The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

“I’ll talk to you after I land this afternoon.” It was all I could do to add the words, “I love you.” I heard her say, “I love you too.” I was glad nobody could see my eyes.

In a mirror near the capsule window, I could see the blockhouse and back across the Cape. The periscope gave me a view out over the Atlantic. It was turning into a fine day. I felt a little bit like the way I had felt going into combat. There you are, ready to go; you know all the procedures and there’s nothing left to do but just do it. People have always asked if I was afraid. I wasn’t. Constructive apprehension is more like it. I was keyed up and alert to everything that was going on, and I had full knowledge of the situation – the best antidote to fear. Besides, this was the fourth time I had suited up, and I still had trouble believing I would actually take off.

Pipes whined and creaked below me; the booster shook and thumped when the crew gimballed the engines. I clearly was sitting on a huge, complex machine. We had joked that we were riding into space on a collection of parts supplied by the lowest bidder on a government contract, and I could hear them all.

At T minus thirty-five minutes, I heard the order to top off the lox tanks. Instantly the voices in my headset vibrated with a new excitement. We’d never gotten this far before. Topping off the lox tanks was a landmark in the countdown. The crew had begun to catch “go fever.”

There was a hold at twenty-two minutes when a lox valve stuck, and another at six minutes to solve an electrical power failure at the tracking station in Bermuda. Then the minutes dwindled into seconds.

At eighteen seconds the countdown switched to automatic, and I thought for the first time that it was going to happen. At four seconds I felt rather than heard the rocket engines stir to life sixty-five feet below me. The hold-down clamps released with a thud. The count reached zero at 9:47 am.

My earphones didn’t carry Scott’s parting message: “Godspeed, John Glenn.” Tom O’Malley, General Dynamics’ test director, added, “May the good Lord ride with you all the way.”

Liftoff was slow. The Atlas’s 367,000 pounds of thrust were barely enough to overcome its 125 ton weight. I wasn’t really off until the forty-two-inch umbilical cord that took electrical connections to the base of the rocket pulled loose. That was my last connection with Earth. It took the two boosters and the sustainer engine three seconds of fire and thunder to lift the thing that far. From where I sat the rise seemed ponderous and stately, as if the rocket were an elephant trying to become a ballerina. Then the mission elapsed-time clock on the cockpit panel ticked into life and I could report, “The clock is operating. We’re under way.”

I could hardly believe it. Finally!

The rocket rolled and headed slightly north of east. At thirteen seconds I felt a little shudder. “A little bumpy along about here,” I reported. The G forces started to build up. The engines burned fuel at an enormous rate, one ton a second, more in the first minute than a jet airliner flying coast to coast, and as the fuel was consumed the rocket grew lighter and rose faster. At forty-eight seconds I began to feel the vibration associated with high Q, the worst seconds of aerodynamic stress, when the capsule was pushing through air resistance amounting to almost a thousand pounds per square foot. The shaking got worse, then smoothed out at 1:12, and I felt the relief of knowing that I was through max Q, the part of the launch where the rocket was most likely to blow.

At 2:09 the booster engines cut off and fell away. I was miles high and forty-five miles from the Cape. The rocket pitched forward for the few seconds it took for the escape tower’s jettison rocket to fire, taking the half-ton tower away from the capsule. The G forces fell to just over one. Then the Atlas pitched up again and, driven by the sustainer engine and the two smaller vernier engines, made course corrections, resumed its acceleration toward a top speed of 17,545 miles per hour in the ever-thinning air. Another hurdle passed. Another instant of relief.

Pilots gear their moments of greatest attention to the times when flight conditions change. When you get through them, you’re glad for a fraction of a second, and then you think about the next thing you have to do.

The Gs built again, pushing me back into the couch. The sky looked dark outside the window. Following the flight plan, I repeated the fuel, oxygen, cabin pressure, and battery readings from the dials in front of me in the tiny cabin. The arc of the flight was taking me out over Bermuda. “Cape is go and I am go. Capsule is in good shape,” I reported.

“Roger. Twenty seconds to SECO.” That was Al Shephard on the capsule communicator’s microphone at mission control, warning me that the next crucial moment – sustainer engine cutoff – was seconds away.