Project Mercury

John Glenn personified the relationship between the development of jet aircraft and the exploration of outer space. Born on 18 July 1921 in New Concord, Ohio, he grew up during the Depression and in April 1941 joined a civilian pilot training scheme while he was at college.

In June 1941 he gained his private pilot’s licence. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the Army Air Corps. He began training and was commissioned into the US Marine Corps in 1943, serving in a Marine fighter squadron. He flew 59 combat missions in the Pacific, air to ground strikes in F4U Corsairs.

His next posting was testing combat aircraft for Grumman. By the end of the war he had been promoted to captain and was offered a regular commission which he accepted. He joined a US mission to the Nationalist Chinese, in support of the Marshall peace initiative, flying reconnaissance patrols. By 1948 Glenn was serving as an instructor in an advanced training unit based at Corpus Christi, Texas, flying jets, the Lockheed P80 Shooting Star. He was sent to Korea in October 1952 where he flew F9 Panthers on close support missions. In 1953 he was attached to the USAF, flying fighter interceptors, the F‑86. In the final days of the war he shot down three Chinese MIG jet fighters.

Posted to the Naval Air Test Centre (NATC) at Patuxent River, Maryland, he graduated as a test pilot in July 1954 and was transferred to the fighter design branch of the Naval Aeronautics Department. In 1957 he personally broke the existing supersonic transcontinental speed record, flying 2,445 miles from coast to coast of the United States. His flight involved air‑to‑air refuelling three times and broke the record by 21 minutes.

Early in 1958 Glenn voluntered for part‑time work on an experimental programme based at the NACA research centre at Langley. When NASA was formed from NACA, Glenn was well placed to learn that he fitted the profile for manned space flight. His age, weight, height, education and experience were suitable although he had to lose 30 lb. On 17 December 1958 NASA announced the name of the project: Mercury.

NASA was looking for test pilots on active duty, preferably with combat experience and clean records. Glenn reported for tests at the Lovelace Clinic, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Glenn:

Lovelace was a diagnostic hospital specializing in aerospace medicine. It had been founded by Dr W. Randolph Lovelace II, a prominent space scientist and chairman of the NASA life sciences committee, who had conducted high‑altitude and pressure suit experimental work at Wright‑Patterson Air Force Base. The clinic was private, but there was a strong military flavor to its administration, which was directed by Dr A.H. Schwichtenberg, a retired Air Force general. The doctors, led by Lovelace, were a hard‑nosed group, or so it seemed to those of us they were poking, probing, and evaluating.

For over a week they made every kind of measurement and did every kind of test on the human body, inside and out, that medical science knew of or could imagine. Nobody really knew what that body would go through in space, so Lovelace and his team tried everything. They drew blood, took urine and stool samples, scraped our throats, measured the contents of our stomachs, gave us barium enemas, and submerged us in water tanks to record our total body volume. They shone lights into our eyes, ears, noses, and everywhere else. They measured our heart and pulse rates, blood pressure, brain waves, and muscular reactions to electric current. Their examination of the lower bowel was the most uncomfortable procedure I had ever experienced, a sigmoidal probe with a device those of us who were tested nicknamed the “Steel Eel.” Wires and tubes dangled from us like tentacles from jellyfish. Nobody wanted to tell us what some of the stranger tests were for.

Doctors are the natural enemies of pilots. Pilots like to fly; and doctors frequently turn up reasons why they can’t. I didn’t find the tests as humiliating or infuriating as some of the other candidates did. Pete Conrad was so incensed by having to rush through the hospital’s public hallways “in distress” that he told General Schwichtenberg he wasn’t giving himself any more enemas – and deposited his enema bag on the general’s desk for emphasis. He didn’t get chosen for the space program until later. But I thought the tests, obnoxious as they were, were fascinating for the most part. It was all in the interests of science, and going into space was going to be one of the greatest scientific adventures of all time.

After eight days at Lovelace, one candidate washed out for medical reasons and the rest of us, again in small groups, received orders sending us to Wright‑Patterson and the Wright Air Development Center’s Aeromedical Laboratories. We traveled separately, as we had to Lovelace, to preserve secrecy.

