Category Escaping the Bonds of Earth

Cooper almost missed out on flying in Project Mercury entirely. Since his selection in April 1959, he had steadily gained a reputation for himself, firstly as a hotshot pilot with a passion for fast cars, but also as a complainer who pulled dangerous stunts, including one in an F-106 jet which screamed right outside, and below, Walt Williams’ office window. Moreover, Deke Slayton wrote of his personal surprise that Cooper had been chosen as an astronaut at all. ‘‘My first reaction was, something’s wrong,’’ he noted. ‘‘Either he’s on the wrong list or I am. Gordo was an engineer at Edwards. As far as I was concerned, he wasn’t even a test pilot.’’

Test pilot or not, if Schirra had been flying before he was born, then Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr was all but born in a pilot’s seat. His father, an Air Force lawyer, county judge and pilot from Shawnee, Oklahoma, frequently plopped his young son onto his lap in the cockpit of an old Command-Aire biplane, even allowing the boy to take the controls at the age of six. Later, in his teens, Cooper would hang around at the airport in Shawnee to pay for lessons in a J-3 Piper Cub trainer; inspired to fly, it seems, from his own experiences and from his father’s tales of the famed aviation aces Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post. He soloed, ‘officially’ at least, at the age of 16. It would garner a lifelong fascination with aviation which Cooper would retain for the rest of his life. Even in his seventies, he once told an interviewer that ‘‘I get cranky if I don’t fly at least three times a month!’’

His love of fast cars also became legendary during his astronaut days, as Gene Kranz, arriving at Cape Canaveral for his first day at work, related in his book ‘Failure Is Not An Option’. ‘‘After the plane rolled to a stop,’’ Kranz wrote, ‘‘a shiny new Chevrolet convertible wheeled to a halt just beyond the wing tip. An Air Force enlisted man popped out, saluted and held open the car’s door for a curly-haired guy in civilian clothes, a fellow passenger who deplaned ahead of me.’’ The curly-haired man offered Kranz a lift to the Cape, which he accepted, then ‘‘peeled into a 180- degree turn and raced along the ramp for a hundred yards, my neck snapping back as he floored the Chevy. I had never driven this fast on a military base in my life.’’ For a while, Kranz wondered if he had a madman behind the wheel as the driver seemingly broke every rule in the book and apparently cared nothing for being pulled over by the Air Police. ‘‘Hitting the highway,’’ Kranz continued, ‘‘he made a wide turn and a hard left, burning rubber. In no time, he had the needle quivering between 80 and 90 miles an hour. After a joyful cry of ‘Eeeee-hah’, he turned and offered his hand, saying ‘Hi, I’m Gordo Cooper’. I’d just met my first Mercury astronaut!’’

Born on 6 March 1927 in Shawnee, Cooper attended primary and secondary schools in his hometown and in Murray, Kentucky, and enlisted in the Marine Corps after graduation. The Army and Navy flying schools, he found, were not taking any new candidates that year. He promptly left for Parris Island, South Carolina, but the Second World War ended before he had an opportunity to see combat and he was assigned to the Naval Academy’s Preparatory School and was an alternate for Annapolis; Cooper was given Marine guard duty in Washington, DC, and was serving there with the Presidential Honour Guard when he and other reservists were released from service. After his discharge, he moved to Hawaii to live with his parents – his father, at the time, was assigned to Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu – and it was whilst there that he met his future wife, Trudy. A drum majorette at the University of Hawaii, she owned a third interest in a Piper Cub and taught flying. She would be the only Mercury Seven wife to hold a pilot’s licence in her own right. In fact, when Cooper joined the astronaut corps, he and Trudy were the only members of the Mercury Seven to own an aircraft: a Beechcraft Bonanza.

The couple married in Honolulu in August 1947 and lived there for two years as Cooper pursued his degree at the University of Hawaii. Whilst studying, he received a commission from the Army’s Reserve Office Training Corps, transferred to the Air Force and was called to active duty for flight training at Perrin Air Force Base, Texas, and Williams Air Force Base, Arizona. Cooper received his pilot’s wings in 1950 and was attached to the 86th Fighter-Bomber Group at Landstuhl, West Germany, flying F-84 and F-8 jets and later commanding the 525th Fighter-Bomber Squadron. Whilst in Europe, he attended an extension of the University of Maryland’s night school, returning to the United States in 1954 for detachment to the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. From here, he received a degree in aeronautical engineering in August 1956 and was sent to Edwards Air Force Base in California for a year at test pilot school.

It was at around this time, in Denver, that he first flew with another Air Force pilot named Gus Grissom; the pair crashed a T-33 jet off the end of the runway at Lowry Air Force Base, though thankfully both were unhurt. Graduation from Edwards brought rapid reassignment to the fighter section of the famed base’s Flight Test Engineering Division as a project engineer and test pilot. Whilst there, Cooper worked on the F-102A and F-106B development efforts. Then, early in 1959, he read an announcement that McDonnell had been awarded the prime contract to build a space capsule. Shortly afterwards, he received mysterious orders to attend a classified briefing in Washington. After undergoing the Lovelace and Wright – Patterson tests, he was so confident that he would be picked by NASA that he told his boss to start looking for a replacement and took two weeks’ leave to move his family to Langley, Virginia. When NASA called him to ask how soon he could get to Langley, Cooper replied “How about now?’’

