The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Capcom added: “I was just looking over your reentry checklist. Looks like you’re in pretty good shape. You’ll have to manually retract the scope.”

No, the scope had come in during a retrosequence check over Hawaii.

Capcom continued: “Roger. I didn’t get that. Very good.”

Carpenter commented: “Going to be tight on fuel.”

Capcom replied: “Roger. You have plenty of time. You have about 7 minutes before .05 g so take—”

Now I was literally dropping out of the sky and had a beautiful view of the earth below. On his own way down Al had strained for a similar view through the tiny portholes of Freedom 7. He hadn’t been able to see anything on his way down, so I treated him to a vicarious thrill – my newer version of the Mercury capsule offered a panoramic view of the earth below.

Carpenter described: “Okay. I can make out very small farmland, pastureland below. I see individual fields, rivers, lakes, roads, I think. I’ll get back to reentry attitude.”

Kris Stoever:

“Roger,” Al concurred. “Recommend you get close to reentry attitude.” Listening to Scott, Al may have recalled that his own attempts at reentry sightseeing had left him behind in his work. Coming up on LOS, he reminded Scott for the last time to use “as little fuel as possible and stand by on fly-by-wire until rates develop. Over.”

Carpenter replied: “Roger, will do.”

With Scott now in range over Cape Canaveral, Gus read off the final stowage checklist items – reminders in case the pilot had been busy with other things. Was the glove compartment “latched and closed?” “Roger, it is,” Scott replied. He read off the face-plate check. “Negative. It is now. Thank you.” Everything else was done. Gus transmitted a weather report for the expected impact point:

“The weather in the recovery point is good – you’ve got overcast cloud, 3 foot waves, 8 knots of wind, 10 miles visibility, and the cloud bases are at 1,000 feet.”

Scott reported matter-of-factly on “the orange glow,” using the definite article because the glow, in that particular blazing color, had been reported by his predecessors in these fiery precincts. He also saw burning particles from the heat shield form an immense orange wake behind him and struggled against increasing G loads to switch on the auxiliary damping mode. G forces would peak in a few minutes at eleven times the normal gravitational load. The capsule steadied. Auxiliary damping worked!

“I assume we’re in blackout now,” Scott transmitted to Gus, referring to the expected loss of voice contact that sets in at about 75,000 feet.

“Give me a try.” Nothing. “There goes something tearing away,” Scott said, now for the voice recorder. Atmospheric drag was creating temperatures outside of close to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit – incinerating trivial bits of the spacecraft, as expected.

Scott continued talking, for the voice recorder, using the old Carpenter grunt perfected at Johnsville to force the words out. It took all his strength. Aurora 7 was reaching peak deceleration rates. Telemetered cardiac readings coming in at Mercury Control registered the physical effort required to produce words, observations, status reports. He never stopped, every three to five seconds bringing a new, concise transmission. The capsule was now oscillating badly.

Faget recalls that back in 1958 they decided that 60 degrees of oscillation was “good enough” when they worked on prototypes in the wind tunnels. But he laughed rather sadistically at the memory – “oscillations of 60 degrees would have produced a wild ride.” By 1962, more circumspect human-factors engineers had settled on the oscillations of a mere 10 degrees. And Scott was right at the edge of “tolerable.” He tried to find reassurance in the evenness of the oscillations, which signaled good aerodynamic stability.

But then, something new: the orange glow gave way to green flashes, and then to a distinctly greenish gleam, unreported by his predecessors. Must be the ionizing beryllium shingles, Scott thought. Again at fifty thousand feet, the oscillations returned.

The Cape should be able to hear him by now, he thought. His transmissions became more expectant.

Carpenter reported: “And I’m standing by for altimeter off the peg. Cape, do you read yet?”

Scott’s rate of descent was slowing to only one hundred feet per second. Cabin pressure was “holding okay.” He was at forty-five thousand feet, already arming the drogue parachute, the first of two chutes designed to steady and slow the capsule on its descent toward splashdown. Then he heard a voice, maybe Gus, and replied, “Roger, Aurora 7 reading okay.”

Carpenter reported: “Getting some pretty good oscillations now and we’re out of fuel.”