The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

“I don’t know. Gonna find out.”

“Roger. Is this flying time or rocket time?”

“Lighter than air, buddy.” Gordo would appreciate that. He and Deke had led the charge for getting us some flying time while we were training.

I turned the capsule around again so I could face the sunrise. The light revealed a new cloud of the bright partides, and I was still convinced they weren’t coming from the capsule. The flight surgeon at Woomera suggested that I eat again. But I had been paying too much attention to the attitude control, and now I was concerned about lining up the spacecraft for reentry. This was the next set of hurdles, another crucial change in flight conditions that would require every ounce of my attention. I was over Hawaii when the capcom there said, “Friendship Seven, we have been reading an indication on the ground of segment fifty-one, which is landing bag deploy. We suggest this is as an erroneous signal. However, Cape would like you to check this by putting the landing bag switch in auto position and see if you get a light Do you concur with this? Over.”

Now, for the first time, I knew why they had been asking about the landing bag. They did think it might have been activated, meaning that the heat shield that would protect the capsule from the searing heat of reentry was unlatched. Nothing was flapping around. The package of retro-rockets that would slow the capsule for reentry was strapped over the heat shield. But it would jettison, and what then? If the heat shield dropped out of place, I could be incinerated on reentry, and this was the first confirmation of that possibility. I thought it over for a few seconds. If the green light came on, we’d know that the bag had accidentally deployed. But if it hadn’t, and there was something wrong with the circuits, flipping the switch to automatic might create the disaster we had feared. “Okay,” I reluctantly concurred, “if that’s what they recommend, we’ll go ahead and try it.”

I reached up and flipped the switch to auto. No light. I quickly switched it back to off. They hadn’t been trying to relate the particles to the landing bag at all.

“Roger, that’s fine,” the Hawaii capcom said. “In this case, we’ll go ahead, and the reentry sequence will be normal.”

The seconds ticked down toward the retro-firing sequence. I passed out of contact with Hawaii and into Wally Shirra’s range at Point Arguello. I was flying backward again, the blunt end of the capsule facing forward, manually backing up the erratic automatic system. The retro warning light came on. A few seconds before the rockets fired, Wally said, “John, leave your retro pack on through your pass over Texas. Do you read?”

“Roger.”

I moved the hand controller and brought the capsule to the proper attitude. The first retro-rocket fired on time at 4:33:07. Every second off would make a five-mile difference in the landing spot. The braking effect on the capsule was dramatic. “It feels like I’m going back toward Hawaii,” I radioed.

“Don’t do that,” Wally joked. “You want to go to the East Coast.”

The second rocket fired five seconds later, the third five seconds after that. They each fired for about twelve seconds, combining to slow the capsule about five hundred feet per second, a little over 330 miles per hour, not much but enough to drop it below orbital speed. Normally the exhausted rocket package would be jettisoned to burn as it fell into the atmosphere, but Wally repeated, “Keep your retro pack on until you pass Texas.”

“That’s affirmative.”

“Pretty good-looking flight from what we’ve seen,” Wally said.

“Roger. Everything went pretty good except for this ASCS problem.”

“It looked like your attitude held pretty well. Did you have to back it up at all?”

“Oh, yes, quite a bit. Yeah, I had a lot of trouble with it.”

“Good enough for government work from down here.”

“Yes, sir, it looks good, Wally. We’ll see you back East.”

“Rog.”

I gave a fast readout of the gauges and asked Wally, “Do you have a time for going to jettison retro? Over.”

“Texas will give you that message. Over.”

Wally and I kept chatting like a couple of tourists ex changing travel notes. “This is Friendship Seven. Can see El Centro and the Imperial Valley, Salton Sea very clear.”

“It should be pretty green. We’ve had a lot of rain down here.”

The automatic yaw control kept banging the capsule back and forth, so I switched back to manual in all three axes. The capcom at Corpus Christi, Texas, came on and said, “We are recommending that you leave the retro package on through the entire reentry. This means you will have to override the point-zero-five-G switch [this sensed atmospheric resistance and started the capsule’s reentry program], which is expected to occur at oh four forty-three fifty-eight. This also means that you will have to manually retract the scope. Do you read?”