out of range of Canton Island and into a dead zone before the station at Guaymas, Mexico, on the Gulf of California, picked me up. We thought we had foreseen everything, but this was entirely new. I tried to describe them again, but Guaymas seemed interested only in giving me the retro sequence time, the precise moment the capsule’s retro-rockets would have to be fired in case I had to come down after one orbit.

Changing film in the camera, I discovered a pitfall of weightlessness when I inadvertently batted a canister of film out of sight behind the instrument panel. I waited a few seconds for it to drop into view and then realised that it wouldn’t.

I was an hour and a half into the flight, and in range of the station at Point Arguello, California, where Wally Schirra was acting as capcom. I had just picked him up and was looking for a sight of land beneath the clouds when the capsule drifted out of yaw limits about twenty degrees to the right. One of the large thrusters kicked it back. It swung to the left until it triggered the opposite large thruster; which brought it back to the right again. I went to fly-by-wire and oriented the capsule manually.

The “fireflies” diminished in number as I flew east into brighter sunlight. I switched back to automatic attitude control. The capsule swung to the right again, and I switched back to manual. I picked up Al at the Cape and gave him my diagnosis. The one-pound thruster to correct outward drift was out, so the drift continued until the five-pound thruster activated, and it pushed the capsule too far into left yaw, activating the larger thruster there. The thrusters were setting up a back-and-forth cycle that, if it persisted, would diminish their fuel supply and maybe jeopardize the mission.

“Roger, Seven, we concur. Recommending you remain fly-by-wire.”

“Roger. Remaining fly-by-wire.”

Al said that President Kennedy would be talking to me by way of a radio hookup, but it didn’t come through and Al asked for my detailed thirty-minute report instead. I reported at 1:36:54 that controlling the capsule manually was smooth and easy, and the fuses and switches were all normal. I paused to ask about the presidential hookup. “Are we in communication yet? Over.”

“Say again, Seven.”

“Roger. I’ll be out of communication fairly soon. I thought if the other call was in, I would stop the check. Over.”

“Not as yet. We’ll get you next time.”

“Roger. Continuing report.” I ran through conditions in the cabin and added, “Only really one unusual thing so far besides ASCS [the automatic attitude control] trouble were the little particles, luminous particles around the capsule, just thousands of them right at sunrise over the Pacific. Over.”

“Roger, Seven, we have all that. Looks like you’re in good shape. Remain on fly-by-wire for the moment.”

As the second orbit began, I thought I could see a long wake from a recovery ship in the Atlantic. One of the tracking stations was aboard the ship Rose Knot, off the West African coast at the equator. I moved into its range and reported a reversal of the thruster problem. Now I seemed to have no low right thrust in yaw, to correct leftward drift. I performed a set maneuver, turning the capsule 180 degrees in yaw so that I was flying facing forward. “I like this attitude very much, so you can see where you’re going,” I radioed. I also reported seeing a loose bolt floating inside the periscope.

I passed the two-hour mark of the flight over Africa, with the capsule back in its original attitude. The second sunset was as brilliant as the first, the light again departing in a band of rainbow colors that extended on each side of the sunfall. Over Zanzibar, my eyeballs still held their shape; I reported, “I have no problem reading the charts, no problem with astigmatism at all. I am having no trouble at all holding attitudes, either. I’m still on fly-by-wire.”