Category Escaping the Bonds of Earth

Meanwhile, Glenn continued putting his capsule through its paces, evaluating its abilities in manual, automatic and fly-by-wire modes. It was shortly after passing the two-hour mark of the mission, however, that he received an unusual request from Mission Control: to keep the switch for Friendship 7’s landing bag in the ‘off’ position. He confirmed that the switch was indeed off and pressed on with his work. Later, as he flew over Muchea, Gordo Cooper asked him to confirm it again. Then, during another pass over Canton Island, Glenn overheard an indication from a flight controller that his landing bag – located between the base of the spacecraft and the heat shield – might have accidentally deployed. He queried Mission Control and was assured that the ground was merely monitoring the situation. Glenn began to suspect that the fireflies could be related, perhaps, to some shifting of his heat shield and landing bag.

Already, as early as the second orbit, an engineer at the telemetry console named William Saunders, had noted that ‘Segment 51’ – an instrument providing data on the landing system – was generating unusual readings and Mercury Control instructed all tracking sites to monitor it carefully. A little over four hours into the flight, however, it became clear that the landing bag might be deployed or, at least, not securely locked into position. Whilst over Hawaii, the duty capcom informed Glenn that the signal was probably erroneous, but, to be sure, asked him to set the landing bag switch in its ‘auto’ position. ‘‘Now, for the first time, f knew why they had been asking about the landing bag,’’ Glenn wrote. ‘‘They did think it might have been activated, meaning that the heat shield was unlatched. Nothing was flapping around. The package of retrorockets that would slow the capsule for re-entry was strapped over the heat shield. But it would jettison and what then? ff the heat shield dropped out of place, f could be incinerated on re-entry.’’

ff the green landing bag light came on, Glenn wrote, it would clarify that it had indeed accidentally deployed. However, ‘‘if it hadn’t, and there was something wrong with the circuits, flipping the switch to automatic might create the disaster we had feared’’. He flipped the switch. No light. This suggested that the landing bag was secure. As retrofire approached, Capcom Wally Schirra, based at Point Arguello in California, told Glenn not to jettison his retrorocket package at least throughout his passage across Texas. ft marked the first of several efforts to ensure that, if the heat shield had been loosened, the retrorocket package might hold it in place just long enough to survive the hottest part of re-entry.

Glenn, meanwhile, had worries of his own. From the end of his first orbit, he had experienced problems with Friendship 7’s automatic control system, as the capsule started to swing over to one side along its yaw axis, corrected itself at considerable expense of hydrogen peroxide fuel, before doing the same again. ‘‘ft became necessary for me to control the capsule’s movements by hand,’’ he said later. ‘‘For most of the rest of the trip, f controlled the capsule myself. This did cut down on the other activities we’d planned. ft meant that f had to cancel several of the experiments and observations f wanted to make on the second and third orbits.’’ These would have included observations of the solar corona, terrestrial cloud structures, his ability to adapt his eyes to orbital darkness and further studies of the effects of weightlessness. ‘‘f was able to take far fewer pictures than f’d intended,’’ Glenn continued, ‘‘and f had to pass up my plan to have two meals during the flight to test my ability to get food down under various conditions.’’

Throughout most of his second orbit, as the ground pondered the Segment 51 situation, Glenn persevered with his efforts to determine the problem with the automatic control system. ‘‘f could hear the large fuel thrusters outside the capsule as they popped off their bursts of hydrogen peroxide in first one direction and then the other,’’ he said. ‘‘f could feel the slight throb of the smaller nozzles when f cut them in. The manual system had been a little mushy. ft did not respond quite as crisply as f thought it should have, but f still had good control. ft worked best when f switched to

the fly-by-wire mode, which combines the manual control stick and the fuel nozzles which are operated by the automatic system. This meant that f could work the automatic system by hand and conserve its fuel. Though this routine took most of my attention and kept me rather busy for the next three hours, f thoroughly enjoyed it. The idea that f was flying this thing myself and proving on our first orbital test that a man’s capabilities are needed in space was one of the high spots of the day. The value of this outweighed the loss of some of the things f did not get to do.’’ Coupled with the landing bag situation, however, these malfunctions contributed to shortening the mission from a possible seven orbits to the original three.

Six minutes before retrofire, Glenn duly manoeuvred Friendship 7 into a 14- degree, nose-up attitude. At 2:20 pm, the first retrorocket fired, causing a dramatic braking effect on the capsule and making him feel momentarily as if he was flying backwards, towards Hawaii. The second and third retrorocket firings came at five – second intervals, slowing the capsule sufficiently to drop it out of orbit. Once again, Schirra repeated: “Keep your retro pack on until you pass Texas’’. The tension at Mission Control was palpable. “f looked around the room,’’ wrote Gene Kranz, “and saw faces drained of blood. John Glenn’s life was in peril.’’

Throughout the early stages of re-entry, Glenn and Schirra chattered like a pair of tourists exchanging travel notes, as Friendship 7 came within sight of El Centro and the fmperial Valley, followed by southern California’s Salton Sea. Then, as he passed over Corpus Christi, Glenn was told again, with evident urgency, to “leave the retro package on through the entire re-entry’’. This meant that he would have to override the 0.05 G switch – which sensed atmospheric resistance and started the capsule’s re­entry program – and manually retract the periscope. Glancing at the on-board clock, which had ticked off four hours, 38 minutes and 47 seconds since launch, his suspicions resurfaced that the reason for keeping the retro package on throughout re-entry was because the heat shield was loose.

He would later admit to irritation at being kept, officially, in the dark about the potential disaster looming ahead. fnformation about his spacecraft was his lifeblood, he wrote in his post-flight report, and it was knowledge, not absence of knowledge, which informed each of his decisions. Despite asking for Mission Control’s reasons for wanting the package kept in place, he was told only that the decision was “the judgement of Cape Flight’’. fn Florida, Al Shepard gave Glenn as much information as he had available. “We’re not sure whether or not your landing bag has deployed,’’ he said. “We feel it is possible to re-enter with the retro package on. We see no difficulty at this time with this type of re-entry.’’

Although the package and its three metal straps would eventually burn up as Friendship 7 plunged deeper into the atmosphere, Glenn assumed that, by keeping it on, the capsule might be protected for long enough until the thickening air could firmly hold the heat shield against Friendship 7’s base. Max Faget, the father of the Mercury spacecraft, agreed with the plan of using the retrorocket package to hold the heat shield in place, but admitted that it posed its own risks: any unused solid fuel could explode when re-entry temperatures grew too hot, destroying the capsule. Flight Director Chris Kraft chimed in with additional concern that the attached retrorocket package could cause Friendship 7 to tumble, incinerating both it and

Glenn. Kraft, although eventually persuaded by Faget and Walt Williams, strongly felt that the ‘cure’ could be worse than the ‘disease’.

As the main phase of re-entry got underway, Glenn switched Friendship 7 from manual to fly-by-wire control, placing the capsule in a slow spin to hold it onto its correct flight path through the atmosphere. A little more than a metre behind his back, the base of the spacecraft steadily heated to a maximum of 5,200°C. Its ionised envelope of heat also blacked out communications, as Al Shepard’s voice in Glenn’s headset faded to nothing. A thud reverberated through Friendship 7 as the retrorocket package’s three metal straps melted, a fragment of which ‘‘fell against the window, clung for a moment and burned away’’. Glenn would recount years later that he expected, as each second passed, to feel the heat on his back and along his spine, but continued working his procedures, as flaming bits of – something – streamed past the window. He had no idea if they were pieces of the retrorocket package or, indeed, of the heat shield.

He was preoccupied for much of the re-entry with damping out the capsule’s oscillations with the hand controller, but had the brief opportunity to glance through the window and see the sky turn to a bright orange, which he described to the automatic tape recorder as ‘‘a real fireball outside’’. Every few seconds throughout the communications blackout, he attempted to contact Shepard, all the while working to keep Friendship 7 on the straight and narrow. At length, and by now through the worst of the re-entry heating, he heard the crackle of Shepard’s voice over his headset. The relief on the ground was audible.

Descending at subsonic speeds, by the time he reached an altitude of 13.7 km, Glenn felt the capsule rocking wildly and, as he looked upwards, could see ‘‘the twisting corkscrew contrail of my path’’. Eight and a half kilometres above the Atlantic, the stabilising drogue chute deployed automatically, followed by the main canopy a few seconds later. Shortly before splashdown, Glenn flipped the landing bag deployment switch. As expected, it lit up. Green. Subsequent investigation would discover that the rotary switch to be actuated by the heat shield deployment had a loose stem, which caused the electrical contact to break when the stem was moved up and down. This was believed to account for the false landing bag deployment signal. However, thinking back over the decision to keep the retro package attached throughout re-entry, Chris Kraft would resolve never to agree to such a dangerous exercise again.

Glenn splashed down with what he later described as ‘‘a good solid thump’’ at 2:43 pm. His landing co-ordinates were later given as 21 degrees 20 minutes North and 68 degrees 40 minutes West, some 320 km north-west of Puerto Rico. He was 60 km off-target, a discrepancy caused by retrofire calculations which had not taken into account Friendship 7’s weight loss in consumables. Seventeen minutes later, the destroyer Noa, codenamed ‘Steelhead’, drew alongside the capsule, followed, shortly afterwards, by helicopters from the Randolph, which had recovered Gus Grissom a few months earlier.

‘‘I could hear gurgling sounds almost immediately,’’ Glenn said of his first few seconds back on Earth. ‘‘After it listed over to the right and then to the left, the capsule righted itself and I could find no traces of any leaks.’’ He released his straps and shoulder harness, removed his helmet and put up his neck dam. He was sweating profusely, as physicians would later determine, and despite the open snorkels in Friendship 7’s hull, the humid air offered little respite. When the Noa arrived, he glanced through the window – coated with a smoky film from re-entry – and saw a deck full of sailors, so high in number that he asked the destroyer’s captain if anyone was actually running the ship! Within minutes, Friendship 7 had been winched aboard and, after obtaining clearance from the bridge, Glenn detonated the hatch. He received two skinned knuckles, through his pressure suit gloves, as the plunger snapped back. (It would be his only injury and, later, the realisation that manually activating the plunger caused such an injury would work in Gus Grissom’s favour.)

According to physicians Robert Mulin and Gene Mclver, Glenn was clearly fatigued, sweating and dehydrated; his only water intake had been from the apple sauce pouch, although his urine collector was full. After drinking water and showering, he became more talkative. He debriefed into a tape recorder aboard the Noa, before being flown to the Randolph for X-rays and an electrocardiogram and, later that evening, to Grand Turk Island for a welcoming committee of astronauts, physicians and NASA officials. When asked by psychiatrist George Ruff if there had been any unusual activity during his mission, Glenn replied “No… just a normal day in space!’’

The Voskhod 1 fliers were still in orbit when the first of the calamitous events of October 1964 took place. Indeed, when Komarov requested a one-day extension to the mission, he was cryptically refused by Korolev, who quoted Hamlet with the words ‘‘There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’’. This has been taken by some historians as a veiled hint at Khrushchev’s removal from office and, perhaps, that Voskhod 1 was originally intended to fly a somewhat longer mission. After a full day aloft, during which time Yegorov took pulse and respiration measurements, Feoktistov checked Voskhod’s equipment and atmosphere and Komarov evaluated the spacecraft’s orientation system, the time came for the fiery plunge to Earth.

According to Asif Siddiqi, the extreme shortness of Yegorov and Feoktistov’s training regime was reflected in their reactions to weightlessness. “Within two or three hours of the launch,’’ he wrote, “both began to experience disorientation in space. Yegorov felt as if he was bent over face-downward, while Feoktistov actually felt he was upside down. Although the sensations apparently did not impair their ability to work, both suffered these feelings throughout the entire length of the mission. . . an anomaly that had not been detected on any of the earlier Soviet space missions. Both cosmonauts also felt dizzy when they moved their heads sharply. It seems that Yegorov had been more afflicted, with his unpleasant sensations peaking about seven hours after launch. . .’’

Shortly after 9:00 am Moscow Time on 13 October, Komarov was advised of the landing instructions and completed the orientation of Voskhod and the firing of its retrorocket. Indications that everything did not go entirely smoothly were, however, relieved by an electrical signal from the spacecraft, which confirmed that the main capsule had separated from the instrument section. At 10:26 am, a tracking station in the Caucasus picked up the signal and followed Voskhod 1 as it hurtled over the Caspian Sea, sped high above the fishing port of Aralsk in south-western Kazakhstan and finally touched down 312 km north-east of Kustanai. Further electrical signals confirmed that the parachute hatch jettisoned properly, but for an anxious Sergei Korolev the key concern was whether the parachutes themselves had deployed. Airman Mikhailov, aboard an Ilyushin-14 some 40 km east of Marevka, confirmed that he saw two parachute canopies. . . then, thankfully, the welcome sight of the capsule on the ground with the three men, alive and well, waving at him.

