The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

The USS John R. Pierce had a strong signal from Carpenter’s SARAH beacon and he was spotted by a Lockheed P2V, the type of US Navy patrol plane that he had flown during the Korean War. He used a hand mirror to signal to it. After NASA had been told, it announced, “A gentleman by the name of Carpenter was seen seated comfortably in his life raft.”

A gust of wind or a winch malfunction plunged him into the sea as he was being lifted by a helicopter. Water damage destroyed half his camera film.

NASA Flight director Chris Kraft blamed Carpenter for Aurora 7’s problems. Robert Voas wrote that Kraft:

grew angrier and more frustrated as the astronaut, busy with a science-heavy flight plan that he had deplored from the beginning, was insufficiently responsive.

Voas added that Kraft saw:

the magnitude of the danger, felt the tension as Carpenter assumed control of the capsule, and worried during the critical reentry period that Scott might not survive.

Voas explained how Aurora 7’s flight differed from that of its predecessors:

Aurora 7 was the first flight in which the success of the mission depended on the performance of the astronaut. In the two suborbital flights, the flight path was fixed: Al and Gus were coming home anyway. In John’s flight, aboard Friendship 7, he took over the spacecraft attitude control because the small thruster controls were malfunctioning. But Glenn’s capsule would have reentered safely in any case because the ASCS, the basic automatic control system, remained operational. The concern with the air bag separation was a false alarm.

But with Aurora 7, the gyro problem went undetected on the ground and the attitude control system was malfunctioning. The astronaut’s eye on the horizon was the only adequate check of the automated gyro system. With its malfunctioning gyros, the spacecraft could not have maintained adequate control during retrofire. Mercury Control may have viewed the manually controlled reentry as sloppy, but the spacecraft came back in one piece and the world accepted the flight for what it was: another success.

Aurora 7 provided proof of why it was important for man to fly in space. It was proof of what the members of the Space Task Group had told the skeptics at Edwards back in 1959: the Mercury astronaut would be a pilot. Many in the test pilot profession were still deriding the program as a “man in a can” stunt, with a guineapig astronaut along for the ride. The irony, of course, is that as Kraft’s anger over MA-7 seeped through the ranks of NASA, subsequent missions came as close to the “man in a can” flights that everyone was deriding in the first place.

With the increasing complexity of the Gemini and Apollo flights this early, intense conflict between control from the ground and control from the cockpit faded. But NASA missed an important opportunity to help the nation understand how putting man in space was not simply a stunt but a significant step toward conquering space.

In October 1962 nine new astronauts were added to the programme. Glenn’s new training partner was Neil Armstrong. Glenn:

I always got a kick out of Neil’s theory on exercise: everyone was allotted only so many heartbeats, and he didn’t want to waste any of his doing something silly like running down the road. Actually, he stayed in better shape than that would indicate.

Glenn gave an example of Armstrong’s sense of humour. It happened when they were on a survival exercise in a Central American jungle:

Neil had a sly sense of humor. After we had built our two-man lean-to of wood and jungle vines, he used a charred stick to write the name Choco Hilton on it. It rained every day. We used the jungle hammocks to stay off the ground. They were tented to keep off the rain, and had mosquito netting. We caught a few small fish and cooked them on a damp wood fire. At the end of the three days the astronauts assembled from their scattered sites and followed a small stream to a larger river. There we put on life vests and floated downriver to one of the feeder lakes to the Panama Canal, where a launch picked us up to end the exercise.