The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

When I had been aboard the carrier for some time an officer came up and presented me with my helmet. I had left it behind in the sinking capsule, but somehow it had bobbed loose and a destroyer crew had picked it up as it floated in the water.

“For your information,” the officer said, “we found it floating right next to a ten-foot shark.”

This was interesting, but it was small consolation to me. We had worked so hard and had overcome so much to get Liberty Bell launched that it just seemed tragic that another glitch had robbed us of the capsule and its instruments at the very last minute. It was especially hard for me, as a professional pilot. In all my years of flying this was the first time that my aircraft and I had not come back together. Liberty Bell was the first thing I had ever lost.

We tried for weeks afterwards to find out what had happened and how it had happened. I even crawled into capsules and tried to duplicate all of my movements, to see if I could make the same thing happen again. But it was impossible. The plunger that detonates the bolts is so far out of the way that I would have had to reach for it on purpose to hit it, and this I did not do. Even when I thrashed about with my elbows, I could not manage to bump against it accidentally. It remains a mystery how that hatch blew. And I am afraid it always will. It was just one of those things.

Fortunately, the telemetry system worked well during the flight, and we got back enough data while I was in the air to answer the questions that I had gone out to ask. We missed the capsule, of course. It had film and tapes aboard which we would have liked to study. But despite all our headaches along the way, and an unhappy ending, Liberty Bell had performed her mission. She had flown me 302.8 miles downrange, had taken me to an altitude of 118.2 miles at a speed of 5,168 mph, had put me through five minutes of weightless flight, and had brought me home, safe and sound. That was all that really mattered. The system itself was valid. The problems which had plagued us could be fixed, and with our second and final sub-orbital mission under our belts, we were ready now for the big one – three orbits of the world.

Glenn’s orbital flight

More sub-orbital flights were scheduled but on 6 August 1961 the Russian cosmonaut Major Yuri Titov made a 17-orbit flight which lasted 25 hours. NASA was hoping to put a man into orbit before the end of the year and this time it would be Glenn. He described the preparations:

Atlas testing moved into its final phase. A September 13 Atlas launch, MA-4, carried a dummy astronaut into orbit and back after circling Earth once, and the capsule landed on target in the Atlantic. At that point the system seemed ready. The Atlas had been strengthened not only by the belly band but with the use of thicker metal near the top. But Bob Gilruth and Hugh Dryden, NASA’s deputy administrator, wanted to send a chimp into orbit before risking a man.

This time the chimp was named Enos, and he went up on November 29. Like Ham, he had been conditioned to pull certain levers in the spacecraft according to signals flashing in front of him. Like Ham’s, his flight was not altogether perfect. The capsule’s attitude control let it roll 45 degrees before the hydrogen peroxide thrusters corrected it. Controllers brought it down in the Pacific after two orbits and about three hours.

When Enos was picked up he had freed an arm from its restraint, gotten inside his chest harness, and pulled off the biosensors that the doctors had attached to record his respiration, heartbeat, pulse, and blood pressure. He also had ripped out the inflated urinary catheter they had implanted, which sent his heart rate soaring during the flight. It made you cringe to think of it.

Nevertheless, Enos’s flight was a success and he appeared unfazed at the postflight news conference with Bob and Walt Williams, Project Mercury’s director of operations. All the attention was on the chimpanzee when one of the reporters asked who would follow him into orbit.

Bob gave the world the news I’d learned just a few weeks earlier, when he had called us all into his office at Langley to tell us who would make the next flight. I had been elated when, at last, I heard that I would be the primary pilot. This time I was on the receiving end of congratulations from a group of disappointed fellow astronauts. Now, as the reporters waited with their pencils poised and cameras running, Bob said, “John Glenn will make the next flight. Scott Carpenter will be his backup.”