Landing occurred at 10:47 am, completing a mission of scarcely a few minutes more than 24 hours, and the three cosmonauts were helicoptered to Kokchetav and thence to Kustanai and finally Tyuratam, arriving late in the afternoon. Komarov, the only ‘real’ cosmonaut on the crew, was described as looking tired, but the two ‘invalids’, Feoktistov and Yegorov, were in good condition and high spirits. Plans for the men to speak to Khrushchev, mysteriously, were postponed when it became apparent that he had returned from his dacha in Pitsunda to Moscow. All attempts to call him at his office in the capital were unsuccessful; only later would it become apparent that as Voskhod plummeted Earthward, so Khrushchev’s premiership had plummeted to its own ignominious end.

In their first conversations with the physicians, Feoktistov and Yegorov would describe their first – and only – experience of weightlessness: the former said that he found conditions not at all unpleasant and the latter, while admitting to feeling unwell during the first few orbits, recovered thereafter. Khrushchev remained uncontactable and, indeed, Marshal Sergei Rudenko was ordered to fly back to the capital immediately, delaying the cosmonauts’ report to the State Commission until the next day. In his diary, Nikolai Kamanin noted his concern that ‘‘something unusual was happening in Moscow’’. The cosmonauts’ post-flight visit to Red

Square was cancelled and their first meeting with the Soviet leader did not come until 19 October, nearly a full week after their landing. That leader was not Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, but Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev.

The three-strong crew, Time magazine told its readers on 23 October, “was a sure promise of multi-man space stations”, adding that “none of these feats have yet been accomplished by the lagging US space programme”. Indeed, at the beginning of the second decade of the human exploration of space, following their loss of the Moon race, the Soviets would become the first to establish a true foothold in the heavens with a long-term orbital base called Salyut. ft was a remarkable achievement that would, by the end of the 20th century, see cosmonauts spending more than a year apiece in space, and despite the harsh economic downturn after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian expertise continues to be drawn upon in today’s fnternational Space Station effort.

However, neither Time nor many of its readers were entirely fooled. The lack of transparency in the early Soviet missions meant that it was virtually impossible to determine what kind of spacecraft Komarov, Yegorov and Feoktistov had ridden into orbit. Rumours quickly abounded in the western press that longer multi­manned flights were planned. Other rumours, which suggested that Voskhod 1 had been brought home early due to communications difficulties, the illness of a cosmonaut or a malfunctioning rocket, were firmly refuted by the Soviets. fn fact, the only light they publicly cast on the ‘new’ spacecraft was that it was lined with “a snowy-white, soft, sponge-like synthetic fabric’’, that its trio of cosmonaut seats were arranged in a row and that its instrumentation consisted of a navigation globe, telegraph key and a multitude of buttons and switches. ft was, admitted Time, ‘‘little help in deciding whether the Sunrise was entirely new or merely an improved version of the standard one-man Vostok-type spaceships”. Senator Clinton Anderson, chair of the Senate’s space and aeronautics committee, speculated that it weighed some 6,800 kg – not too much higher than its real 5,680 kg – and, further, hinted that this would make it possible to fly aboard a similar rocket to that used by Vostok.

Within days, on 28 October, plans for subsequent missions were laid out. The Vykhod flight, to be flown by Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov, was tentatively pencilled-in for the first quarter of 1965, after which five others would undertake long-duration sorties of up to 15 days, conduct scientific research and perform another spacewalk. These would decisively surpass American plans to fly their first two-man Gemini in the spring of 1965, conduct a spacewalk that summer and attempt a 14-day endurance run thereafter. Hopes were high, wrote Nikolai Kamanin at the end of December, that five or six cosmonauts could be flown in a pair of spacecraft which would rendezvous and dock in orbit as early as 1966. After this, perhaps, a flyby of the Moon could be attempted.

Key to the success of the Vykhod mission – Voskhod 2 – was the 250 kg inflatable airlock through which Leonov would have to squeeze his way, all the time encased in a cumbersome, pressurised suit which would almost claim his life in orbit. On Gemini missions, an astronaut would venture outside by depressurising the capsule and opening the hatch. This was feasible because the American miniaturised electronic systems were capable of operating in vacuum. The fact that the Soviet

systems relied on air cooling meant that the capsule could not be depressurised and, hence, the airlock was born. Initial designs sketched out rigid structures, flexible contraptions and even one that could be rolled into a spiral before launch. The ‘winning’ design, codenamed ‘Volga’, envisaged a cylindrical device composed of 36 inflatable booms isolated in groups of 12. In this way, even if two groups of booms lost pressure, the airlock would retain its shape.

The airlock was not merely desirable, but necessary, since Voskhod’s avionics were cooled by cabin air and would overheat if the entire cabin was depressurised. Physically, it comprised a metallic ring, 1.2 m wide, which fitted over the spacecraft’s inward-opening hatch, and its length when fully deployed amounted to 2.5 m. Oxygen to inflate and pressurise the airlock booms was supplied by four spherical tanks and took around seven minutes to complete in orbit. The chamber boasted two lamps and three 16 mm cameras – two inside, one outside – and control of the inflation procedure would be performed from inside the cabin by Belyayev. However, a backup set of controls for Leonov’s use were suspended on bungee cords inside the Volga airlock itself.

For two years, the cosmonauts and their backups – Dmitri Zaikin and Yevgeni Khrunov – trained to a point at which the spacecraft’s cabin and airlock seemed like a second home, albeit a cramped one. In his autobiography, Leonov would recall his close friendship with Belyayev and express relief that attempts to remove ‘Pasha’

from Voskhod 2 on the basis of an old leg injury sustained in a parachute accident were not successful. “There were those,” Leonov wrote, “who had wanted Yevgeni Khrunov to command the mission… but I lobbied hard for Pasha, whom I thought more capable than Khrunov. I had worked with him more; I trusted him. In the end they agreed, though it caused some rancour with Khrunov.” Instead of commanding the prime crew, Khrunov would instead shadow Leonov on the backup team. Other attempts to fly another cosmonaut, 43-year-old Georgi Beregovoi, were quashed by Nikolai Kamanin; not on the basis of his age, but in view of his height and weight, both of which were greater than Belyayev, Leonov, Zaikin or Khrunov.

Much of Leonov’s preparation for the actual spacewalk, which would last between ten and 15 minutes, was undertaken in a modified Tupolev Tu-104 aircraft, flown in a series of parabolic arcs to simulate weightlessness for periods of up to 30 seconds at a time. It was time-consuming and imperfect, wrote Leonov, since “there was no way of simulating pure weightlessness in any laboratory on the ground. . . such limited, disconnected periods meant that the hour and 15 minutes of exiting the spacecraft, performing the spacewalk and re-entering the airlock had to be practiced over the course of over 200 Tu-104 steep climbs’’. Astronaut Deke Slayton, who would fly with Leonov on the Apollo-Soyuz mission ten years later, remembered the world’s first spacewalker recounting that he needed to build his upper-body muscles and indulged in diving “to test his equilibrium”. Leonov also, according to Asif Siddiqi, “cycled about a thousand kilometres in less than a year, carried out more than 150 EVA training sessions and jumped by parachute 117 times’’. Elsewhere, pressure-chamber tests with Zaikin and Khrunov satisfactorily evaluated the performance of the airlock at conditions equivalent to an altitude of 37 km. At around the same time, early in February 1965, the mission was redesignated as Voskhod 2, rather than Vykhod (‘Exit’), which it was felt would give away its true nature.

As their March 1965 launch date drew nearer, plans were afoot to despatch an unmanned precursor, Cosmos 57, to demonstrate the performance of the Volga airlock. Early on 22 February, three weeks before Belyayev and Leonov were due to fly, it was blasted into orbit… and, shortly thereafter, it exploded! Telemetry signals intercepted by American intelligence hinted that its airlock had successfully deployed and tests of opening and closing its outermost hatch were in progress. Then, the hatch was automatically closed and further telemetry indicated that commands to repressurise the airlock had been issued and accepted by Cosmos 57. Television images transmitted from the spacecraft revealed that the airlock appeared to have fully inflated. ‘‘During the first orbit,’’ wrote Nikolai Kamanin in his diary, ‘‘the craft was observed by special television circuit at Simferopol and Moscow [ground stations] … Quite unexpectedly, a distinct image of the front part of the airlock appeared on the screen, causing an outburst of joy among all present.’’

Unfortunately, the Klyuchi and Yelisovo ground stations, both in Kamchatka, then issued simultaneous commands to deflate the airlock, which confused Cosmos 57 and which it interpreted as an instruction to commence descent. The spacecraft automatically set the retrofire process in motion, but the TDU-1 rocket fired improperly. Spaceflight analyst Sven Grahn has mentioned on his website that

Cosmos 57 apparently began to tumble; this was at least partly due to the unjettisoned airlock, whose presence would have displaced the spacecraft’s centre of mass and induced the spinning. Twenty-nine minutes later, as programmed, the on­board destruct system – designed to prevent sensitive hardware from falling into enemy hands – was automatically activated to destroy Cosmos 57. A post-flight accident commission found that Klyuchi alone was permitted to transmit the airlock-deflation command and that Yelisovo should only have done so as a backup measure and only if directed by the Moscow control centre. In his diary, Kamanin would blame the poor security of commands being issued to orbiting spacecraft and felt that such weaknesses could be exploited by the United States.

Sergei Korolev faced a quandary. Only one other Voskhod capsule was ready to fly and the spacewalk could not be attempted until the airlock had been satisfactorily evaluated on a fully-successful mission. On 7 March, a Zenit reconnaissance satellite, under the cover name of ‘Cosmos 59’, was launched. A key concern was that, assuming the inflatable airlock jettisoned successfully after Leonov’s spacewalk, its attachment ring would rise 27-40 mm above the surface of the capsule; however, if it only partially separated, the ring could be as much as 80 mm high. In such an eventuality there was a chance that the asymmetry of the ring on the upper heat shield could impart a rotation on the Voskhod, perhaps affecting the safe deployment of the drogue parachute during descent. Cosmos 59 was equipped with an identical airlock attachment ring to that planned for Voskhod 2 and its eight-day mission was entirely successful, proving, with just days to spare, that Belyayev and Leonov could survive re-entry and landing with this in place.

Nonetheless, in his autobiography, Leonov would recount the Chief Designer’s concern that he and Belyayev should have the final decision over whether to fly their mission. Leonov also wrote of Korolev’s visible exhaustion: he had suffered from high fever as a result of lung inflammation and, indeed, would die early the following year, after prophetically declaring Voskhod 2 as the ‘‘last major work of his life’’. Korolev told the men that they had two options: they could wait a year for another Voskhod to be built, fly one spacecraft unmanned to complete Cosmos 57’s mission and then launch Belyayev and Leonov, or they could take a risk and fly the manned mission immediately. ‘‘Then, very cannily,’’ wrote Leonov, ‘‘he added that he believed the Americans were preparing their astronaut Ed White to make a spacewalk in May. He knew how to get our competitive juices flowing. He must have known what we would say. We didn’t want to lose a year.’’

The fruitless station-keeping exercise had led to a 42 per cent depletion of their fuel supply, which would correspondingly reduce the extent to which McDivitt could manoeuvre the spacecraft while White was outside. It forced the astronauts to continue with their primary mission, the EVA, and leave rendezvous for Gemini VI. McDivitt, aware that his partner was tired and hot after the rendezvous attempt, told the Kano tracking station that he wanted the spacewalk postponed from the second to the third orbit. Chris Kraft agreed and the astronauts spent some time relaxing, admiring the view of the Gulf of Mexico and Florida and chatting to Gus Grissom, the Houston capcom. Then they dived headlong into the 54-item checklist to prepare the EVA equipment. At length, White snapped a gold-tinted faceplate onto his helmet, hooked up the 7.4 m umbilical to provide him with oxygen and a communications link to McDivitt and, with the aid of a small mirror, strapped the 3.7 kg chest pack into place. He checked his camera gear three times, wanting to make sure he did not leave the lens cap stuck on. “I knew I might as well not come back if I did,’’ White said later.

Since the EVA would place the entire cabin into vacuum, the astronauts had to steadily reduce its pressure from the normal 3.51 bars to 2.55 bars. Depressurisation commenced over Carnarvon in Australia, but quickly hit a snag when the overhead hatch refused to unlatch. A spring had failed to compress properly. Four hours and 18 minutes after launch, at 2:34 pm, White cranked a ratchet handle to loosen a set of prongs lining the opening of the hatch, raised it to 50-degrees-open and poked his head into the void.