Despite his flying credentials and engineering talent – he designed a personal survival knife and chaired the Emergency Egress Committee for Project Mercury – Cooper’s early days within the astronaut corps were somewhat less than illustrious and would lead several senior managers to consider bypassing him entirely for a spaceflight. He was, some said, a complainer, unpredictable, with a seemingly indifferent stance towards the public image that NASA wanted each of its astronauts to display. Cooper protested, for example, about the lengthy periods away from his family, about the lack of opportunities to fly jets and collect flight pay and, in fact, when Deke Slayton was grounded from Delta 7, he even threatened to leave the programme. Flying a chase plane over Cape Canaveral during Gus Grissom’s July 1961 ascent, Cooper buzzed the launch site, momentarily disrupting communications and earning him a severe ticking-off from superiors. On another occasion, he flew to Huntsville in Alabama, landed on a runway that was too short and asked to be refuelled. When ground crews objected that it was too dangerous for him to take off again, Cooper shrugged, took off regardless and made it to a nearby air base with fumes in his tanks. . .

Even in the weeks leading up to Cooper’s own mission, Faith 7, there were persistent rumours in the press that he might be dropped in favour of his backup, Al Shepard. In fact, so shaky was operations director Walt Williams’ ‘faith’ in Cooper that he had approached Shepard several months earlier and strongly hinted that the Freedom 7 pilot might be tipped to fly instead. Believing the mission to be his, Shepard continued training feverishly, but Deke Slayton – removed from his own flight – felt that Faith 7 belonged to Cooper. Others agreed that it would reflect badly on NASA if the astronauts were switched so soon before launch.

A timely intervention by Wally Schirra, who threatened to raise the roof if his friend was overlooked, eventually contributed towards securing Cooper his seat on the very last Mercury mission. Shepard was livid and Williams admitted that the Freedom 7 flier could have done a better job, but that the decision had been made

and it was now his job to ensure that Cooper was as prepared as possible. As partial compensation, Williams half-promised Shepard the three-day MA-10 mission. This never transpired. (Shepard later gained his revenge by lending Williams his Corvette for the day… then, as the operations director drove off, phoned security to inform them that ‘someone’ had just stolen his car.)

Perhaps reacting to these frustrations, two days before the scheduled launch, Cooper took a flight in an F-106 and, to the great surprise of Walt Williams and Chris Kraft, made a very low pass over Cape Canaveral. ‘‘We were talking,’’ Kraft recalled of that Sunday afternoon in Williams’ office, ‘‘and a sudden roar came upon us. The roar was a jet airplane diving onto the Cape at a very high rate of speed, which was forbidden. We looked out the window to see none other than Gordo.’’ Cooper flew beneath the second-floor office window and the astonished managers were actually able to look down on the screaming jet. The Cape, of course, was restricted airspace and its switchboard quickly lit up with frantic calls. Williams went berserk, according to onlookers, and threatened to have Cooper’s ‘‘ass on a plate!’’

He called Deke Slayton, who had to shout down the phone to be heard over the F-106’s roar, and Williams argued that Cooper should lose Faith 7. He even contacted Al Shepard, asking him if he and his pressure suit were ready to go. Slayton, however, refused to pull Cooper off the mission, but expressed serious reservations about the astronaut’s judgement. Both he and Williams allowed Cooper to sweat about his flight status for a day to put some fear into him. Not until late on the evening before launch did the operations director finally relent and agree to let him fly. Although many would come to regard him as a daredevil, Cooper’s supporters described him as a good, smart pilot, a man with a mission ‘‘to go a little bit higher and a little bit faster’’. In May 1963, he would fly his highest and fastest mission so far.

Two weeks before Grissom and Young’s launch, the gradual progress of the American civil rights movement exploded into violence when 600 protestors marching from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama were attacked by club-wielding, tear-gas-spraying police. As a result, 7 March 1965 would become forever known as ‘Bloody Sunday’.

At the time, Selma – seat and main town of Dallas County – had a population that was 57 per cent black, although fewer than one per cent was actually registered to vote. The vast majority of the black community lived beneath the poverty line in mundane, unskilled occupations, a situation which the Boynton family and others sought to rectify. Their efforts to achieve this had been hampered since the late Fifties by the White Citizens’ Council, the Ku Klux Klan and direct violence. The situation reached a head in February 1965, when an Alabama state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson as the latter tried to protect his mother and grandfather during a nocturnal demonstration.

Jackson’s murder was the catalyst for the first of three Selma-to-Montgomery marches. The initial plan was for the marchers to ask Alabama Governor George Wallace if he had authorised the troopers to shoot during the demonstration, which ultimately broadened with Martin Luther King’s desire to request better protection of black voting registrants from Wallace.