The tests at Wright‑Patterson were more familiar. They subjected us to the kinds of stresses test pilots could be expected to endure, heightening some of them in an attempt to simulate the thin reaches of space. Again, the doctors were guessing. They injected cold water into our ears as a way to create a condition called nystagmus, in which you can’t keep your eyes focused on one spot, then measured how long it took us to recover. They measured body fat content and rated our body types as endomorphic, ectomorphic, or mesomorphic. They inserted a rectal thermometer; sat us in heat chambers, ran the temperature to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and clocked the rise in our body temperature and heart rate. We walked on treadmills, stepped repeatedly on and off a twenty‑inch step, and rode stationary bicycles. We blew into tubes that measured lung capacity and held our breath as long as we could. We plunged our feet into buckets of ice water while the doctors took blood pressure and pulse measurements. We sat strapped into chairs that shook us like rag dolls. We were assaulted with sound of shifting amplitudes and frequencies that made our flight suits quiver and produced sensations in our bones. We endured blinking strobe lights at frequencies designed to irritate the nervous system. We entered an altitude chamber that simulated sixty‑five thousand feet of altitude, with only partial pressure suits and oxygen. We lay on a table that tilted like a slow‑motion carnival ride. We pushed buttons and pulled levers in response to flashing lights to test our reaction times. We sat in an anechoic isolation chamber to see how we might endure the vast blackness and silence of space. All the while sensors plastered on our heads and bodies recorded our reactions.

The isolation chamber was simply a dark soundproof room. A technician led me in, seated me at a desk, and turned out the lights when he left. I had no idea if I would be there for fifteen minutes or fifteen hours. I knew the easiest way to make the time pass would be to put my head down and go to sleep. But I suspected that the doctors wanted mental alertness. I opened the desk drawer after a while and found a writing tablet. I had a pencil in my pocket. “Will attempt to keep record of the run,” I wrote on the first page.

By the time the door opened Glenn had scrawled 18 pages. Glenn:

I had moved on to summarizing my thoughts on the isolation experience when the door opened after three hours and the lights came on.

I had been back in Washington two weeks when the phone rang at my desk at BuAer. I answered it and heard Charles Doulan say, “Major Glenn, you’ve been through all the tests. Are you still interested in the program?”

“Yes, I am. Very much,” I said, and held my breath. “Well, congratulations. You’ve made it.”

I don’t remember my response. I know I felt a swell of pride – that I couldn’t help – but I also felt humble at being a small part of a program that was so full of scientific talent and of such importance to the nation.

Hanging up the phone, I was struck by the fact that the call had come on the day it did. It was April 6, my wedding anniversary. Annie and I had been married sixteen years, and that night we had planned to go to dinner at Evans Farm Inn in McLean and a play in downtown Washington in celebration. There was no greater celebration than sharing the news with her. I told her I had no idea where all this would lead, but wherever it was, we were in it together.

The Mercury Astronauts met for the first time at Langley Air Force Base on April 8, 1959. We were seven pilots, three from the Air Force, three from the Navy, and one from the Marines, but none of us were in uniform, and at that time we were still anonymous. I had just received a routine promotion from major to lieutenant colonel, but as astronauts, we all ranked equally. We wore suits, the uniform of our new service, as we milled about with NASA officials and discreetly tried to check out the other men who had been chosen for this new assignment.

Robert Gilruth was the head of NASA’s Space Task Group, which included Project Mercury. Bob had a fringe of thinning white hair and prominent black eyehrows, which gave him a look of Buddha‑like wisdom. He was an old‑line aerodynamics investigator with a quiet, congenial manner and he stepped to a podium in the room where we had gathered to brief us on how NASA planned to tie us into the project.

“You’re not just short‑term hired guns,” he said. “NASA wants the benefit of your experience as test pilots and engineers. Project Mercury is a team, and you’re part of it. This isn’t the military, where direction comes from the top down. We want your direct input. Any problem you have with design, or anything we’re doing, you let me know.

“But let me warn you. Project Mercury isn’t a continuation of anything. Nobody’s ever gone into space before. It’s completely new; it’s untried, there are many uncertainties ahead. If for any reason whatsoever you decide it’s not for you, you can go back to your respective service with no questions asked.”

None of us were looking back, however. After Bob’s brief introduction, we tried to get to know the men we were going to be working with.

I had met some of the others who’d been chosen, but didn’t know them well. They may have known a little more about me, as a result of the cross‑country speed run and Name That Tune, than I knew about them.