After receiving assurance from Kraft that he was good to go, White pushed himself from his seat and caught his first glimpse of Earth from the ethereal vantage point known only to the spacewalker – with barely a helmet faceplate and 166 km of emptiness separating him from his home planet. ‘Below’, he beheld the intense blue of the Pacific and, coming up to the east, Hawaii. Losing no time, he tested the hand­held manoeuvring device and found that it responded crisply to his commands, as he ‘squirted’ it to propel himself firstly underneath the capsule, then to its top. Within a short time, the manoeuvring device’s gas supply was gone and for the remainder of his 21 minutes outside, White twisted and hand-pulled himself backwards and forwards along his tether. The umbilical imparted the force to the spacecraft, which reacted in response. ‘‘One thing about it,’’ noted McDivitt as he fired the thrusters to hold the craft stable, ‘‘when Ed starts whipping around that thing, it sure makes the spacecraft hard to control.’’ Also tricky was the fact that the umbilical kept drawing White towards the adaptor section and he had no desire to contaminate his suit with the toxic residue from burning monomethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide.

The spacecraft was nearing the California coastline when Capcom Gus Grissom asked for photographs. ‘‘Get out in front where I can see you again,’’ McDivitt called and White duly complied. It is hard to comprehend that in little more than a quarter of an hour, White had ‘walked’ from the central Pacific, crossed California and, very soon, he and McDivitt were gliding high above Houston, talking to Grissom, somewhere, directly beneath them. ‘‘There’s Galveston Bay right there!’’ McDivitt yelled with excitement. ‘‘Hey, Ed, can you see it on your side of the spacecraft?’’ White concurred and snapped a picture with a 35 mm camera affixed to his hand-held pack. McDivitt, using a 70 mm Hasselblad, also took pictures, venturing ‘‘they’re not very good’’. On the contrary, these actually turned into some of the most iconic images from the annals of the early manned space effort. A 16 mm movie camera also recorded scenes of White in motion, bouncing backwards and forwards over a cloud-studded, blue-and-white Earth.

From his seat in the MOCR, Grissom was having a hard time trying to contact the two men. Every time McDivitt or White spoke, the spacecraft’s voice-activated system cut off messages from Mission Control – and they talked a lot during those exhilarating minutes. When McDivitt called Houston to ask if there was anything they wished to say, Kraft pushed his communications switch, something he rarely did, and ordered, ‘‘The Flight Director says ‘Get back in’!’’ The spacecraft was heading toward Earth’s shadow and White had to be inside by then with the hatch closed. As White returned to the cabin, he described it as ‘‘the saddest moment of my life’’. His last view was of the entire southern portion of Florida and the islands chain of Cuba and Puerto Rico. McDivitt turned up the interior lights to guide his partner to safety in case they hit orbital darkness before he was in. White pushed his feet back through the hatch, onto his seat and finally under the instrument panel. He had walked across America – and then some – in barely 21 minutes.

White’s return to the capsule was not entirely smooth, however, and his pulse rate soared from 50 to 178 beats per minute at the end of the spacewalk. He closed the hatch over his head and reached for the handle to lock it, quickly realising that it would be as hard to seal as it had been to open. As he pushed on the handle, McDivitt pulled onto him to give him some leverage and, eventually, the hatch was secured. The official ending time of the first American spacewalk was 3:10 pm, some four hours and 54 minutes into the mission and 36 minutes between the opening and closure of the hatch. Repressurisation started two minutes later. White had long since exceeded the cooling capacity of his space suit, resulting in severe condensation inside his helmet and sweat streaming into his eyes. The hatch problems led to a decision from the MOCR not to re-open it again to discard unneeded equipment.

After the mission, White would recount that the hand-held manoeuvring unit worked in the pitch and yaw axes, more or less as it had done during ground simulations. In the roll axis, however, he considered it more difficult to control without using excessive fuel. He experienced no sensations of vertigo or disorientation; nor, indeed, did he feel any inkling of the tremendous 28,100 km/h at which he was moving. White’s excursion also demonstrated that astronauts would be able to cross from the Apollo lunar module back to the command module, if necessary, in the event that the two spacecraft could not dock properly after ascent from the Moon’s surface.

Meanwhile, aboard Gemini IV, White relaxed and McDivitt began powering down some of the spacecraft’s systems to conserve electrical power and OAMS fuel, intending to drift for the next two and a half days. Plans called for the men to sleep alternate periods of four hours each, although this would prove difficult with the constant crackle of radio chatter from MOCR, frequently bumping into each other and an inability to turn down the volumes on their headsets. In spite of the drama of the past few hours, they had barely begun their 98-hour mission. It would be an uncomfortable and tedious slog.

His voice exhibited clarity, calmness and confidence when Korolev called over the radio an hour before launch for a status update. To alleviate the boredom, Pavel Popovich, the cosmonaut on duty in the control bunker, arranged for some music to be played. This stopped abruptly at 8:51 am as Korolev gruffly announced that, with a little over 15 minutes to go, it was time for Gagarin to seal his gloves and close his visor. Unlike their counterparts in the United States, no ‘5-4-3-2-1’ countdown was followed; the R-7 was simply fired at the appointed time. As a result, the last few seconds before humanity’s first voyage into space were almost anti-climatic. With steady rhythm, Korolev barked out in turn: ‘‘Launch key to ‘go’ position. . . Air purging… Idle run,’’ and, finally, at 9:07 am, ‘‘Ignition!’’ The gantry’s supporting arms sprang clear from the sides of the rocket as its 20 kerosene-fed engines, with an explosive yield of 880,000 kg, roared to full power.

Gagarin would later describe the initial sensation of liftoff as ‘‘an ever-growing din’’, albeit no louder than the sounds he had experienced flying high-performance jets at Nikel. His helmet muffled much of the R-7’s rumble, although the vibrations remained apparent. At some point, a few seconds after leaving Earth, he yelled the immortal words ‘‘Poyekhali!’’ (‘‘Let’s go!’’) over the radio circuit. Within two minutes, as the G loads began to build, he found it increasingly difficult to speak and would later compare the sensation to the stress of a harsh turn in a MiG. The pressure lifted momentarily as the R-7’s four strap-on boosters burned out and separated; after a brief pause, the central core of the rocket accelerated and the G loads began to rise again. By three minutes into the flight, at 9:10 am, the Little Seven’s nose fairing was jettisoned from around Vostok’s ball, giving Gagarin his first glimpse of the dark blue sky and the clear curvature of Earth as he reached the edge of space.

The R-7’s core, now exhausted of propellant, finally fell away some five minutes into the flight, leaving Gagarin reliant on an upper-stage engine, which inserted him

into orbit promptly at 9:18 am, exactly as Korolev had planned. Unknown to the cosmonaut, the core had actually burned for longer than anticipated, leaving Vostok in an orbit with an apogee – high point – of 327 km, rather than the intended 230 km. It added a little more height to Russia’s already-won World Aviation Altitude Record. As Muscovites arrived at work and the western world still slumbered – figuratively and literally – a new era had begun. Gagarin, whose heart rate soared from 66 to 158 beats per minute during ascent, had won the first lap of the space race.

Although the noise and intense vibration of the R-7 was now gone, it was succeeded by the steady murmur of fans, ventilators, pumps and the hiss of static in his ears. His first experience of the state of weightlessness, properly termed ‘microgravity’, was hampered by the fact that he was tightly strapped into his ejection seat. However, he had purposely carried a small Russian doll as a gravity indicator and watched as it floated comically in midair. So too did a notepad and pencil. In fact, this would not be the doll’s only experience of space travel: in 1991, cosmonaut Musa Manarov would carry it on his mission to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Gagarin’s flight.

As the capsule slowly rotated, to avoid wasting propellant on unnecessary manoeuvres and also to ensure that various sections of Vostok did not become too hot or cold, the First Cosmonaut had his first opportunity to view the world through the Vzor. In his official statement, made in Moscow a few days later, he would describe ‘‘a smooth transition from pale blue, blue, dark blue, violet and absolutely black… a magnificent picture’’. He started jotting down observations in his notepad, but after the pencil floated away he turned instead to the on-board tape recorder to log his thoughts, describing weightlessness as ‘‘not at all unpleasant’’ and confirming that the food and drink were good. Two Russian schoolgirls, who would sample that same food in less than two hours’ time, would be inclined to disagree.

Ten minutes after launch, Vostok was heading eastwards in the direction of Siberia and Gagarin gradually drifted out of radio range with Tyuratam, to be picked up in turn by other listening posts at Novosibirsk, Kolpashevo, Khabarovsk and the easternmost station on Soviet soil, Yelizovo, near Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula. To attract Gagarin’s attention, each station transmitted musical themes to him: Muscovite tunes, ‘Waves of the Amur’, Baglanova songs and others. ‘‘During that early period,’’ Alexei Leonov wrote, ‘‘the Mission Control Centre at Yevpatoriya in the Crimea . . . was still under construction, so communication and control from the ground. . . were performed from the radio stations above which the spacecraft flew.’’ Leonov had been sent to the remote Yelizovo site a few days earlier as its cosmonaut representative and, to underline the secrecy, had no idea if Gagarin or Titov was aboard Vostok. Then, as the spacecraft passed over Kamchatka at around 9:21 am, he saw the first crude television images from the cabin. ‘‘I could not make out his facial features,’’ he wrote, ‘‘but I could tell from the way he moved that it was Yuri.’’

Leonov had been instructed not to initiate communications with Vostok unless given permission to do so and he duly remained silent. However, within moments, Gagarin radioed a request for details of his ‘‘flight path’’, keeping the orbital nature of the mission – for now – a secret from western ears. “The radio operator by my side did not realise his finger was depressing the button that opened the radio link… when he turned to speak to me,” Leonov wrote. The open mike broadcast the words of both Leonov and the radio operator straight up to Vostok. As soon as he heard Leonov tell the operator that “everything is going fine”, Gagarin responded with “Give my regards to Blondin”, fair-haired Leonov’s nickname.

The journey continued, cutting diagonally across the Pacific Ocean from volcanic Kamchatka’s land of fire and ice into darkness and toward the sleeping Americas. “The transition into Earth’s shadow,’’ Gagarin would explain to a Moscow press conference a few days later, “took place very rapidly. Darkness comes instantly and nothing can be seen. The exit from the Earth’s shadow is also rapid and sharp.’’ The unexpected suddenness of the shift from orbital daytime to nighttime led to some mutterings that the flight was a fraud; a testament, clearly, to how limited humanity’s understanding of space travel was at the time. Midway through the darkness, at 9:26 am, Vostok rose above the horizon of the Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) station on the Alaskan island of Shemya, giving the United States its first awareness that a Soviet man was indeed in orbit. Admittedly, American long-range radars had detected the R-7’s launch, but it was Shemya which confirmed without doubt that live dialogue was ongoing with an Earth-circling cosmonaut.

By 9:32 am, a stable orbit had been achieved – reaching a maximum apogee of 327 km and dipping to a perigee of 169 km, inclined 64.95 degrees to the equator – and, shortly thereafter, Gagarin began his passage across Hawaii, then out over the South Pacific. Following several requests, he was assured by the Khabarovsk station via long-range radio at 9:53 am that his orbit was satisfactory.

Minutes later, precisely on the hour, as he crossed the Strait of Magellan, Radio Moscow announced the electrifying news: “The world’s first spaceship, Vostok, with a man on board, was launched into orbit from the Soviet Union on 12 April 1961. The pilot-navigator of the satellite-spaceship Vostok is a citizen of the USSR, Flight Major Yuri Gagarin. The launching of the multi-stage space rocket was successful and, after attaining the first escape velocity and the separation of the last stage of the carrier rocket, the spaceship went into free flight on a round-the-Earth orbit. According to the preliminary data. . . ’’

The effect throughout the world, and particularly in the United States, was dramatic. Although it was known that the mission was underway virtually since its launch, and with certainty since Shemya confirmed Gagarin’s dialogue, and even though the imminence of the flight was not unexpected, the event sent shockwaves through the Kennedy administration. Before retiring to bed the previous night, the president had displayed a sense of foreboding and his science advisor, Jerome Wiesner, had gone so far as to prepare a statement for the press. Elsewhere, in Florida, NASA’s press officer John ‘Shorty’ Powers was awakened in the middle of the night by an alert journalist who had just heard of Gagarin’s launch. Powers, unfortunately, had not. With clear irritation in his voice and uttering words he would regret, he yelled down the phone: ‘‘What is this? We’re still asleep down here!’’ The journalist could not resist exploiting the figurative irony of Powers’ words. The United States and its own effort to put a man in space had indeed been caught off­guard. Next morning came the front-page headline: ‘Soviets Put Man In Space. Spokesman Says US Asleep.’

