The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

“Negative,” I said. Mercury Control was working on an erroneous assumption about the thrusters malfunctioning and needed to be sure I had checked them thoroughly. Having satisfied my own questions about the thrusters, and done the best I could with the ASCS, I had moved on to grappling with my spacesuit’s coolant and steam-vent settings and said so: “Except for this problem with steam-vent temperature.” It wasn’t the heat now, but the humidity, in this case inside my suit: I knew that the cabin temperatures were high, at about 103 degrees. The dry air would at least provide some evaporative relief from the sweat now pouring down my forehead, plowing through my eyebrows, and stinging my eyes with salt.

Carpenter reported: “I’m going – I’ll open the visor a minute, that’ll cool – it seems cooler with the visor open.”

The Capcom persisted. Mercury Control needed me to reconfirm that I had used the fly-by-wire control system to check out all the thrusters.

Capcom replied: “Aurora 7, confirm you’ve checked fly-by-wire, and all thrusters are okay.”

Carpenter replied: “Roger. Fly-by-wire is checked, all thrusters are okay.”

But the information coming from the horizon scanner was faulty. During the orbital phase of spaceflight, a malfunctioning automated navigational system is tolerable – for my flight this was especially so because the ASCS was so rarely used. But during an ASCS-controlled retrofire – that critical exit off the orbital highway – an accurate horizon scanner is crucial. For retrofire, the spacecraft must be aligned exactly in two axes – pitch and yaw. Pitch attitude, or angle, must be 34 degrees, nose down. Yaw, the left-right attitude, must be steady at 0 degrees, or pointing directly back along the flight path. The ASCS performs this maneuver automatically, and better than any pilot, when the on-board navigational instruments are working properly.

If the gyros are broken, all is not lost: a pilot can do two things to bring yaw attitude to zero. The first is to point the nose in a direction he thinks is a zero-degree yaw angle and then watch the terrain pass beneath the vehicle. This is nearly impossible to do over featureless ocean or terrain. Far better to have a certain geographical feature or cloud pattern to watch. Because the pilot is traveling backward, the geographical features he is trying to track must begin at the bottom of the window and flow in a straight line from there to the top. When this happens, the pilot knows he is in a zero-degree attitude. This can be done through the periscope too, but it takes a little longer and is less accurate.

My travails with a hot cabin and a humid spacesuit continued over Australia. Deke, the Muchea Capcom, assumed ground communications. It was his unhappy job to tell me that my cabin temperatures had climbed to 107 degrees Fahrenheit (they would peak, during the third orbit, at 108 degrees). Dehydration under such conditions is a worry, and for these and other reasons NASA medics had lobbied for some of the capcom posts, to no avail. By the time I had completed another solid-food experiment, by eating some Pillsbury-made morsels, I was within voice range of the next Australian capcom, at Woomera, and still fussing with my suit temperature controls. The capcom there asked me for suit temperature and humidity readings. They were at 74 degrees Fahrenheit, with the “steam exhaust” registering a miserable 71 degrees of humidity inside my suit. Still, the numbers had come down since Australia, so the Woomera Capcom asked rather hopefully:

“Are you feeling more comfortable at this time?”

A noncommittal “I don’t know” was the best I could manage. I was frustrated with the suit controls and realized with exasperation that for all the exhaustive testing of the suits prior to this and other early launches, no one thought to test its cooling capacity with the face-plate open! And so many in-flight activities required me to keep my visor up.

Carpenter reported: “I’m still warm and still perspiring. I would like to – I would like to nail this temperature problem down. It – for all practical purposes, it’s uncontrollable as far as I can see.”

Capcom asked: “How about water?”

Carpenter replied: “That would be a no.”

Carpenter reported: “I had taken four swallows at approximately this time last orbit. As soon as I get the suit temperature pegged a little bit, I’ll open the visor and have some more water. Over.”