Al Shepard had worked on the Crusader. We had attended meetings together; and comments he had made revealed a sharp, analytical mind. A couple of times Annie and I had been in groups that included him and his wife, Louise, but we didn’t know them well. I knew Scott Carpenter and Wally Schirra, because they, like Al, were Navy – I didn’t know Wally’s work or personality; but Scott had been in my group during the testing at Wright‑Patterson. We shared an open‑minded curiosity that had made us like each other right away.

The Air Force guys, Gordo Cooper, Gus Grissom, and Deke Slayton, I didn’t know at all. I had met them for the first time when we were going through some of the testing.

One thing we did know, from our own histories and what we had gone through at Lovelace and Wright‑Patterson, was that we were all extremely competent. The Langley meeting bolstered that impression. The way each man walked, stood, and shook hands exuded confidence, and maybe just a little arrogance. The fact that we had been selected meant we stood on a high step on the test pilot ladder. We were part of an elite group, an exclusive fraternity. Talking to each other, we didn’t need preliminaries.

I learned quickly that several of the others had flown in Korea. Gus had about a hundred F‑86missions under his belt. Wally had served as an exchange pilot with the Air Force, as I had, and had shot down two MiGs. Scott had flown P2Vs, a long‑range patrol plane; he had only about two hundred hours of jet time, which made his selection a little surprising. Deke and I were the only two who also had flown in combat during World War II; he had done bombing runs in B‑25s over Europe. More recently, he and Gordo had been test pilots at Edwards. They had been flying the hottest of the Air Force jets, the Century series, although Deke was in fighter ops and Gordo was in engineering. Gus had been doing electronics testing at Wright‑Patterson.

The final seven became known as the Mercury Seven and were introduced to the public. Glenn:

Walt shambled to the podium while people handed out press kits with our names and information about Project Mercury. Then we waited for a few minutes with flashbulbs going off in our faces while the reporters with afternoon deadlines scrambled for the phones to alert their offices. They came back, and T. Keith Glennan, NASA’s director who had served in the same capacity at NACA, stood up and said, “It is my pleasure to introduce to you – and I consider it a very real honor, gentlemen – Malcolm S. Carpenter, Leroy G. Cooper, John H. Glenn Jr., Virgil I. Grissom, Walter M. Schirra Jr., Alan B. Shepard Jr., and Donald K. Slayton… the nation’s Mercury astronauts.”

The competition from the Soviets made the whole business urgent. Glenn:

And then there were the Soviets. Their strides in space, combined with our fear of their intentions, placed the astronauts in the front line of the war for not only space supremacy but – in many minds – national survival. The Soviets seemed so joyless and ideologically grim, and we didn’t want to be like them. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had said, “We will bury you.” Americans knew a threat when they heard one.

In May 1959 training began in earnest – the first trial launch of the Atlas missile was a failure. Glenn:

We had been in training for about three weeks when NASA took us to Cape Canaveral for our first missile launch. We gathered on the night of May 18 on a camera pad about half a mile from one of the big gantries where an Atlas D waited to lift off.

The Atlas was the United States’ first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), built by the Convair division of General Dynamics. Its two Rocketdyne booster engines each produced 154,000 pounds of thrust, and its central sustainer engine generated 57,000 pounds. Two small vernier engines used for guidance added another 1,000 pounds of thrust each. The Atlas was thin‑skinned, basically a steel balloon. Its fuel combination of liquid oxygen and RP‑1 kerosene had to be kept under pressure or the missile would crumple like a crushed soft‑drink can. It was a very fragile vehicle that had been under development since the mid‑1950s and had yet to produce a record of sustained success.

The sight of the Atlas on the launch pad was dramatic enough to have been designed by Disney. Searchlights played on the silver rocket, and clouds of water vapor came off it from the liquid oxygen, or lox, cooled to 293 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

The count went down. Suddenly the engines lit, and the rocket lifted off slowly in a blast of orange flame and billowing smoke. The powerful racket of the engines rolled across the palmettos like a wind. We watched it gain speed, a brilliant phoenix rising into the night sky.

A minute after lifting off, it blew. The explosion looked like a hydrogen bomb going off right over our heads, so close we ducked before we realized the flight path would carry the debris out over the Atlantic. We stood in stunned silence after the roar of the explosion faded. Even Wally didn’t have one of his usual wisecracks. Then Al said, “Well, I’m glad they got that out of the way.”