The reaction from the governor, disturbingly, was that the march represented a threat to public safety and he opposed it. Mounted police awaited the marchers and, in the presence of journalists, attacked them with clubs, tear gas and bull whips. Amelia Boynton, one of the organisers, was beaten and gassed and 17 other marchers were hospitalised.

Two days later, on 9 March, King organised a second march. Numbers had by now swelled to more than 2,500 in outraged reaction to the images from Bloody Sunday. However, an attempt to gain a court order to prevent the police from interfering was rejected by a federal district judge, who instead issued a restraining order to stop the march until further hearings could be held. To avoid breaking the terms of the order, King led the marchers out to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, held a short prayer session, then turned them around and disbanded. Violence, however, was not far away. That evening, three white ministers involved in the second ‘march’ were clubbed by white supremacists. One of the ministers, James Reeb, later died from his injuries.

After finally gaining approval for an unimpeded march, the full journey along Route 80 through rain and cold was completed from Selma to Montgomery on 24 March. Five months later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Voting Rights Act, which prohibited states from preventing their citizens from voting on the basis of colour or race. Previous practices of requiring voters to pass literacy tests before being cleared to cast at the ballot box were abolished. Moreover, states with a history of abuses over voting rights could not make any changes without first requesting the consent of the Department of Justice. A wind of change had taken hold in America.

When Radio Moscow announced Nikolayev’s successful 11:24 am launch on 11 August, observers could be forgiven for wondering what this latest Soviet mission might entail. The answer became clear when Popovich roared aloft from Gagarin’s Start in an R-7 he had christened ‘Swallow’ at 11:02 the following morning and, within an hour of reaching orbit, he had established visual line of sight with Vostok 3. In his post-flight debriefing, Nikolayev would recount that, despite positioning his ship in the correct attitude, he had been unable to see Popovich’s launch from space. Over the following days, despite the paucity of reliable information from Tass, western analysts set to work plotting the two ships’ radio signals and estimated that they were flying some 120 km apart. This led to increased speculation about whether the Soviets had trumped the United States again by achieving what the Americans were not expected to achieve until their two-man Gemini spacecraft flew in 1964: rendezvous in orbit. If, indeed, they had achieved this remarkable feat of celestial mechanics, a Soviet man on the Moon by the middle of the decade was entirely possible. ‘‘Once they have achieved orbital rendezvous,’’ the British Interplanetary Society’s Kenneth Gatland said at the time, ‘‘they have taken a vital step toward lunar flight.’’

Strictly speaking, what had been achieved was not rendezvous. The wording of the official communiques allowed the interpretation that the spacecraft had manoeuvred to reduce their initial separation, but the reduction was due to orbital dynamics, after which the range increased again. Nonetheless, inserting two manned spacecraft into similar orbits at the same time was a feat that the United States could not hope to match for several years and the propaganda value of this was fully exploited. As announced, the purpose of the missions by Nikolayev and Popovich, callsigned ‘Falcon’ and ‘Golden Eagle’, respectively, was to check ‘‘contact’’ between two spacecraft flying in similar orbits. Although the minimum range is believed to have been 6.5 km, one account claimed that the cosmonauts had been able to see each other through their capsules’ portholes! Hence their ‘‘contact’’ seems to have been exclusively visual or by radio.

Indeed, the Sohio tracking station in Cleveland, Ohio, reported that after their initial close proximity, the two spacecraft drifted more than 2,800 km apart. ‘‘We’re convinced that if they had the proper equipment, they could have touched,’’ the station’s supervisor was later quoted as saying by Time magazine. Yet the dual mission did induce some concern in the Pentagon. ‘‘If the Russians can send Colonel Popovich up to look at Major Nikolayev,’’ said one officer, ‘‘they can go up and look at one of our birds. Why, they could knock out those delicate instruments in some of our satellites by hitting them with almost anything.’’ Others were more cautious, pointing out that the interception of one Vostok by another was simplified by the fact that both had launched from the same pad.

Unlike Gherman Titov, who had experienced space sickness shortly after reaching orbit, neither Nikolayev nor Popovich appeared to be affected by the ailment. Their spirits seemed high as they congratulated each other over a shortwave channel which linked their two ships and even engaged in a three-way radio conversation with

Sergei Korolev and his wife with the cosmonauts selected in March 1960 and a number of their trainers. Included in this portrait are five of the six Yost ok fliers. Gagarin is the only person wearing a tie; Titov stands directly behind Korolev’s wife; Popovich sits at the far left on the front row; Nikolayev is second from the left on the second row; and Bykovsky is second from the right, also on the second row. These cosmonauts, and, of course, Korolev himself, were responsible for some of the most remarkable triumphs in mankind’s early conquest of space.

fellow cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin at the control centre. Elsewhere on the ground, after the official announcement had been made, Muscovites gathered in their hundreds in the streets to listen as loudspeakers blared out the news of the latest Soviet spectacular in space. Possibly in an effort to show how much more ‘roomy’ Vostok was compared to the Americans’ cramped Mercury capsules, it was revealed that Nikolayev released his shoulder straps and floated ‘around’ the cabin.