It was not only the world that expressed shock and disbelief at Gagarin’s achievement; even those closest to him – his family – had little or no inkling of what had happened. Only his wife Valentina knew that he would be flying into space, although he had told her that the mission was planned for 14 April, so as not to worry her. He informed his parents that he was going on a business trip and, according to his sister, would be travelling ‘‘very far’’. Upon learning of the flight, his mother’s reaction was to buy a train ticket to visit her daughter-in-law in Moscow and help care for their children. His father, meanwhile, was working on the collective farm near Klushino and, after hearing that someone called Major Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was in space, he responded that it could not be his son, who was ‘‘only a senior lieutenant”. The enormity of what his son had done became apparent when he headed to the local soviet for more information and was quickly pushed onto the phone with a Communist Party official in Gzhatsk. Within hours, Alexei Gagarin and his sons were answering an endless stream of calls from journalists within and beyond the Soviet Union.

High above Earth, at 10:25 am, just off the coast of western Africa, near Angola, Vostok’s retrorocket fired automatically to begin its re-entry into the atmosphere. Gagarin would never need to touch his controls, nor open the envelope, nor worry about the three magic numbers. Eight thousand kilometres still remained to be covered before landing back in the Soviet Union. However, all did not go according to plan. Ten seconds after retrofire, as intended, the four metal straps holding the instrument section and the capsule together severed, but an electrical cable failed to separate. The cable contained a thick bundle of wiring which provided power and data to the capsule.

For ten minutes, the two remained connected, with the unneeded instrument section trailing behind and causing the capsule to experience wild gyrations as high as 30 degrees per second. The incident, which was not revealed by the Soviets, but which Gagarin hinted at in his state-sanctioned report, was potentially disastrous. The capsule was weighted in such a way that it would naturally rotate to point the thickest part of its heat shield into the direction of travel. If the instrument section did not separate cleanly, the capsule could not assume its correct attitude and properly bear the brunt of re-entry heating. Gagarin could burn alive.

Fortunately, at 10:35 am, as the spacecraft’s meteoric descent path neared Egypt, the cable finally burned through and separated the instrument section. After slinging the capsule away with a spin so severe that Gagarin almost lost consciousness, it finally attained aerodynamic equilibrium with its heat shield positioned accurately. It was later revealed that the complications arose when a retrorocket valve failed to close properly, allowing some fuel to escape from the combustion chamber. As a result of this loss, the engine cut off a second too early, slowing Vostok at a less – than-expected rate and preventing a normal shutdown command from being issued. In the absence of this command, the engine’s propellant lines remained open and pressurised gas and oxidiser continued to escape through the nozzle and served to induce the wild gyrations.

Although the engine was ultimately cut off by a timer, its lack of delivered thrust caused the spacecraft’s control system to scrub the primary sequence to separate the capsule from the instrument section. The notes of the cosmonauts’ physician, Yevgeni Karpov, auctioned by Sotheby’s in March 1996, revealed his concern and, indeed, analysts have speculated that – had the world known of these problems – the Sixties space race might have slowed dramatically.

Gagarin himself made one brief reference to the incident. “The craft began to revolve and I told ground control about it,’’ he wrote. “The turning I had worried about soon stopped… ’’ Little else would be known or even suspected for almost three decades. However, in his testimony before the top-secret State Commission on 13 April, whose panel included both Korolev and Kamanin, he described feeling the intensity of the capsule’s oscillations and an audible sound of ‘cracking’, possibly from the structure of Vostok itself or from the expansion of the thermal cladding material. Through the Vzor, he saw the bright crimson glow of ionised gases rushing past the capsule and would later estimate that the G forces exceeded 10 and ‘‘data on the control gauges started to look blurry. . . starting to turn grey in my eyes’’.

Eventually, as he heard denser air whistling past the capsule and saw blue – not black – sky outside, he braced himself for ejection. By this point, Vostok had crossed back into Soviet territory, on the Black Sea coast, near Krasnodar. Gagarin’s ejection procedure was supposed to be fully automatic, triggered when the on-board sensors registered an outside atmospheric pressure consistent with an altitude of 7 km. He may, however, have felt that the oscillations were too severe to risk it and it would appear that he initiated the sequence manually. With a tremendous roar and rush of air, the hatch above his head blew away and the ejection seat’s rocket propelled him from the capsule at terrifying speed. Protected from frigid high – altitude temperatures of -30°C by his suit, Gagarin descended to Earth; his main parachute opened successfully, followed by its backup, and the First Cosmonaut hit the ground under two canopies.

The location at which his feet touched terra firma, in a field some 26 km south­west of the town of Engels in the Saratov region, near Smelovka, are today marked by a 12 m obelisk and plaque, inscribed with the legend ‘Y. A. Gagarin Landed Here’. The formal marker was placed there on 14 April 1961. However, the historic nature of the event had already led someone to erect a small commemorative signpost on the spot, instructing potential trespassers not to remove it and announcing the time of his landing as 10:55 am Moscow Time. Less than two hours had elapsed since Gagarin’s launch from Tyuratam.

Tractor driver Yakov Lysenko heard, but could not see, the ejection sequence as a loud ‘crack’ in the sky. Seconds later, he saw the Vostok capsule descending under its own automatically-deployed parachute and immediately returned to Smelovka to raise the alarm. A hastily-assembled search party was greeted by what Lysenko would later describe as a ‘‘very lively and happy’’ Gagarin, who identified himself to them as ‘‘the first space man in the world’’. Farmer Anna Takhtarova also recalled the strange sight of the orange-clad cosmonaut telling them not to be afraid and asking for a telephone to call Moscow.

Shortly thereafter, the Soviet military, under General Andrei Stuchenko, arrived in force to take over the recovery effort. Gagarin had been promoted to the rank of major during his flight and was greeted as such by one of the local officers, Major Gasiev. “It was a complete invasion force,” Yakov Lysenko said later of the military’s arrival. “They didn’t allow us to get too close. They’re very strange people.” It was understandable, at least from Stuchenko’s perspective. He had already been told in no uncertain terms by an anonymous Kremlin official the previous day that on his head, literally, lay the responsibility to safely recover Gagarin. Stuchenko obviously wanted to leave nothing to chance.

The Vostok capsule hit the ground a couple of kilometres from the cosmonaut himself, since his high-altitude ejection had caused them to drift apart. For years, the spacecraft’s landing site was officially one and the same with Gagarin’s own, to avoid FAI suspicions that both had not touched down together. However, the Vostok site is known with certainty, thanks to a group of children who happened to be playing in a meadow near the banks of a tributary to the Volga River. They saw the capsule land. Schoolgirls Tamara Kuchalayeva and Tatiana Makaricheva described the dent it left in the soft earth and related how the boys clambered inside and began handing out and trying the tubes of space food. “Some of us were lucky and got chocolate,’’ Makaricheva recalled of the unusual mid-morning snacks. “The others got mashed potatoes. I remember tasting some [of this] and spitting it out.’’ Kuchalayeva agreed that she would not eat it again. Gagarin’s 108-minute adventure, it seemed, made him a hero not only for being the first to survive space, but also for being the first to survive the tastelessness of space food.

HEROES

An expectant hush descended over the journalists in the conference room of the Dolley Madison House, opposite Lafayette Park in downtown Washington, DC. It was the afternoon of 9 April 1959. Backstage, clad in civilian suits, two of them wearing bow ties, stood the United States’ first team of astronauts – the ‘Mercury Seven’. At 2:00 pm Eastern Standard Time, the presiding officer, Walt Bonney, finally spoke. ‘‘Ladies and gentlemen,’’ he began, ‘‘in about 60 seconds, we will give you the announcement you have all been waiting for: the names of the seven volunteers who will become the Mercury astronaut team.’’

Those volunteers – Scott Carpenter, Gordo Cooper, John Glenn, Virgil ‘Gus’ Grissom, Wally Schirra, Al Shepard and Donald ‘Deke’ Slayton – had been chosen after three months of careful screening of 110 experienced combat and test pilots. The list had gradually been reduced through a series of invasive and, in many cases, degrading medical and psychological evaluations. The pilots had been split into three groups, two of which were summoned secretly to the Pentagon in January 1959 for briefings on the effort to send a man into space. Afterwards, the 69 candidates from the first two groups had been asked if they wished to volunteer for further tests and, to the great surprise of many on the selection board, more than 90 per cent of them agreed. The third group, unneeded, was never called up. It had been assumed that the pilots would be so entrenched in their military careers that shifting to a civilian space project would hold little appeal. Already, some of the United States’ most accomplished test pilots – Chuck Yeager among them – had poured scorn on the idea of rocketing men into space atop converted ballistic missiles. Even Al Shepard’s father (himself a former military officer) expressed concern that his son had made the wrong decision. He would eat his words years later when Shepard not only became the first American in space, but also the fifth man to walk on the Moon.

Sixty-nine candidates rapidly dwindled to just thirty-two, who reported to Randy Lovelace’s aerospace medicine clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for additional evaluations. Over the course of a week, every spot on the bodies of Shepard and the

others was sampled, measured, poked and prodded, with scarcely a muscle, bone or gland left untouched. Throats were scraped, stool and semen samples taken, electricity zapped into hands and intensely uncomfortable ‘steel eels’ inserted into rectums. Wally Schirra would later call Lovelace’s tests ‘‘an embarrassment, a degrading experience… sick doctors working on well patients’’.

Survivors of the clinic devised a tradition of inviting the newer candidates to dinner at a local Mexican restaurant. At one of these gatherings, the veterans each had at their feet a jug of urine, which they had been obliged to collect for medical purposes during their stay. One evening, accidentally, Gus Grissom knocked over his jug, but, thanks to the quick-thinking crowd of test pilots, was provided with a ready solution: to order more beer. Several rounds, and a number of trips to the lavatory, later, Grissom’s jug had its required amount of urine…

Still more tests followed at the Aeromedical Laboratory of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, where the pilots withstood cold water pumped into their ears, sat for hours in overheated saunas, endured soundproofed and darkened isolation rooms, blew up balloons until they were out of breath, walked on treadmills until their heart rates soared to 180 beats per minute and were photographed from every conceivable angle and into every conceivable orifice. Many perceived the whole thing as excessive and a waste of time. “I’d flown combat missions and done operational test flying for 17 years by that point,’’ wrote Deke Slayton. “The fact that I’d survived should have told them all they needed to know about stress. At least putting me in the blackout chamber, they let me catch a nap!’’

Not only were the selectors looking for the most physically unbreakable men, they were also scrutinising their reactions to the tests and the testers. Would they crack, psychologically, under the unknown stresses imposed by the mysterious space environment? Personality questions prompted them to explore their individual motivations for wanting to become astronauts, their concerns about their health, their frustrations, their ‘thoughts’ and even whether their desires to fly jets and rockets arose from feelings of sexual inadequacy. The seven men eventually chosen, in addition to their combat and test flying credentials, were all highly intelligent – with IQs of between 131 and 141 – but, said psychologist George Ruff, all were ‘‘oriented toward action, rather than thought’’.

The weeks after Friendship 7 would be filled with euphoria over lohn Glenn’s achievement, tempered with disappointment over the fate of Deke Slayton, the man meant to follow him into orbit on the next Mercury-Atlas mission.

Relief at Glenn’s safe return was evident on many faces, including that of lawyer Leo D’Orsey, who had personally endorsed a $100,000 cheque for Annie to cover her husband’s life insurance in the event of a disaster. (Despite D’Orsey’s attempts to purchase million-dollar policies, the astronauts were uninsurable.) Now, thankfully, it did not need to be cashed. “Boy, am I glad to see you!’’ D’Orsey told Glenn later. Elsewhere, Henri Landworth, former manager of Cocoa Beach’s Starlight Motel and later of the Holiday Inn frequented by the astronauts, had made a 400 kg cake, shaped like Friendship 7. He even rigged up an air-conditioned truck to prevent it from spoiling. After Glenn sampled a slice, Landwirth told him that it had been made in time for the original lanuary launch date and was a month old!

At Cape Canaveral, President Kennedy awarded the astronaut and Bob Gilruth with NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal, then flew America’s newest hero to Washington, DC, aboard Air Force One to address Congress and, later, enjoy a tickertape parade through the streets of New York. Whilst airborne, Kennedy introduced his four-year-old daughter Caroline to Glenn. Clearly accustomed to the flights of Ham and Enos, the little girl’s disappointed reaction was: “But where’s the monkey?’’

Like Shepard, Glenn was impressed by the president’s enthusiasm and passion for the space programme. “He believed… that it was not just a scientific journey,’’ the

John Glenn experiences his first taste of public adoration, with President Kennedy at his side.

astronaut wrote in his memoir, “but a source of inspiration that could motivate Americans to pursue great achievements in all fields.” Glenn had been accorded the rare privilege of addressing a joint session of Congress, which he did on 26 February, before the tickertape parade through New York. Four million people reportedly lined the streets to greet him and his speech before Congress led some columnists, including Arthur Knock and James Reston of the New York Times, to remark on his suitability for politics and his embodiment of “the noblest human qualities”. One group of Republicans from Nevada even called upon him to run for the presidency. Glenn would admit at the time that his interests were apolitical, but a cultivated friendship with, among others, Attorney-General Bobby Kennedy would gradually direct him towards a career in the Senate.

