The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

At the debriefing sessions, I had the highest praise for the whole operation, the training, the way the team had come back from all the cancellations, and the mission itself – with one exception. They hadn’t told me directly their fears about the heat shield, and I was really unhappy about that. A lot of people, doctors in particular, had the idea that you’d panic in such a situation. The truth was, they had no idea what would happen. None of us were panic-prone on the ground or in an airplane or in any of the things they put us through in training, including underwater egress from the capsule. But they thought we might panic once we were up in space and assumed it was better if we didn’t know the worst possibilities.

I thought the astronaut ought to have all the information the people on the ground had as soon as they had it so he could deal with a problem if communication was lost. I was adamant about it. I said, “Don’t ever leave a guy up there again without giving him all the information you have available. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a manned program?”

It emerged that a battle had gone on in the control center over whether they should tell me. Deke and Chris Kraft had argued that they ought to tell me, and others had argued against it, but I didn’t learn that until many years later. I don’t know who had made the decision, but they changed the policy after that to establish that all information about the condition of the spacecraft was to be shared with the pilot.

I was describing the luminous particles I saw at each sunrise when George Ruff, the psychiatrist, broke up everyone in the debriefing by asking, “What did they say, John?” (The particles proved to be a short-lived phenomenon. The Soviets called them the Glenn effect; NASA learned from later flights that they were droplets of frozen water vapor from the capsule’s heat exchanger system, but their firefly-like glow remains a mystery.)

George also had a catch-all question tagged on at the end of the standard form we filled out at the end of each day’s training. It was, Was there any unusual activity during this period?

“No,” I wrote, “just the normal day in space.”

Grand Turk was an interlude, in which morning medical checks and debriefing sessions were followed by afternoons of play. Scott, as my backup, stuck with me as I had Al and Gus after their flights. We went scuba diving and spearfishing, and Scott rescued a diver who had blacked out eighty feet down, giving him some of his own air as he brought him to the surface. There were no crowds, since the debriefing site was closed.

Annie had tried to give me some idea of the overwhelming public reaction to the flight. Shorty Powers had said there was a mood afoot for public celebration. But I was only faintly aware of the groundswell that was building.

Project Mercury returned to space on May 24, with Scott’s three-orbit flight in Aurora 7. Deke had been scheduled to make the flight, but the doctors had grounded him after detecting a slight heart murmur.

Malfunctions aboard Scott Carpenter’s orbital flight

Scott Carpenter was born in Boulder, Colorado, on 1 May 1925. He joined the US Navy in 1943 but was discharged at the end of the Second World War. He rejoined the US Navy and was commissioned in 1949. He was given flight training at Pensacola, Florida and Corpus Christi, Texas and designated a naval aviator in April 1951. During the Korean War he flew anti-submarine, ship surveillance, and aerial mining missions in the Yellow Sea, South China Sea and the Formosa Straits. In 1954 he attended the Navy Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland, and subsequently was assigned to the Electronics Test Division of the Naval Air Test Center, where he flew tests in every type of naval aircraft including multi-and single-engine jet and propeller-driven fighters, attack planes, patrol bombers, transports, and seaplanes.