Further details trickled out with the suggestion that he had worried about bumping into things as he moved around; Popovich, too, it was claimed, accidentally banged his head whilst floating across the cabin. Obviously, after the dimensions of Vostok were revealed to the world in April 1965, it became clear that neither cosmonaut had much room in which to move and the stories were simply a clever game designed to keep western listeners guessing about the spacecraft’s true size.

The Soviets clearly only revealed what they wanted the outside world to know and, indeed, when American networks asked to plug in on televised images of Nikolayev and Popovich via the Telstar communications satellite, they were politely refused. Instead, Soviet embassies released photographs of the cosmonauts at play with their families, at seaside resorts, riding pedal boats and even one of Nikolayev sniffing poppies. The two men, meanwhile, worked methodically through their detailed experimental programmes, photographing and – in Nikolayev’s case – filming Earth in colour for the first time. They checked their ships’ systems, monitored communications, verified guidance… and even found time to request the latest football scores. They chatted, too, about their food. Instead of the toothpaste – tube-like fare that Titov had endured, they were provided with packed meals: small, bite-sized chunks of veal cutlet and chicken, together with sandwiches and pastries. A disappointed Nikolayev, upon learning that Popovich had a small piece of dried fish in his food locker, asked for some; to which Popovich gamely invited him to ‘‘come a little closer and we’ll share what we’ve got’’.

Medical personnel hoped that the packed meals, which were more ‘normal’ than those consumed by Titov, might help avoid a recurrence of space sickness. ‘‘It was just as pleasant as a good restaurant,” Nikolayev would recall after landing and it would appear that neither cosmonaut experienced any of the dizziness, nausea or headaches suffered by Vostok 2’s pilot. In their post-flight debriefings, both would explain that they moved their heads sharply from right to left with no ill effects. However, an unfortunate misunderstanding appears to have curtailed Popovich’s mission. It was becoming clear that occurrences of space sickness might be linked to the reactions of individual cosmonauts, rather than as a result of long missions. Consequently, before launch, the cosmonauts had been given the callsign ‘‘observing thunderstorms’’ – ‘‘groza’’ – to report to ground controllers if they felt unwell and desired an immediate return to Earth. Unluckily for Popovich, it would seem that he really was observing enormous thunderheads over the Gulf of Mexico and made an innocent remark about them. Within hours, and just a few minutes after Nikolayev’s own landing, Popovich’s mission was over and he was back on Soviet soil.

Although he had tried to explain, whilst still in orbit, that he really was observing meteorological thunderstorms and was not ill, neither Nikolai Kamanin nor Yuri Gagarin wanted to take the risk, suspecting that he had experienced an attack of nausea, made the transmission and later relented, not wishing to admit to any weakness. To be fair, problems with Vostok 4’s life-support system had already caused the cabin temperature to plummet to just 10°C and some officials were pushing to bring the cosmonaut home on his 49th orbit. Additionally, since he had only expected to remain aloft for three days, Popovich had not conserved his on­board provisions with the same tenacity as Nikolayev; still, he remained cheerful, active and eager to complete a lengthy mission.

It is ironic that these events should have transpired because, by 13 August, optimism was high that both cosmonauts were sufficiently healthy to complete four – day missions: the only voice of dissent came from Kamanin, still fearful of the effects of long-duration flights on the human body. One such effect began to manifest itself midway through Nikolayev’s flight when he vented his frustration on personnel at a Soviet tracking station, who had provided him with incorrect timing information. “You were wrong by five minutes,’’ he barked. “Please give me a new time recording now. Can’t you hear what I say? Start the timing, for heaven’s sake!’’ Tension and fatigue, it seemed, were something even the Iron Man could not avoid.

Nikolayev’s feet touched Earth at 9:52 am Moscow Time on 15 August, in the hilly desert country close to the coal-mining city of Karaganda in north-central Kazakhstan, some 2,400 km south-east of Moscow. He was followed, barely seven minutes later, by Popovich, who landed a few kilometres away and at the same (48th) parallel; a similar landing principle would be adopted during the joint flight of Vostoks 5 and 6 in June 1963. Some observers have speculated that the reason was to deploy recovery forces in an east-to-west pattern. Both re-entries appeared to be smooth and not as eventful as those of Gagarin and Titov, with Nikolayev commenting only that his capsule “revolved randomly on reaching the denser atmosphere” and he experienced deceleration forces of 8-9 G. He also recounted that, although there were boulders in the landing zone, he was able to guide his parachute successfully and touch down in a clear area. After recovery, the two now – bearded cosmonauts were reunited, greeting each other, it is said, with embraces, kisses and spontaneous song. As they munched watermelon and chatted with locals in a crowded Kazakh rest house, their sole complaint was that the heat and discomfort of the desert was greater than it had been in space.