His diplomatic abilities were also put to the test in May 1962, when he was invited, along with Vostok 2 cosmonaut Gherman Titov, to address the Committee on Space Research, part of the third International Space Symposium, in Washington, DC. Glenn described Titov as “cordial but forceful and thoroughly indoctrinated. . . charts and photographs had supplemented my presentation, but not his; he followed the Soviet line that disarmament would have to precede full sharing of information”. Nonetheless, he hosted the cosmonaut during his visit to Washington, even debating the existence of God in front of journalists.

Titov’s standpoint was that he did not see anyone in space – offering clear “proof for the communist position’’ that such a deity did not exist – but Glenn responded that ‘his’ God was not so small that he expected to “run into Him a little bit above the atmosphere”. Diplomacy was extended still further when the Glenns invited the Titovs to a barbecue at their house; after initially refusing, the cosmonaut’s delegation changed its mind at the last moment. The Glenns, unprepared, were forced to ask their neighbours for spare steaks and send their police escorts to buy vegetables. Meanwhile, Al Shepard picked up the Titov delegation and bought the Glenns some time by taking a few wrong turns on his way to Arlington. . .

Not only was Glenn deemed valuable to the nation, but so too was Friendship 7, which, despite some discolouration, was in remarkable condition and today resides in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. In 1962, however, it undertook what was popularly nicknamed its ‘fourth orbit’: a global tour of 17 countries before eventually being installed in the Smithsonian, close to the Wright Brothers’ original aircraft and Charles Lindbergh’s ‘Spirit of St Louis’.

As Glenn basked in his new-found fame, 38-year-old Donald Kent ‘Deke’ Slayton fought a losing battle to fly his own Mercury-Atlas mission, tentatively scheduled for April 1962. He had already picked a name for his capsule – ‘Delta 7’, the fourth letter in the Greek alphabet for the fourth manned Mercury mission – which he would describe in his autobiography as ‘‘a nice engineering term that described the change in velocity’’. Slayton’s own velocity, both in spacecraft and high-performance aircraft, would decline markedly, thanks to a minor, yet persistent, heart condition, known as ‘idiopathic atrial fibrillation’. This took the form of occasional irregularities of a muscle at the top of the heart, caused by unknown factors and extremely rare in highly-fit thirtysomethings like Slayton. It had first arisen during a centrifuge run at Johnsville in August 1959, when physicians noticed traces of sinus arrhythmia, which Bill Douglas later wrote “wasn’t uncommon in healthy young men and… the kind of thing that often went away with exertion’’. After the run, however, it was still present, prompting Douglas and his team to undertake a clinical electrocardiogram at the Philadelphia Navy Hospital.

They concluded that Slayton had a ‘flutter’ in his heartbeat, although, in 1959, the astronaut himself ‘‘had no idea how much of a problem it was’’. Further tests at the Air Force’s School of Aviation Medicine in San Antonio, Texas, verified that the condition was of no consequence and should not influence Slayton’s eligibility for a spaceflight. Douglas informed Bob Gilruth, who briefed NASA Headquarters on the issue late in 1959, as well as the Air Force Surgeon-General, who advised that no further action was necessary. The ‘Slayton File’, for a time, lay dormant.

The problem resurfaced a little over two years later, a week before Friendship 7’s launch, when speculation arose that John Glenn had a heart murmur. Apparently, wrote Slayton, the call to Bill Douglas came from Air Force physician George Knauf, attached to NASA Headquarters, and had originated from ‘‘a source higher than the Department of Defense’’. Douglas denied that Glenn had a problem, but effectively opened a can of worms. Knauf asked next if Glenn’s backup, Scott Carpenter, had a heart murmur: again, the response was negative. Then Douglas, to reinforce the point that the matter was of little consequence, revealed that Slayton had long been known to have a minor condition. He expected this to be the end of the matter. It wasn’t.

Back in 1959, flight surgeon Larry Lamb had examined Slayton at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio and had become convinced the heart fibrillation should disqualify him from the selection process. ‘‘He hadn’t said so in 1959,’’ wrote Slayton, ‘‘but he said so now. I don’t think it was anything personal – this was just his medical opinion.’’ Lamb’s judgement was very much a voice in the wilderness, but unfortunately he also happened to be Lyndon Johnson’s cardiologist, and in the spring of 1962 began to question the astronaut’s suitability for flight. Three weeks after Friendship 7, Jim Webb reopened Slayton’s medical files and the astronaut and Douglas were summoned to the office of the surgeon-general of the Air Force in Washington, DC. A panel of military physicians signed him off as fit to fly, a decision endorsed by the Air Force’s chief of staff, General Curtis LeMay.

For Webb, though, it was not enough. The Secretary of the Air Force, Eugene Zuckert, suggested that a civilian panel of physicians should also examine Slayton at NASA Headquarters. On 15 March, less than two months before launch, Slayton was poked and prodded and had his heart monitored by Proctor Harvey of Georgetown University, Thomas Mattingley of the Washington Hospital Center and Eugene Braunwell of the National Institutes of Health. In a turnaround which, in Slayton’s own words, would leave him ‘‘devastated’’, Deputy Administrator Hugh Dryden entered the room and told him, point-blank, that he was off the flight. None of the physicians had found a specific medical reason to keep him off Delta 7, but their consensus was that if NASA had pilots ‘without’ his condition, one of them should fly the mission instead.

Years later, Slayton would refute theories that Lyndon Johnson’s annoyance over the Annie Glenn incident had anything to do with the decision, but certainly felt it was a political move. “NASA knew it would have to publicly disclose my heart condition prior to my flight,” he wrote. “There would be medical monitors at tracking stations all over the world who wouldn’t know how to react otherwise. Everybody expected this to be a big deal. NASA would be opening itself up to a lot of medical second-guessing.” Bill Douglas felt that problems could arise if Slayton started fibrillating on the pad – “do you scrub the launch or go ahead?’’ – but he, Bob Gilruth and Walt Williams had confidence that he was the best person to follow John Glenn. All three men were prepared, personally, to take the heat, but Jim Webb’s fear that it could trigger adverse headlines for the agency drew a line in the sand. “It didn’t matter that a whole lot of doctors thought I didn’t have a problem,’’ Slayton wrote of Webb’s actions. “He was only going to listen to the few who did.’’

In Webb’s mind, an Atlas abort could subject the astronaut to acceleration loads as high as 21 G and conjured the very real possibility that Slayton, dehydrated and perhaps fibrillating, could die as a result. The impact on NASA, on President Kennedy’s promise to land a man on the Moon before the end of the decade and on the ongoing contest with the Soviets could be profound.

The next day, 16 March, the now-grounded, and furious, astronaut was forced to sit through a lengthy press conference, in which the minutiae of the case were examined. Hugh Dryden remarked that, despite the decision, Slayton might remain eligible for future flights. One journalist asked if the problem had been caused by stress, to which Slayton responded no, and further that he did not even know about it until he had been hooked up to an electrocardiogram in 1959. The most stressful part of the space business, he explained caustically and with more than a hint of sarcasm, was “the press conference after the flight’’. Bill Douglas’ own departure from NASA within days of the announcement, to return to the Air Force, was leapt upon by some journalists as ‘evidence’ of his bitterness over Slayton’s treatment. In truth, Douglas was already at the end of a three-year detachment to NASA and his transfer had been in the works since mid-1961.

Despite his grounding, Slayton did not give up on flying. ‘‘I made some changes in my lifestyle,’’ he wrote, ‘‘gave up drinking, started working out more regularly – quit doing everything that was fun, I guess!’’ Thanks to Bill Douglas, he also secured an examination by Dwight Eisenhower’s cardiologist, Paul Dudley White, in June 1962. White advised him that two-thirds of people with his condition would die young, whilst the remainder would probably never know they had it and might never be affected. The verdict: ‘‘Young man, you’re going to live a long time.’’ (Slayton lived to be 69.) However, White’s report, which highlighted that Slayton did not appear to have a problem, also advised that if astronauts were present without the condition, it would be preferable to assign them in his stead. As it became clear that he would not draw any of the remaining Mercury-Atlas flights, Slayton turned his gaze to the two – man Gemini project, only to be told by Bob Gilruth that his condition would make him a ‘‘hard sell’’ to senior management. Shortly thereafter, the Air Force decreed that he no longer met the qualifications for a Class I pilot’s licence – effectively, he could no longer fly solo – and, at the end of November 1963, Slayton tendered his resignation from the service.

Although he would eventually get his ride into space, it would not come until July 1975, when he was 51 years old. A lesser man might have thrown in the towel and departed NASA for pastures new, but not Slayton. With no guarantee that he would ever fly, he decided to stay and in the summer of 1962, as the agency prepared to expand its astronaut corps by picking nine new pilots, he was appointed as Co­ordinator of Astronaut Activities. Initial plans to bring in a manager from the outside to oversee the corps were quashed by the astronauts themselves. “What we wanted the least,” wrote Wally Schirra, “was somebody who would outrank us and issue orders in a military way. We wanted someone who knew us, who trained with us. Deke was the one and only choice.” During the next few years, as America pushed for the Moon, Slayton, though non-flying, would be all-powerful within the astronaut corps, deciding the career paths of the men who would someday walk on the lunar surface. . . and those who would not.

Rollout of Voskhod 2, atop its R-7 booster, to Gagarin’s Start occurred on 17 March, with an anticipated launch the following morning. That same day, data from the just-landed Cosmos 59 proved encouraging: during re-entry, despite the presence of the airlock attachment ring, the rate of rotation of the capsule never exceeded 40­100 degrees per second, well within design tolerances for both the crew and the parachute deployment mechanism. By the evening, intense rumours were circulating in Moscow of the impending flight of what was dubbed a ‘space bus’, but about which very little else was known.

Three cosmonauts suited up in the small hours of 18 March, one of them – Yevgeni Khrunov, who had trained for both Belyayev’s and Leonov’s positions – ready to take over from either prime crew member if needed. He was not needed on this occasion, but his spacewalking skills would be put to the test four years hence, when he embarked on a far riskier endeavour: to transfer between two orbiting Soyuz capsules in a pressurised suit. In his autobiography, Leonov recalled the customs he and Belyayev observed before launch: a breakfast of boiled eggs, a small sip of champagne, a brief moment of reflection with Yuri Gagarin and Korolev and, finally, at the pad, the time-honoured tradition of urinating on the wheel of the bus. Belyayev, the commander, was first aboard Voskhod 2, followed by Leonov. Also loaded into the capsule were a few personal items for the cosmonauts. Leonov’s stash included a sketchpad and a set of coloured crayons. His childhood dream to become an artist would figuratively and literally reach new heights on this flight. He had already decided not to tell his wife of the spacewalk, instead informing her vaguely that he and Belyayev would be embarking on ‘‘a particularly complex and challenging mission’’. Indeed they would be.

Launch occurred at 10:00 am Moscow Time and the spacecraft entered orbit shortly afterwards. The entire ascent was flawless, although the first minute in particular proved stressful, with both men fully aware that they had no means of emergency escape. ‘‘As the engine of the rocket beneath us ignited, we felt a light vibration start to build,’’ wrote Leonov. ‘‘Lifting away from the launch pad, we were pushed back into our seats. Now we felt the full force of the rocket propelling us upward through the Earth’s atmosphere. It felt as if we were being lifted vertically by a speeding train. From this moment on we were required to report constantly on how we felt.’’

Leonov’s first glimpse of Earth from the edge of space actually disappointed him, since it did not appear much different to the vistas he had seen from the MiG – 15s he flew at Chuguyev almost a decade earlier. ‘‘I had expected to see the curvature of the horizon against a dark sky, but we were not yet high enough for that,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Ten minutes into the flight, at an altitude of almost 500 km, our capsule separated from the rocket with a loud flap. We were flying far beyond the confines of the Earth’s atmosphere.’’ At this instant came weightlessness, which manifested itself in a flurry of loose objects drifting serenely through the cabin… and by an absolute, ethereal silence. In fact, with the R-7’s roar gone, it was now so quiet inside Voskhod 2 that the two men could even hear the clock on their instrument panel ticking.

‘‘For two or three minutes,’’ continued Leonov, ‘‘it was extremely uncomfortable. I had the feeling that I was suspended upside down, which is a well-documented phenomenon: once the force of gravity ceases, the senses become confused. But we quickly got used to it and started going through a complex series of checks to verify that all systems inside the capsule were operating normally.’’ Shortly afterwards, Belyayev requested permission to extend the Volga airlock and promptly activated switches which pumped air into small rubber tubes running along the length of the chamber, inflating it from a coiled 74 cm to a fully-unfurled 2 m. Leonov, meanwhile, busily strapped bulky breathing apparatus, carrying sufficient oxygen for 90 minutes outside, onto his ‘Berkut’ (‘Golden Eagle’) space suit. When he was ready, Belyayev clapped him on the back and wished him luck.