We were a sober group of astronauts when we sat down the next morning with B. G. McNabb and his engineers in the Convair launch team. They had little to tell us, except that they were analyzing photo and telemetry data from the launch.

Ten days later, on May 28, NASA launched an Army Jupiter missile from Cape Canaveral. In the nose cone were Able, a Rhesus monkey, and Baker, a South American squirrel monkey, both festooned with electrodes to register the effects of weightlessness. The missile achieved an altitude of three hundred miles, and the nose cone was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean with both monkeys alive.

Able died four days later from the effects of anesthesia given for removal of the electrodes. Nevertheless, the heart stoppage and brain alterations that some doctors had thought might result from weightlessness apparently had not occurred. At the very least, it was clear living beings could reach space and return alive – if the rockets that carried them didn’t blow up.

In September 1959 the Soviets reasserted their lead. They launched Luna 2. Luna 2 was an unmanned probe which crash landed on the moon. In October 1959 another Soviet probe, Luna 3, sent back pictures of the dark side of the moon. On 4 December NASA launched and recovered a monkey named Sam to an altitude of 55 miles.

The chief of the US Army’s Guided Missile Development Division was Wernher von Braun. Glenn described him:

The German‑born engineer, then in his late forties, was a handsome, broad‑shouldered man with thick dark hair. Von Braun had been a devoted Nazi during World War II, but his rocket expertise was valuable to the United States, and when the war ended he and members of his team of German scientists were brought to this country Other scientists went to the Soviets. Whatever anyone thought of von Braun’s previous allegiances, he had a well‑deserved reputation for heading an effective rocket team. He had led the development of the German V‑2 guided ballistic missiles that had rained destruction on England and Allied‑held Europe near the end of the war. In the new postwar equation, the V‑2 became the basis for the Redstone, which gave the United States its effective intermediate‑range ballistic missile in the competition with the Soviets. Modifications would allow it to carry a Mercury capsule. Von Braun spoke of men riding the Redstone and other rockets into space and someday to the moon, of humans pitting themselves against enormous odds for the sake of discovery.

His library showed him to be a man whose interests were not confined to rocket science. I wandered into the book‑lined room expecting to find nothing but tomes on engineering, astronomy, physics, and other technical matters. There were many of those. But I was impressed to find even more extensive collections in fields such as religion, comparative religion, philosophy, history, and government.

By the time of our trip to Huntsville, we were also doing parabolic flights at Edwards that gave up to a minute of weightlessness at the top of the parabola. We used two‑place F‑100 trainers. We’d take the rear seat while the pilot would go up to forty thousand feet, make a dive reaching Mach 1.4, and then head up again while pushing over to an angle that would make anything on the cockpit floor float up in front of you, holding that balance all the way over the top of the arc and back toward Earth again. It was like an extension, but much faster and farther, of that brief moment when your car goes over a rise in the road and you’re lifted out of your seat. While we were strapped down and couldn’t float in the cabin, it gave us the chance to try eating and drinking and manipulating equipment during weightlessness.

We had done something similar at Wright‑Patterson in a C‑131, a cargo plane. This gave us only about fifteen seconds, but was more fun because we were unstrapped and could float and turn flips in the cabin.

Bob Gilruth had made good on his word to involve us in all aspects of Project Mercury. We each had specific areas of responsibility. Since I had probably flown more different types of aircraft than the others, I was handed cockpit layout and instrumentation, spacecraft controls, and simulation.

Scott’s domain was communications equipment and procedures, periscope operation, and navigational aids and procedures. Gordo’s area was the Redstone booster, trajectory, aerodynamics, countdown, and flight procedures, emergency egress, and rescue. Gus was responsible for reaction control system, hand controller, autopilot, and horizon scanners. Wally had environmental control systems, pilot support and restraint, pressure suit, and aero‑medical monitoring. Recovery systems, parachutes, recovery aids, recovery procedures, and range network were Al’s job. And Deke had the Atlas booster and escape system, including configuration, trajectory, aerodynamics, countdown, and flight procedures.

Oddly, we were limited in the weight we could rocket into orbit because of our advanced technology. The Soviets lifted far heavier satellites than ours. Both nations’ boosters had been designed as ICBMs, but because we had done a better job of reducing the size of our nuclear warheads we could use smaller missiles. The Soviets had failed at making smaller warheads, and so needed larger boosters. The tables were turned when it came to putting satellites, and eventually manned spacecraft, into space. Our Atlas rocket, with its 367,000 pounds of thrust, could deliver nuclear warheads from the United States to Moscow – but could barely lift the four‑thousand‑pound Mercury capsule into orbit; the Soviets could have orbited a house if they had wanted to.