Despite the hatch malfunction, Grissom’s flight validated the Mercury capsule sufficiently to encourage the Space Task Group to do away with plans for two more suborbital Redstone missions; in fact, MR-6 had already been discarded from consideration since early June. Although Bob Gilruth was happy with this plan, NASA’s head of spaceflight programmes, Abe Silverstein, felt that the Liberty Bell 7 data should be fully appraised before abandoning MR-5. Moreover, the public knew that three astronauts – Shepard, Grissom and Glenn – were in training for Redstone missions and fully expected each to fly. On the other hand, by expediting Project Mercury and accomplishing a five-hour, three-orbit mission, the achievement of Yuri Gagarin would be eclipsed. To do this, the abilities of the Redstone were simply insufficient; the larger Atlas missile, a rocket with a long history of development problems, would be needed. Then, on 7 August 1961, less than three weeks after Grissom’s mission, all hopes of beating Gagarin were quashed when Gherman Titov completed 17 circuits of the globe in the day-long Vostok 2.

After the analysis of the Liberty Bell 7 data, it became clear that little more could be accomplished with the Redstone and, on 14 August, the Space Task Group’s Paul Purser drafted a termination recommendation for Gilruth to submit to Silverstein. In it, Purser argued that the Redstone had successfully qualified the Mercury spacecraft, had validated NASA’s training hardware and, despite problems, had not presented anything that could hinder a manned orbital flight. Four days later, NASA Headquarters announced the effective termination of Mercury-Redstone and the decision was made that the next manned mission would orbit Earth three times. However, although the capsule was ready, the Atlas rocket had a very bad habit of exploding either on the pad or shortly after liftoff and would require further qualification before it could be entrusted with a human pilot.

Unlike the Redstone, which owed its genesis to the Army and Wernher von Braun, the Atlas was an Air Force effort, inaugurated in 1946 to develop the United States’ first intercontinental ballistic missile. Initial studies were awarded to the Convair Corporation of San Diego and led to Project MX-774 or what was described as “a sort of Americanised V-2’’. Its novel design would control the rocket by swivelling its engines, using hydraulic actuators which responded to commands issued by gyroscopes and an autopilot. Unfortunately, President Harry Truman’s administration offered the Air Force the choice of having funding cut for either its intercontinental manned bombers and interceptors or its advanced weapons designs; the latter option was taken and, as the first MX-774 test vehicle neared completion, it was abruptly cancelled. This left the United States with no intercontinental ballistic missile, a problem made all the more worrisome when the Soviets detonated their first live nuclear device in 1949. A dramatic turnaround followed, with Truman ordering the development of hydrogen-fusion warheads on a priority basis and the outbreak of the Korean War boosting military budgets overnight. The Army began planning the Redstone and the Air Force, at last, was able to resume efforts to build an intercontinental missile which, in 1951, assumed the name ‘Atlas’.

An initially cautious approach to its development was altered dramatically late the following year, when the Atomic Energy Commission conducted the world’s first thermonuclear explosion on Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific Ocean and increased emphasis was imposed on the Air Force to give its highest consideration to work on long-range ballistic missiles. By 1955, Convair’s rocket gained a new lease of life with a long-term contract for its fabrication: Atlas truly became a high-profile, ‘crash’ project. During its development, another Air Force missile, the intermediate-range Thor, was designed by Douglas Aircraft Company as a stopgap nuclear deterrent, while the Army and (at first) the Navy assumed joint responsibility for a rocket dubbed ‘Jupiter’.

Convair, meanwhile, was busy tackling several fundamental problem areas with the Atlas, one of which led to an entirely different airframe. The principle of this airframe, nicknamed ‘the gas bag’, utilised stainless steel sections thinner than paper, which were rigidised through helium pressurisation at between 1.7-4.2 bars. This led to a huge reduction in the ratio between the Atlas’ structure and total weight – its ‘empty’ weight was less than two per cent that of its propellant weight – and yet the airframe remained capable of withstanding heavy aerodynamic loads. Meanwhile, a three-engine design for the missile, employing two boosters and one sustainer, producing a total thrust of 163,000 kg, together with small vernier jets, was devised by the Rocketdyne Division of North American Aviation.

The technique of igniting the boosters and sustainer on the ground provided an advantage of avoiding the need to start the Atlas’ second stage in the high atmosphere. Firing the sustainer at liftoff also meant that smaller engines could be used. These would be fuelled by a combination of liquid oxygen and a hydrocarbon mixture known as Rocket Propellant-1 (RP-1) – a highly-refined form of kerosene – brought together by an intricate system of turbopumps, lines and valves, which fed them into the Atlas’ combustion chambers at a rate of 680 kg per second. Appearance-wise, it also made the Atlas ‘fatter’ than the Redstone or Thor. Its original length was nearly 23 m, its diameter at the fuel tank section was 3.3 m and its fully-loaded weight was around 118,000 kg. At burnout, it was capable of a speed of some 25,750 km/h and a range of 14,480 km. Later Atlas variants, including those used for Project Mercury’s orbital missions (the Atlas-D), were thicker-skinned and employed radio-inertial guidance systems to detect aerodynamic forces and calculate and adjust position, speed and direction.