In a similar manner to the ensemble already in the works for Gemini, the Berkut was of the purest white, ‘‘to reflect all possible sunlight,’’ Time magazine told its readers, ‘‘for maintaining tolerable temperatures is one of the major problems in the design of space suits. Because sunlight in space is twice as strong as at the bottom of the atmosphere and contains ultraviolet rays that quickly weaken many materials, the outer layer of a space suit must not only ward off light and heat, but must be proof against ultraviolet”. Equally hazardous was the intense cold, as Leonov passed from the direct sunlight of orbital daytime to the deepest black of frigid orbital nighttime, requiring the Berkut to perform adequately at both extremes. Not surprisingly, Time added, the Soviets had failed to describe the materials from which their suit had been manufactured, only admitting to its colour and general appearance. ft would be many years before the Berkut was revealed in its entirety.

‘‘Once inside the airlock,’’ Leonov wrote, ‘‘f closed the hatch and waited for the nitrogen to be purged from my blood. To avoid suffering from what divers call ‘the bends’, f had to maintain the same partial pressure of oxygen in my blood once f emerged into space. With the pressure inside the airlock finally equal to zero pressure outside the spacecraft, f reported f was ready to exit.’’ He was ‘lying’ on his back when the outermost airlock hatch opened, revealing the grandeur of Earth in its entirety for the first time. Years later, he would lucidly recall those first few, heart­racing moments as he pushed his upper body out of the airlock and, safely attached to Voskhod 2 by a 15 m tether, into open space. As the capsule neared orbital sunrise, he beheld the vast, deep blue panorama of the Mediterranean, together with the familiar shapes of Greece, ftaly and, as Voskhod headed eastwards, the Crimea, the snow-capped Caucasus Mountains and the mighty Volga, largest river in Europe and national waterway of Russia.

Leonov brought his feet to the rim of the airlock and held tightly to a handrail for an instant, before letting go. The exhilarating feeling of being the first human being ever to do this – to actually leave the confines of a spacecraft – would remain with him with surreal clarity for decades; he felt both insignificant and overwhelmed by the importance of his achievement. His departure from the airlock came at 11:34:51 am Moscow Time, barely 94 minutes after launch, just before Voskhod 2 reached the radio horizon of the Yevpatoriya ground station in the Crimea. ft was here that the ghostly images of humanity’s first spacewalk were received.

‘‘Dim and probably purposely fuzzy shots showed the round white top of a helmet poking slowly out of a hatch,’’ Time magazine reported a week later on 26 March. ‘‘Then came the visored face of a man, followed by his shoulders and arms. He seemed to push something away with his left hand before he moved his left arm back and forth as if to test its freedom. He reached for a handrail and quickly his entire body came clear of the hatch. Now it could be seen that he was dressed in a bulky pressure suit, with cylinders strapped on his back and a thick cable twisting behind him. . . ’’ ft was an image that would trigger dispute from some observers, who

argued that the film had been faked in a terrestrial studio, that Sun-glint angles were not ‘quite right’ for it to be authentic. Rather than expressing disgust, however, Leonov acquiesced that ‘‘the race between our two countries for superiority in space was intense… Personally, I did not believe in all this boasting about who did what first, the Soviet Union or the United States. If you did it, you did it’’.

Leonov may not have cared eitherway, but Leonid Brezhnev certainly did. In spite of the tumult surrounding the overthrow of his predecessor, Nikita Khrushchev, the new premier continued to support Soviet ambitions in space. . . although his knowledge of its practicalities would later prove the butt of jokes when he suggested beating the Americans to the Moon by landing instead on the Sun. When advised that the cosmonauts would burn up, Brezhnev supposedly told them to land at night! On the morning of 18 March 1965, however, he was full of pride. ‘‘We, all members of the Politburo,’’ the premier, surrounded by his stone-faced aides, began, ‘‘are here sitting and watching what you are doing. We are proud of you. We wish you success. Take care. We await your safe arrival on Earth.’’ Brezhnev’s pride was not, initially, shared by Leonov’s young daughter, Vika, or his elderly father: the former hid her face in her hands and cried, while the latter, not understanding that the point of the mission was to venture outside, demanded that his son be punished for acting “like a juvenile delinquent” by abandoning his spacecraft in orbit.

Years later, Leonov would reveal more detail of the Berkut suit and his own activities outside Voskhod 2. He described the gold-plated filter across his visor, which, although satisfactory in cutting out nearly all ultraviolet sunlight, did not significantly improve his vision in the incessant glare. “It was like being somewhere in the south, Georgia maybe,” he wrote, “without sunglasses on a summer’s day.” Every so often, he would ease open the filter to observe Earth through the clear faceplate of his helmet. The view was akin to a geography class, he said, with thousands of square kilometres laid out, map-like, beneath him. As an automatic television camera on the end of the airlock filmed his every move, the task of capturing the astonishing vista fell to Leonov himself. Mounted in the chest of his suit was a Swiss-built camera, together with a switch sewn into the Berkut’s upper leg, which, unfortunately, turned out to be just beyond his reach!

At the time of writing, around 300 spacewalks and Moonwalks have been conducted since Leonov’s excursion and some astronauts who did both would describe the sensation of floating high above the home planet as far more powerful than ambling across the surface of our closest celestial neighbour. The ‘ethereal’ nature of spacewalking, the almost godlike feeling of looking down from on high, was certainly not lost on its first practitioner. ‘‘I felt the power of the human intellect that had placed me there,’’ Leonov wrote. ‘‘I felt like a representative of the human race… I was overwhelmed by these feelings.’’ He would also describe the profound tranquillity of floating in the void, the only sounds coming from his own breathing, the crackle of the radio and the noise of the life-support apparatus that kept him alive. Getting back inside Voskhod 2, however, would prove far from tranquil.

The men’s physical and psychological wellbeing was of paramount concern. Fear of dehydration led physicians to remind them regularly to drink water – at least 1.2 litres a day – because their space suits’ cooling systems evaporated perspiration as it formed, thus increasing the loss of body fluids. Their food sounded appealing, but in reality its freeze-dried or dehydrated nature and the need to mix it with water and knead it until mushy, lessened its attractiveness. Still, beef pot roast, banana pudding, fruitcake and even a Roman Catholic treat of fish on Friday for McDivitt formed the basis of their four-day diet. They would also recall space sandwiches, “covered with waxy-tasting stuff to keep the crumbs from getting in your eyes, ears and nose’’, undoubtedly less desirable than Gus Grissom’s corned beef option. Spaghetti dishes, too, required rehydration by water pistol. “You cut the other end with a pair of scissors,’’ McDivitt recalled later, “put the tube in your mouth and squeezed the stuff.’’ Indeed, it provided much-needed sustenance, rather than desirable food.

Sanitation on such a long mission presented its own obstacles. Both men would return to Earth with four-day beards, neither having been able to shave, and ‘washing’ was effected with little more than small, damp cloths to mop their faces. Urine was dumped overboard, while faeces were stored in self-sealing bags with disinfectant pills. Living amidst all of this, they had 11 experiments to perform. Photography of selected land and near-shore regions for geological, geographical and oceanographical studies undoubtedly proved the most enjoyable and 207 images were acquired with a hand-held 70 mm Hasselblad 500-C camera. Among the most

visually stunning were terrain images of north-western Mexico, the south-western United States, North Africa, the Bahamas and the Arabian peninsula, although weather photographs captured a broad range of meteorological phenomena, including cellular cloud patterns, layers of clouds in tropical disturbances, lines of cumulus covering the oceans and vast thunderheads. The Hasselblad also proved essential for a series of two-colour images of Earth’s limb, part of efforts to better define the daylit horizon with red and blue filters.

Elsewhere, a proton-electron spectrometer monitored the radiation environment encountered through the South Atlantic Anomaly region (an intense ‘pocket’ of Earth’s ionosphere) and a tri-axis magnetometer measured the magnitude and direction of the local geomagnetic field with respect to the spacecraft. Five dosimeters, scattered throughout Gemini IV, kept watch on radiation levels, particularly as McDivitt and White passed through the South Atlantic Anomaly. In other areas, a bone demineralisation experiment revealed the first signs of mass loss in astronauts exposed to long periods of weightlessness and both men agreed that systematic exercise programmes were a necessity on future flights. A bungee cord was provided, but even the super-fit White found that his desire to do strenuous work dwindled as the mission dragged on, perhaps due to lack of sleep.

Rest, it seemed, was a precious commodity and one which both McDivitt and White found hard to capture. During their 33rd orbit, two days into the mission, Gus Grissom told them that they had a relatively free 18 hours and advised them to get as much sleep as they could. He recommended that one of them unplug their headset entirely to ensure uninterrupted rest. At other times, the chatter was incessant. Grissom radioed to McDivitt on one occasion that his son’s Pee Wee League team, the Hawks, had defeated the Pelicans 3-2, and to White that his son had scored a hit in a Little League game. The astronauts talked to their wives, with McDivitt asking Pat if she was behaving herself and assuring her that “about all I can do is look out the window’’. White’s wife, the second Pat, commented that her husband seemed to be “having a wonderful time’’ on his EVA and advised him to drink plenty.

On their third day in orbit, the spacecraft’s IBM computer failed. It was supposed to have been updated during a pass over the United States and McDivitt was asked to switch it off and then back on again. However, he quickly discovered that he could not bring it back to life. Attempts to try different switch positions came to nothing. Ironically, only days earlier, IBM had published an advert in the Wall Street Journal, praising its computers as being so reliable that even NASA used them. The failure caused no great alarm, but it did mean that a computer-controlled re-entry would now be impossible and, in Gemini IV’s final orbits, Chris Kraft advised McDivitt that ground computers would help steer the spacecraft for him. As the 7 June return to Earth neared, the astronauts were told to brace themselves for an 8 G re-entry, which McDivitt, only days short of his 36th birthday, joked was “too much for an old man like me!’’

Although in good spirits, neither astronaut felt particularly comfortable. McDivitt told Chuck Berry that he felt “pretty darn woolly’’, needed a bath, and, when asked if there was anything else he needed, replied “Yeah, my computer!’’ After the pre-retrofire checklist, the Hawaii capcom counted them down to the OAMS ‘fail-safe’ burn at 11:56 am, which reduced Gemini IV’s perigee to just 80 km. The burn lasted two minutes and 41 seconds and used most of the remaining propellant. They jettisoned the equipment section shortly before making contact with the station in Mexico. McDivitt initiated the retrofire one second late. The capsule hit the ocean at 12:12:11 pm, some four days and two hours since liftoff. Their splashdown point was about 725 km east of Cape Kennedy and, despite being slightly long of its target, McDivitt and White were soon joined by frogmen and landed by helicopter on the deck of the aircraft carrier Wasp at 1:09 pm. Their sturdy spacecraft was also safely aboard the carrier by 2:28 pm.

Re-entry, McDivitt recounted later, was the prettiest part of the flight. ‘‘We saw pink light coming up around our spacecraft,’’ he said. ‘‘It got oranger, then redder, then green. It was the most beautiful sight I have ever seen.’’ The two men were described by Time as being heavily bearded and sweaty, their faces lined with fatigue, although that did not prevent McDivitt from letting out a whoop of joy. Medical examinations revealed that White, whose normal heart rate was 50 beats per minute, registered 96 whilst lying supine aboard the Wasp; this climbed to 150 when the table was tilted slightly. McDivitt, on the other hand, was found to have flecks of caked blood in his nostrils, probably attributable to the dryness of his mucous membranes after inhaling pure oxygen for so long.

Both men had lost weight – McDivitt shed 1.8 kg, White some 3.6 kg – although, summing up, Chuck Berry was more than satisfied that they were in good physical shape. Gemini IV and the condition of its astronauts promised, he said, “to knock down an awful lot of straw men. We had been told that we would have an unconscious astronaut after four days of weightlessness”. Clearly, that was not the case. As if further demonstration were needed, a day after splashdown, still aboard the Wasp, White noticed a group of marines and midshipmen having a tug-of-war and joined them for 15 minutes. Although ‘his’ team lost, the astronaut certainly appeared to be the epitome of health and fitness.

On the day of Gemini IV’s splashdown, the two men received congratulations from President Johnson, together with joint promotions from majors to lieutenant-colonels and NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal. Elsewhere, the University of Michigan awarded them both with newly-created honorary doctorates in astronautical science. Also promoted to the same rank, Johnson announced, were Gordo Cooper and Gus Grissom. ‘‘I can hardly get used to people calling me ‘Colonel’,’’ wryly observed Ed White. ‘‘I know in a million years, I’ll never get used to people calling me ‘Doctor’!’’ (The spot promotions may have been at least partly inspired by a remark made by Grissom. When asked if there were any differences between American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts, Gruff Gus had replied: ‘‘Yeah. They get promoted and we don’t!’’)