There were still arguments for and against manned flight and the astronauts wanted a window. Glenn:

Bob Gilruth and NASA’s design team had agreed with us on the window if the weight problem could be solved. Max Faget, the capsule’s original designer, attacked the problem. If the daddy of the spacecraft thought it could be done, it could be done. Eventually Max gave the new design his go‑ahead, and soon afterward we got word that McDonnell was incorporating a window in the Mercury capsule.

The ability to recognize constellations and orient the capsule in relation to them could be critical in an orbital flight. The capsule had to be lined up just right at the moment we fired the retrorockets that would slow us at reentry. Too steep a reentry would send the capsule into the atmosphere too fast, and it would burn up; too low and it could skip off the atmosphere like a stone on the surface of a pond and not be able to return. The capsule’s automatic attitude control would probably work perfectly, but knowing how to position the capsule by the stars was at the very least a good backup.

Here was an argument against both the few Air Force test pilots who claimed the astronauts would be just passengers and the heavy thinkers who thought that machines could learn as much about space as humans and for a lot less money. This was to be a different kind of flying, for sure. But machines failed, and only humans in the cockpit could take over when they did. NASA knew that from the start.

Cape Canaveral had been a military launch site since 1949 and was chosen as the project Mercury launch site. The second Atlas test was also a failure. Glenn:

The morning of July 29 was dark and rainy. The countdown proceeded anyway. NASA had assembled an audience that included the astronauts, its own officials, and executives and engineers from General Dynamics. The Atlas sat on the launch pad, topped with a simulated Mercury capsule, the package looking exactly as it would look on the day an astronaut was aboard ready to be lifted into orbit. We listened on the squawk box as the count went down. The stage was set for the debut of Mercury‑Atlas 1.

The launch went perfectly. The rocket rose on a column of flame and disappeared into an orange halo in the clouds. A minute later the squawk box erupted with hurried, cryptic messages indicating that flight telemetry – the signals from the rocket to the ground – had been lost and the rocket had disappeared from radar. Another half a minute, and some people on the ground thought they heard an explosion.

The investigation that followed determined the rocket had failed structurally and blown up going through high Q at thirty‑two thousand feet. The debris fell into the Atlantic. The only good news was that capsule telemetry had continued until it hit the water; and all of its shattered pieces were recovered.

I didn’t know what to think. We were much closer now to a manned flight than when we had witnessed the earlier explosion. The first flights were going to be on top of the more proven, smaller Redstone rockets, but sooner or later an astronaut was going to be riding an Atlas because only the Atlas had the power to put a spacecraft into orbit. The failure of MA‑1 set NASA’s launch schedule back by months.

A test of the smaller Redstone rocket proved to be an additional discouragement. Glenn:

This time it was the test flight of Mercury‑Redstone 1, the supposedly well tested Redstone rocket, topped with a Mercury capsule just as it would be for the first manned suborbital flight. Once again NASA assembled an audience of several hundred dignitaries and politicians at the Cape for the November 21 launch. The Redstone fired, rose four inches, then cut off and settled back on the pad. The three small rockets of the capsule’s escape tower worked perfectly, however. They lifted the tower – without the capsule – four thousand feet. The capsule stayed atop the rocket, but the parachutes that were supposed to bring it down activated. The drogue chute popped out and floated down, carrying the capsule’s antenna canister. Then the main and reserve chutes billowed out, settled down over the capsule and booster, and floated gently in the breeze.

The astronauts, NASA officials, and Wernher von Braun and members of his Redstone team watched in consternation from the blockhouse. Then we couldn’t leave. Von Braun was afraid that if a gust caught one of the parachutes, it would pull the rocket over, and it would blow up with its entire fuel load. It was several hours before we could scramble out.

The press again derided NASA. Reports said the sight of the escape tower popping from the top of the rocket looked for all the world like a champagne cork popping from a bottle.

On 12 April 1961 Major Yury A.Gagarin of the Soviet Union made the first space flight by a man in Vostok 1. It was a full orbital flight lasting one hour forty‑eight minutes.