A key stumbling block, though, involved preventing the warhead inside the Atlas nosecone from burning up as it entered the denser atmosphere at several times the speed of sound; this also had important ramifications from a man-in-space standpoint. During the development of Project Mercury, discussion flared over whether to include a beryllium heat sink or an ablative shield, with both concepts being developed in tandem for a time, until the latter option was finally selected. The Atlas’ role as an orbital rocket became more acute when the Soviets launched the first Sputniks in 1957, by which time it was only partway through its verification programme, plagued by turbopump and fuel-sloshing problems. Nonetheless, on 8 December 1958, the Space Task Group formally approved it as the launch vehicle for its orbital missions and ordered nine flight units.

Since the Mercury-Atlas combo was taller than the weapons-carrying version of the missile, the gyroscopes had to be installed higher in the airframe, in order to more precisely gauge attitude changes during flight. The Mercury spacecraft would use its own posigrade rockets to separate from the Atlas, but because there was a chance that they could burn through the thin-skinned liquid oxygen dome, a fibreglass shield was affixed to the capsule-to-rocket mating ring. Also, the two small vernier jets were adjusted to reduce weight and complexity and increased aerodynamic loads and buffeting problems with the attached capsule forced engineers to thicken the skin of the Atlas’ forebody. New instrumentation was installed to carefully monitor liquid oxygen and differential tank pressures, attitude rates about all three axes, engine manifold pressures and primary electrical power, all of which had the potential to lead to catastrophe.

Its maiden suborbital flight with a capsule, dubbed Mercury-Atlas 1 (MA-1), got underway on the morning of 29 July 1960. Despite holds for heavy rainfall, the cloud ceiling rose high enough to be considered acceptable and, after other delays caused by problems topping-up the Atlas’ liquid oxygen tanks and ensuring telemetry was sound, the rocket lifted-off at 9:13 am. The early part of ascent went like clockwork, but, around a minute into the flight, the pressure difference between the liquid oxygen and fuel tanks went to zero and all contact with the Atlas was lost. Unfortunately, cloud cover over the Cape was so thick that visual and photographic evidence was virtually impossible, although it subsequently became apparent that the Atlas’ walls had ruptured due to vibrations set up by mechanical resonance in the capsule-to-rocket adaptor. The rocket and spacecraft reached a peak altitude of 13 km, before descending to impact the Atlantic. One of the few saving graces was that the Mercury capsule maintained its structural integrity until it hit the ocean.

A stainless steel reinforcing ‘belly band’, strapped around the upper part of the

rocket, was implemented and the capsule-to-Atlas adaptor was stiffened. The MA-2 suborbital mission was duly launched at 9:12 am on 21 February 1961, passing successfully through ‘Max Q’ a minute later, and after reaching an apogee of 183 km, the now-separated capsule commenced its ballistic fall towards the South Atlantic. Splashdown occurred 18 minutes after launch and a proud NASA described the mission as ‘‘nominal in nearly every respect’’, with MA-2 recovered in good condition. When asked at a press conference later that day if an astronaut could have survived the test, Bob Gilruth beamed with a resounding ‘‘Yes’’.

Nine weeks later, at 11:15 am on 25 April, MA-3 lifted-off on what should have been an orbital flight, carrying an electronic mannequin capable of ‘inhaling’ and ‘exhaling’ man-like quantities of gas, heat and water vapour. This time, however, the Atlas failed to properly follow its roll and pitch manoeuvres due to a transient voltage. ‘‘The roll and pitch program normally changed the initial vertical trajectory of the launch into a more horizontal one that would take the Atlas out over the Atlantic,’’ wrote Gene Kranz. ‘‘This Atlas was still inexplicably flying straight up, threatening the Cape and the surrounding communities.’’ It was remotely destroyed after just 43 seconds, but, fortunately, the LES tower saved the Mercury capsule by pulling it free as planned. It impacted the Atlantic seven minutes after launch and was in such good condition that it was used on the very next Atlas flight. That flight was itself repeatedly postponed, firstly by delays in the delivery of its rocket to the Cape and also by the need to extensively overhaul the old MA-3 capsule back at McDonnell’s St Louis plant. During its time in Missouri, the spacecraft was meticulously cleaned, its heat shield replaced and other repairs implemented.

At length, at 9:04 am on 13 September, only weeks after Gherman Titov’s 17- orbit mission, MA-4 succeeded where its predecessor had failed, splashing down safely 280 km east of Bermuda. Finally, on 29 November, the chimpanzee Enos was blasted aloft in MA-5 to evaluate the capsule’s life-support systems and the Atlas’ performance with a living passenger. NASA Administrator Jim Webb’s office had questioned the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) about the need for this and, indeed, Washington newspapers suggested that another such mission would invite Soviet ridicule. However, the decision was taken for a ‘‘necessary preliminary checkout’’ of the hardware before committing a human pilot. Enos, one of four chimps shortlisted for the flight, owed his name to the Hebrew word for ‘man’, hopefully indicative that the next Mercury-Atlas would be flown by a somewhat less hairy hominid. He underwent 1,250 hours of training – more than Ham, because Enos would be exposed to a much longer period of weightlessness and higher G loads – which included psychomotor preparations and aircraft flights. President Kennedy drew laughs from the Senate when he announced that the just-launched Enos ‘‘reports that everything is perfect and working well’’.