Before McDivitt and White could take their new titles, however, they both needed to take a shower. After four days without washing, White wondered what all the fuss was about. ‘‘I thought we smelled fine,’’ he said of his and McDivitt’s ‘distinct aroma’. ‘‘It was all those people on the carrier that smelled strange!’’

Twenty minutes after the R-7 blasted off, Nikolai Kamanin boarded an An-12 aircraft, bound for the industrial city of Kuibishev, today’s Samara. With him were Gherman Titov, Mark Gallai and a substantial delegation from Tyuratam. Whilst airborne, they learned of Gagarin’s landing in Saratov and toasted his success with cognac. The cosmonaut, meanwhile, had already spoken with Nikita Khrushchev by telephone from Engels, before heading on to Kuibishev. On the outskirts of the city, in a special dacha on the banks of the Volga, Gagarin was given a medical examination and a day’s rest before his journey to Moscow. The mission was over. Shortly, his new life as an international celebrity would begin.

But not yet. On 13 April, whilst still secluded in the Kuibishev dacha, he underwent his official, two-and-a-half-hour interview by the Vostok State Commission; the only opportunity for ‘the truth’ about the mission to be revealed, behind closed doors, to Korolev, Kamanin and other high-ranking officials. Although he undoubtedly described the problem with the instrument section, it remains unclear as to why this was not properly resolved in time for the next flight, Vostok 2, other than the possibility that changes were implemented, but failed to work. Meanwhile, efforts to secure the World Aviation Altitude Record had already led sports official Ivan Borisenko to hurriedly get the First Cosmonaut’s signature on FAI documents within hours of landing. In his fictitious account of the proceedings, published in 1978, Borisenko would recall “dashing up to the descent module, next to which stood a smiling Gagarin”. The reality that capsule and cosmonaut landed a couple of kilometres apart was kept closely guarded.

After his day on the Volga, during which time he also played billiards with Titov and described his experiences, Gagarin flew to Moscow on the morning of 14 April aboard an Ilyushin-18. He had already rehearsed the half-hour speech that he would deliver to Khrushchev – in which Nikolai Kamanin played the role of the Soviet leader – but could hardly have anticipated the sheer outpouring of adoration for him. On the outskirts of the capital, a squadron of seven MiG fighters intercepted his aircraft and escorted him down Lenin Prospekt, Red Square and along Gorky Street to Vnukovo Airport, where the Il-18 touched down just 100 m from Khrushchev’s flower-bedecked reception stand. The premier congratulated Gagarin, announcing that “you have made yourself immortal because you are the first man to penetrate space’’. Following the party line and successfully currying immense favour with Khrushchev, the First Cosmonaut responded by challenging the “other countries’’ to try to catch up with superior Soviet technology.

However, partly due to sour grapes, but mainly because of the intense mistrust that the Russians had themselves created through their ridiculous secrecy, some observers in those ‘other countries’ were already doubting that the mission had happened at all or – at the very least – that it had not occurred precisely as reported. The Soviet campaign of misinformation became evident when their sports officials filled in the FAI paperwork to register Gagarin’s flight on 30 May 1961. The name and co-ordinates of the launch site, they wrote, were ‘Baikonur’ at ‘47°22’00"N, 65°29’00"E’, whereas in reality the site was close to Tyuratam at 45°55’12.72"N, 63°20’32.32"E, a considerable distance to the south-west. Indeed, speculation abounded as late as July 1961 over conflicting reports, obscure photographs and a lack of reliable eyewitnesses. Other suspicions lingered over whether Gagarin landed in his capsule or by parachute. On 17 April, just five days after the mission, a correspondent for the London Times wrote that ‘‘no details have been given about the method of landing’’ and revealed that, when questioned at a press conference, Gagarin had ‘‘skated over the question’’.

Nonetheless, within hours of the flight, NASA Administrator Jim Webb appeared on American television to congratulate the Soviets and express his disappointment, but also to offer reassurance that Project Mercury – the United States’ own man-in-space effort – would not be stampeded into a premature speeding-up of its schedule. His remarks did little to dampen the fury of the House Space Committee, which verbally roasted both Webb and his deputy, Hugh Dryden, on 13 April. It made no difference; the Soviets had won the first lap of the space race and John Kennedy, still only months into his presidency, had to respond with something spectacular. Faced with persistent questions from Congress as to why the United States should remain in second place to Russia in space, together with a perceived ‘gap’ in missile-building technology, Kennedy knew that Project Mercury’s first manned flight would not even match, let alone surpass, Vostok’s achievement. Indeed, it was unlikely that a single-orbit piloted mission could be attempted before the end of 1961, so temperamental was the new Atlas launch

vehicle needed to achieve such a feat. By that time, the Soviets could well have pushed their lead even further.

A goal on a longer-term basis, with an above-average chance of success, was crucial for America’s young president. On 14 April, Kennedy called an informal brainstorming session with several aides to discuss suitable space goals. Landing a man on the Moon emerged as the best option to draw the Soviets into a race which the United States could conceivably win. Not only would it convey a message to the world of American technological prowess, but it would clearly beat Russia. A few days later, however, circumstances on a Caribbean island just south-east of Florida made Kennedy’s need for something – anything – to bolster his administration even more urgent.

The Bay of Pigs 27

Initially dubbed ‘Project Astronaut’ – a term later dropped because it placed too much emphasis on ‘the man’, rather than ‘the mission’ – the effort and its search for volunteers was carried out under the auspices of the newly-founded National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a government body established by President Dwight Eisenhower in the autumn of 1958. It represented the combined parts of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which, since 1915, had employed thousands of personnel at several research centres across the United States to design newer, better and faster aircraft. These included the Bell – built X-1 vehicle, in which Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in 1947. However, in addition to taking NACA’s old resources, the new NASA also assumed control of the United States Army’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, and absorbed its ongoing aeronautical, rocketry and man-in-space projects.

Proposals for a civilian agency of this type had been made in the summer of 1957, during the International Geophysical Year, and led to a formal report, submitted to James Killian, chair of Eisenhower’s Science Advisory Council, that December. At around the same time, NACA Director Hugh Dryden, responding to the Soviet launch of Sputnik 1, also felt that ‘‘an energetic programme of research and development for the conquest of space’’ was acutely needed. In March 1958, Killian added weight to the proposal and suggested that a new agency should be based on a “strengthened and redesignated NACA’’, utilising all of its 7,500 employees, $300 million-worth of research assets and $100 million annual budget, ‘‘with a minimum of delay’’. Later that same month, Eisenhower outlined his administration’s future aims in space: to explore, to support national defences, to bolster the United States’ prestige and to advance scientific achievement. Future projects would begin with preliminary experiments, followed by automated exploration, then limited manned missions, robotic planetary flights and, eventually, journeys to the Moon and Mars.

A civilian space agency had already won the support of Eisenhower, who distrusted the significant role that the military was playing in space affairs, and the bill for its creation was quickly pushed through Congress, thanks to the efforts of Senator Lyndon Johnson. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act on 29 July 1958 and NASA officially came into being on the first day of October, headquartered at the Dolley Madison House until better facilities could be found. Its first administrator, Keith Glennan, was a former Case Western University president, and one of his earliest official tasks, on 17 December, was to announce America’s man-in-space effort to the nation and publicly give it a name: ‘Project Mercury’. Designed by NACA aerodynamicist Max Faget, the spacecraft would employ a truncated cone, sitting on a dish-shaped heat shield, to be launched on either a suborbital trajectory atop a Redstone missile or an orbital flight aboard an Atlas rocket. Project Mercury, however, was not the only man-in-space effort: for at least two years beforehand, the military had harboured its own plans. One of the most prominent of these, cultivated by the United States Air Force, was dubbed, somewhat unimaginatively, ‘Man In Space Soonest’ (MISS).

In July 1957, the Air Force’s Scientific Advisory Committee arranged through the Los Angeles-based Rand Corporation to hold a two-day conference to discuss state – of-the-art space projects. Six months later, in the wake of Sputnik 1, a panel of scientists led by Edward Teller concluded that there was no technical reason why the Air Force could not launch a man into space within two years and an abbreviated plan was set in motion to explore the feasibility of placing a vehicle into orbit atop a converted Atlas. Contracts to build mockups of the spacecraft were awarded to North American Aviation and General Electric in March 1958 and, with a sense of great urgency, plans were implemented for an effort initially called ‘Man In Space’, then, from June, an accelerated ‘Man In Space Soonest’.

Animal-carrying flights, read the proposal, would be attempted in 1959, followed by a manned mission in October I960 and lunar landings as early as 1964. The five – year project would cost $1.5 billion. MISS, a ballistic capsule measuring 1.8 m in diameter and about 2.4 m long, would be fully automated and capable of supporting a single astronaut for up to 48 hours in orbit. Interestingly, the astronaut would lie supine in a contoured couch which could be rotated according to the direction of the G forces building up during ascent and re-entry.

Two camps existed over which missile – Atlas or Thor – should be used to loft the MISS spacecraft into orbit; the former was considered too unreliable and, moreover, would subject its astronaut to around 20 G, beyond the limits of human tolerance, in an abort situation. A two-stage Atlas, on the other hand, could provide a shallower re-entry flight path and reduce this to a survivable 12 G, but others expressed preference for a modified Thor intermediate-range ballistic missile, fitted with a Nomad fluorine-hydrazine upper stage. Eventually, on 2 May 1958, detailed designs for the MISS spacecraft, its operational procedures and the decision to employ the

Thor missile, were forwarded to Air Force Headquarters, with a first manned launch tentatively scheduled for October I960.

However, it was felt in many quarters that development of the Thor-Nomad would take longer than planned, perhaps requiring 30 test launches and causing massive cost overruns. Consequently, the Air Force’s undersecretary was convinced that using a modified Atlas as the launch vehicle could cut the project costs below the $100 million mark. Unfortunately, this would also mean cutting the orbital altitude achievable by MISS from 275 km to just 185 km, essentially putting it out of range of the tracking network for much of its flight. Still, on 15 June 1958, the Atlas was brought on board, the project’s budget descended to $99.3 million and the first manned launch was targeted for April 1960.

Ten days later, the Air Force selected test pilots Robert Walker, Scott Crossfield, Robert Rushworth, William Bridgeman, Alvin White, Iven Kincheloe, Robert White, Jack McKay and – notably – Neil Armstrong as candidates to fly the MISS spacecraft. Arriving on the scene ten months before the Mercury Seven and almost two years before the first Soviet cosmonaut team was chosen they represented the first ‘astronaut’ selection in history. These astronauts would have been little more than passengers, inspiring the denigration of Chuck Yeager and others that the early space fliers were ‘spam in a can’, riding relatively simple ballistic capsules and parachuting to a water landing in the vicinity of the Bahamas.

Within weeks, however, Eisenhower’s plan to create a civilian space agency had developed into legislation and Brigadier-General Homer Boushey of Air Force Headquarters announced that the Bureau of the Budget was blocking the further release of funds for MISS. A chance remained to make the project a reality if its costs could be kept below an impossible $50 million ceiling in 1959, although this would have pushed the first mission into the spring of 1962. Eisenhower’s ingrained distrust of military involvement in the human spaceflight effort, coupled with the fact that the soon-to-be-formed NASA would not be spending more than $40 million on its own man-in-space project for 1959, signalled the final death-knell for MISS. By the third week of August 1958, Eisenhower assigned NASA specific responsibility for developing and carrying out manned space missions and $53.8 million, set aside for Air Force projects, including MISS, was transferred from the Department of Defense to the civilian agency. It has been speculated that, had it gone ahead with the required level of funding, it is quite possible that MISS would have beaten the Soviets into space, orbiting a man sometime in 1960.

At around the same time, the Army was planning its own, simpler, man-in-space effort, initially called ‘Man Very High’ (with Air Force participation, utilising the Manhigh gondola design) and, later, ‘Project Adam’. This had been the brainchild of Wernher von Braun, designer of the V-2 missile and among a handful of German rocketry experts brought to the United States in the wake of the Second World War. Had it gone ahead, its proponents claimed, it would have reached space even ‘sooner’ than the Soonest. Utilising a converted Redstone missile, it would have placed a capsule onto a ballistic, suborbital trajectory, probably similar to that followed by the first two manned Mercury missions. The Army’s astronaut would have been housed inside an ejectable cylinder, 1.2 m wide and 1.8 m long, which itself would have been encased inside the Redstone’s nosecone. The rather tongue-in­cheek justification for the project was as a step towards improving techniques of troop transportation, although Hugh Dryden scornfully remarked that “tossing a man up in the air and letting him come back. . . is about the same technical value as the circus stunt of shooting a young lady from a cannon’’. By July 1958, the Army was told that Project Adam’s impracticability meant that it would not receive its requested $12 million of funding.

Meanwhile, the Navy, not to be outdone, proposed its own Manned Earth Reconnaissance (MER) initiative. This would have taken the form of a cylindrical spacecraft with a sphere at each end. After launch atop a two-stage booster, the spherical ends of the vehicle would expand laterally along two structural, telescoping beams to form a delta-winged, inflated glider with a rigid nose. The astronaut would then be able to make a controlled re-entry and water landing. Several studies were undertaken, including one jointly between Convair and the Goodyear Aircraft Corporation. By the time the partnership made its report, in December 1958, Project Mercury was already well underway. Although MER was undoubtedly the most ambitious of these early projects, its emphasis on new hardware and cutting-edge techniques led many observers to doubt its chances of approval, with or without the advance of Mercury. Indeed, of all of the military plans, MISS probably came closest to fruition, before the clear direction was taken to place manned spaceflight in the hands of a civilian organisation.

The urgency with which NASA addressed the need to launch an astronaut was heightened by the fact that, within four months of Glennan’s announcement, the Mercury Seven were in place. ft was already known that the Soviet lead on space achievement was strong and that they were surely planning their own man-in-space effort, with I960 or shortly thereafter considered the most likely timeframe for a human launch. fndeed, Time magazine told its readers in September of that year that the long-awaited Soviet shot “could happen tomorrow’’, adding that “few of the world’s scientists doubted. . . that man at last was nearly ready to launch himself boldly and bodily into space’’. Eighteen bold bodies survived the punishing tests at Lovelace and Wright-Patterson and their names were forwarded to a NASA selection committee, with the original intent to choose six astronauts. However, after firmly picking five names, officials and physicians could not agree between two competing volunteers and ended up selecting both of them.

fn many ways, the Mercury Seven were quite distinct from their counterparts in the Soviet cosmonaut team. For a start, their ages were somewhat higher. According to Neal Thompson, in his 2004 biography of Al Shepard, NASA had opted for “steely, technology-savvy test pilots’’, who were “mature… who’d been around, been tested and stuck it out’’, rather than inexperienced, wet-behind-the-ears young bloods for whom the fascination might lose its lustre when faced with the prospect of long hours and extremely hard work. As a result, Glennan’s agency stipulated that the astronauts had to be 25-40 years old at the time of selection, around 1.8 m tall and no heavier than 80 kg, to ensure that they could fit comfortably inside the tiny, conical Mercury capsule. They were also required to possess degrees in medicine, physical science or engineering, together with several years of professional expertise, including test piloting credentials, and at least 1,500 hours in their flight logbooks. Interestingly, this eliminated some of the most famous names in American experimental aviation – Chuck Yeager did not hold the required academic qualifications and Scott Crossfield, the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound, was a civilian – although the former at least would publicly ridicule Project Mercury, believing that it did not require the talents or merits of a test pilot.

The choice of combat and test pilots seemed logical, but had actually come about after lengthy debate: submariners, high-altitude balloonists and even mountaineers were considered in the early days and original plans advocated a public call for volunteers, after which perhaps 150 might be chosen for testing and around a dozen finally selected. In fact, a notice to this effect, with an annual salary of between $8,330 and $12,770, had appeared in the Federal Register on 9 December 1958. Nowadays, of course, astronauts are chosen from both the military and civilian sectors, but the sheer unknowns surrounding space travel at the close of the Fifties prompted the selection committee and, in particular, Navy psychologist Bob Voas, to favour test fliers from the armed forces. It also did not hurt, wrote Deke Slayton, that “you wouldn’t have to be negotiating salaries with active-duty officers who volunteered”. Moreover, none of the Mercury Seven was obliged to resign their military commissions in order to work for a civilian agency and, indeed, continued Slayton, given the state of NASA in late 1958, “you’d have had to be an idiot to give up your Air Force or Navy career to join them’’. For his part, President Eisenhower heartily endorsed the idea of selecting purely from the military, effectively ending the national call for volunteers.

“The astronaut training programme,’’ Glennan told the Dolley Madison audience that April afternoon in 1959, “will last probably two years. During this time, our urgent goal is to subject these gentlemen to every stress, each unusual environment they will experience in that flight.’’ That training programme had scarcely begun and according to Chris Kraft, a legendary NASA flight director from those early days, “we were inundated with the newness of everything”. The astronauts expected their preparation to include many hours in the cockpits of jet aircraft – “we didn’t know what else to train on,’’ Gordo Cooper remarked – but their actual training for one of the most audacious feats in human history would encompass much more: physical and psychological conditioning, together with intense, PhD-level technical, scientific and medical instruction, to enable them to understand the intricacies of the spacecraft and rockets upon which their lives would depend. Spaceflight training had never been attempted and, in many ways, NASA and its first seven astronauts were forced to make it up as they went along. Indeed, Bob Gilruth, head of the Space Task Group, which included Project Mercury, stressed that they were not merely ‘hired guns’ and that, unlike the military, “where direction comes from the top’’, their direct input with respect to spacecraft design was expected and desired.

One particular training contraption, known as the Multiple-Axis Space Test Inertia Facility (MASTIF), was used to simulate the motions of the Mercury capsule in orbital flight conditions. Located at the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, it comprised a system of three interlocking concentric ‘cages’, one inside the next, with the innermost resembling the spacecraft itself. The cages could be

Described as one of the most sadistic trainers ever created, the Multiple-Axis Space Test Inertia Facility (MASTIF) comprised three interlocking cages to simulate motions about roll, pitch and yaw axes.

programmed to spin, sometimes simultaneously, about all three axes – roll, pitch and yaw – at up to 30 revolutions per minute. Nitrogen-gas jets attached to the cages created these motions, which were intended to precisely mimic the worse-than-worst – case scenario of a complete loss of control of the capsule whilst in space. As the simulator tumbled, the astronaut, with all but his arms held firmly in place, had to read eye-level instruments and actuate the jets by means of a control stick to somehow interpret the motions and correct and steady the capsule accordingly. For three weeks in February and March I960, all seven Mercury astronauts were wrung through the MASTIF, which often left them nauseous and vomiting and which all would agree was one of the most sadistic trainers they had ever ridden.

Elsewhere, punishing centrifuge runs at the Naval Air Development Center in Johnsville, Pennsylvania, subjected their bodies to forces as high as 16 G – enough to smooth back the skin on their faces and break blood vessels in their backs – in recognition of the fact that so little was known about deceleration during descent. Nicknamed, rather innocuously, ‘the wheel’, the centrifuge “took every bit of strength and technique you could muster to retain consciousness,” according to John Glenn. These exercises were perverted yet further by so-called ‘eyeballs-in, eyeballs – out’ testing, where the forces were extended by simulating another worse-than-worst – case eventuality that the Mercury capsule could splashdown in the sea on its nose, rather than its base; the astronauts were rotated 180 degrees and thrown violently against their restraining straps, which Al Shepard sarcastically called ‘‘a real pleasure’’. Indeed, one NASA physician who underwent the test could not properly catch his breath for some time afterwards. It later became clear that his heart had slammed into one of his lungs and deflated it. . .

The eyeballs-in, eyeballs-out testing eventually led to recommendations for more durable shoulder harnesses inside the capsules and, after their first visit to prime contractor McDonnell Aircraft Corporation’s St Louis plant in Missouri, the astronauts realised to their surprise that no window – only a blurry periscope – existed for them to see outside. Although their suggestion to include a viewing window was implemented, the first three Mercury spacecraft had already been built and outfitted, meaning that at least the first American in space would have to rely instead on two small portholes and the fisheye view transmitted through the periscope lens onto a circular screen in front of his face. The astronauts’ ability to apply their technical prowess and implement practical changes proved quite at odds with the experiences of Yuri Gagarin and his comrades, who had little or no input into the Vostok design process. In fact, with each of the Mercury Seven assigned a responsibility – Carpenter focused on communications and navigation, Cooper on Redstone rockets and trajectories, Glenn on cockpit layout, Grissom on controls, Schirra on environmental systems and space suits, Shepard on recovery equipment and Slayton on the Atlas booster – questions of whether to include aircraft-like rudder pedals or a control stick, whether to use gauges or easier-to-read tape-line instruments, where to position certain switches or handles to make them easily reachable or how best to remove the capsule’s hatch in an emergency were encountered on a regular basis.

In spite of the intense preparation, some psychologists remained fearful that the two-year wait for the first manned mission could lead to ‘over-training’ and staleness, although Shepard and others would strongly disagree and remark that the similarity of training with actual flight conditions was a key factor in making the real thing feel ‘routine’. The choice of Shepard as the first American in space was delivered on 19 January 1961 – the eve of John Kennedy’s presidential inauguration – when Bob Gilruth personally visited the astronauts at their headquarters at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. After 20 months of training, it did not come as a great surprise. Gilruth had already asked them, weeks earlier, to write the name of the astronaut, excepting themselves, that they would like to fly first. ‘‘We all intuitively felt that Bob had to make a decision as to who was going to make the first flight,’’ Shepard said, ‘‘and when we received word that Bob wanted to see us at five o’clock in the afternoon in our office, we sort of felt that perhaps he had decided.’’

Gilruth wasted little time and got straight to the point. Revealing that it was the hardest decision he had ever made, he announced that Shepard would fly first, Gus Grissom would fly second and John Glenn would support both missions. Years later, strong suspicions would abound that the choice of naval aviator Shepard had much to do with President Kennedy’s own nautical background and more than one member of the Mercury Seven would attribute the decision purely to politics. Indeed, even the Shepard-Grissom-Glenn trinity neatly represented the United States Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. (Army pilots had not been selected, on the basis that they lacked the required expertise in high-performance jets.)

No further public decisions on subsequent missions would be made, Gilruth told them, and, in fact, the three men’s names as mere ‘candidates’ for the first flight would not be announced to the world for another five weeks. Shepard’s selection as America’s first astronaut would not be revealed publicly until 2 May, as his first launch attempt was in the process of being scrubbed. Until then, the trio had to run through their own training facade of ‘not knowing’ which of them was to fly – ‘‘a ruse,’’ wrote Neal Thompson, ‘‘that all the astronauts thought was ridiculous and annoying’’. Oblivious, the media’s favourite had always been John Glenn, whose appearance, eloquence and warm demeanour typified the ‘all-American’ hero, and much surprise abounded when he, in fact, was not picked. Some newspapers even implied that inter-service rivalry was so strong that the Air Force may have deliberately leaked Glenn’s name to embarrass NASA and reduce his chances. Others supported Grissom, since his parent service – the Air Force – was already in the process of developing its own winged spacecraft called ‘Dyna-Soar’, together with an Earth-circling space station.

Glenn was the first to offer his hand to Shepard in congratulation, but others, including Wally Schirra, were ‘‘really deflated’’ by the decision. Deke Slayton, although he had privately ranked Shepard as the best in terms of piloting skills and general ‘smartness’, felt humiliated and could scarcely believe that he had not even made the cut of the final three. Gilruth’s choice did not surprise Scott Carpenter, though, who had been aware for two years that Shepard was ‘‘single-minded in his pursuit of the first flight’’. Moreover, according to Walt Williams, NASA’s director of operations for Project Mercury, Glenn’s image-consciousness, his untiring effort to perfect his ‘boy-next-door’ image and his currying of favour with top brass, led some officials to consider Shepard the best. His intense focus on the mission, his desire to know every aspect of the engineering and capsule design and his superb flying skills left him the obvious choice.

Admittedly, all seven knew that only one of them could make the coveted first flight, even though it would amount to little more than a 15-minute suborbital lob into the heavens atop a converted Redstone, but the disappointment was tangible. ‘‘I think Life magazine got into the act with some horseshit about the Gold Team (Glenn, Grissom and Shepard) and Red Team (the rest of us),’’ wrote Deke Slayton, ‘‘and I even had to have a press conference. . . a couple of days after the announcement to reassure everybody that we weren’t depressed.’’ In a situation once described as seven pilots all trying to fly the same aircraft, each man had been chosen at the very pinnacle of his profession; each was hyper-competitive and in their time together each had set himself the personal goal of ensuring that ‘the other guy’ never got so much as half a step ahead in ‘the game’. That game, and that intense competitiveness, ran from flying jets to mastering the MASTIF to winning a dispute over an aspect of Mercury design to racing the fastest in their flashy sports cars.

With the exception that all were military pilots and all would someday be flying into space, little commonality existed between them and their Soviet counterparts. The former were screened from the world and venerated only after their missions. The Mercury Seven, on the other hand, were placed on a pedestal of hero-worship from the day of their selection. They were, in a sense, ‘premature heroes’, with their personal stories sold by their lawyer Leo D’Orsey to Life magazine for $500,000 and a variety of perks – from sleek Corvettes on one-dollar-a-year leases from General Motors to the choicest picks of real estate – headed their way. They would battle the evil Soviet empire, take democracy to the new ‘high ground’ of space, and Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr, it was hoped, would be the first man to do it.