The Atlas successfully placed MA-5 into an orbit of 159 x 237 km. Originally intended to fly three orbits – the same as was planned for John Glenn on MA-6 – the capsule encountered difficulties with its attitude-control system when a metal chip in a fuel line caused one of its roll thrusters to fail. This allowed the spacecraft to drift from its normal attitude and, although the automatic system worked to correct this, some 4 kg of fuel was wasted trying to keep it properly aligned during its second orbit. Coupled with this problem, the environmental system experienced glitches and the temperature of Enos’ pressure suit rose to 38.1°C. The problem later resolved itself, but engineers’ concerns over fuel consumption prompted them to request a re­entry at the end of the second orbit. As Enos hurtled over Point Arguello in California, Flight Director Chris Kraft decided to bring MA-5 home early and the retrofire command was transmitted to the spacecraft.

Three hours after launch, Enos’ capsule was bobbing in the Atlantic, just off the coast of Puerto Rico. It was hauled aboard the destroyer Stormes and its hatch explosively detonated. Enos, who, like Ham, had been ‘rewarded’ with electric shocks for operating the correct controls, thanks to an equipment malfunction, was bloodied and ‘‘excitable’’, but nonetheless alive and happy to see his rescuers.

Significant though it was, the flight of Enos – who would die of dysentery less than a year later – quickly faded as public attention became riveted on the impending mission, tentatively scheduled for 19 December. At around the same time, some members of the media speculated that Glenn, Shepard and Scott Carpenter had been selected as candidates for the first orbital mission. Glenn, however, having served as backup for the last two missions, had already been picked by Bob Gilruth to fly. Barely a day after Enos splashed down, his launch vehicle, designated ‘Atlas 109D’, arrived at the Cape and Mercury’s operations director Walt Williams told journalists that three shifts were now working around-the-clock, seven days a week, in a bid to get an American into orbit before the end of the year. That plan evaporated on 7 December, when it was announced that ‘‘minor problems dealing with the cooling system and positioning devices in the Mercury capsule’’ had obliged a postponement until January. Admittedly, many senior managers had known since October that the timeframe for a December launch was tight. Said the agency’s deputy administrator, Hugh Dryden: ‘‘You like to have a man go with everything just as near-perfect as possible. This business is risky. You can’t avoid this, but you can take all the precautions you know about.’’

With the completion of MA-5, NASA felt confident and ready for the manned orbital mission. By the end of February 1962, a somewhat different hominid – a Marine pilot, transcontinental record-holder and ‘Name That Tune’ winner named John Herschel Glenn Jr – would ride the temperamental Atlas not only into space, but into orbit and into the history books. Yet the risks were pervasive and enormous. The success of Enos’ mission did not detract from the reality that the rocket had exploded on a number of occasions. ‘‘John Glenn is going to ride on that contraption?’’ asked the Redstone’s designer, Wernher von Braun. ‘‘He should be getting a medal just for sitting on top of it before he takes off!’’

Cooper’s hotshot characteristics were balanced by a misleadingly quiet voice and laid-back personality, to such an extent that he frequently fell asleep during the lengthy physical checks… and, famously, dozed off aboard his Faith 7 spacecraft, atop the fully-fuelled Atlas, on launch morning. Al Shepard, for his part, had lost his last chance to fly the final Mercury mission. Despite having himself engaged in flat – hatting as a naval aviator, he told Walt Williams that he felt Cooper had shown ‘‘unusually bad judgement’’. However, wrote Neal Thompson, ‘‘it wasn’t the height Shepard thought was dumb; it was buzzing the administration building’’.

Four hours after a still-enraged Williams had given his consent to let Cooper fly, early on 14 May, the prime and backup astronauts ate breakfast… and Shepard got more revenge for his ‘lost’ mission through another tension-relieving, though somewhat mean-spirited, gotcha. Press spokesman Shorty Powers arrived early that morning with a pair of cameramen to shoot some behind-the-scenes footage of Cooper as he prepared for launch. However, they found, to their shock, that none of

the overhead lights were working, nor, indeed, were any of the electrical sockets. Someone, it seemed, had cut the wires, removed every light bulb, inserted thick tape into the sockets and replaced the bulbs. No one pointed any fingers, but Powers recognised the grin on Shepard’s face “that is typical of him when he has a mouse under his hat’’.

Another gift from Shepard awaited Cooper when he boarded Faith 7 at 6:36 am: a small suction-cup pump on the seat, labelled with the legend ‘Remove before launch’, in honour of the new urine-collection device aboard the spacecraft. Cooper would become the first Mercury astronaut who would be able to urinate in a manner other than ‘in his suit’. At this stage, the only expression of doubt over whether Faith 7 would fly came from meteorologist Ernest Amman. His fears were soon realised, not because of the weather, but due to a malfunctioning C-band radar at the mission’s secondary control centre in Bermuda. Shortly after this had been rectified, at 8:00 am, with an hour remaining before the scheduled launch, a simple 275- horsepower diesel engine, responsible for moving the gantry away from the Atlas, stubbornly refused to work. More than two hours were wasted in efforts to repair a fouled fuel injection pump on the engine and the count resumed around noon. The gantry was successfully retracted, but the failure of a computer in Bermuda – crucial for a ‘go/no-go’ launch decision to be made – caused the attempt to be scrubbed.

Cooper, after six hours on his back inside Faith 7, remained upbeat and summoned a forced grin. ‘‘I was just getting to the real fun part,’’ he said. ‘‘It was a very real simulation.” He spent part of the afternoon fishing, while checkout crews prepared the Atlas for launch the following morning. Arriving at Pad 14 for the second time, he greeted Guenter Wendt, with mock formality, reporting as ‘‘Private Fifth Class Cooper’’, to which the pad fuehrer responded in kind. The roots of their joke came two years earlier, when Cooper had stood in for Al Shepard in a launch – day practice run prior to Freedom 7. Upon arriving at the pad, Cooper had expressed mock terror, begging Wendt not to make him go, in true Jose Jimenez fashion. Some of the assembled media were amused, but NASA’s public affairs people were not and one even suggested that Cooper be ‘‘busted to Private Fifth Class’’. Ironically, the astronaut and Wendt liked the idea and ran with it.

This time, his wait inside the spacecraft lasted barely two and a half hours. The countdown ran smoothly until T-11 minutes and 30 seconds, when a problem developed in the rocket’s guidance equipment and a brief hold was called until it was resolved. In fact, so smooth was the countdown that flight surgeons were astonished to note that Cooper’s heart rate had fallen to just 12 beats per minute: he had dozed off. It took Wally Schirra, the capcom at Cape Canaveral, to bellow his name over the communications link to awaken him. Agonisingly, another halt came just 19 seconds before liftoff to allow launch controllers to ascertain that the Atlas’ systems had assumed their automatic sequence as planned.

Thirteen seconds after 8:00 am on the morning of 15 May, the Atlas rumbled off its launch pad in what Cooper would later describe as a smooth but definite push. A minute into the climb, the silvery rocket initiated its pitch program and the astronaut felt the vibrations of Max Q, after which the flight smoothed out and he heard a loud clang and the sharp, crisp ‘thud’ of staging as the first-stage boosters cut off and separated. Unneeded, the LES tower was jettisoned and, at 8:03 am, Faith 7’s cabin pressure sealed and held, as intended. Two minutes later, the sustainer completed its own push, shutting down and inserting the spacecraft perfectly into orbit. It was so good, in fact, that the heading was 0.0002 degrees from perfect, Cooper’s velocity was right on the money at 28,240 km/h and his trajectory set him up for at least 20 circuits of the globe. Said Wally Schirra as America’s sixth spaceman entered orbit: “Smack-dab in the middle of the plot!’’

Cooper watched for about eight minutes as the sustainer tumbled away and then moved to his checklists, running through temperature readings, contingency recovery areas and began the process of adjustment to weightlessness. So rapid was Faith 7’s passage across the Atlantic – accomplished in a matter of minutes – that he expressed surprise when called by the capcoms in the Canaries and Kano in Nigeria. Sigma 7 had been near-perfect and it seemed that Cooper’s mission would match or excel it; he dozed off for a few minutes during his second orbit, as the spacecraft passed over a lonely stretch of the Pacific, between Hawaii and California. Flight surgeons would note that his heart rate surged momentarily from 60 to 100 beats per minute, suspecting that he was having an exciting, though somewhat brief dream. At one stage, things were running so well that Capcom Al Shepard had nothing to say, except to offer Cooper some quiet time. Not until the following day, 16 May, would serious problems arise and allow him to demonstrate his skills as a pilot.

He was by no means inactive. His tasks including eating – brownies, fruit cake and some bacon – as well as Earth observations, photography, collection of urine samples and monitoring Faith 7’s health. His efficient use of the cabin oxygen even prompted Shepard to tell him to “stop holding your breath and use some oxygen if you like’’. Cooper’s response was that, as the only non-smoker among the Mercury Seven, his lungs were in better shape than his colleagues. Not only was his oxygen expenditure economical, but so too was his fuel usage, prompting mission managers to nickname him, good-naturedly, a “miser”. As Faith 7 embarked on its second orbital pass, Shepard reiterated that the flight was proceeding beautifully and “all of our monitors down here are overjoyed’’. In fact, Cooper’s only complaint during this period was of a thin, oily film on the outside pane of his trapezoidal window.

Beginning with the third orbit, the astronaut set to work on the first of 11 scientific experiments assigned to his mission. One of these was a 15 cm sphere, instrumented with two xenon strobe lights, part of efforts to track a flashing beacon in space. Three hours and 25 minutes after launch, he clicked a squib switch and heard and felt the experiment separate successfully. However, despite repeated efforts, he could not see the flashing beacon in orbital darkness. He would later catch a glimpse of it pulsing at sunset, during his fourth circuit of the globe, telling Capcom Scott Carpenter with jubilation: “I was with the little rascal all night!’’ Cooper reported seeing the beacon flickering during his fifth and sixth orbits, too. Another major experiment, the deployment of a 76 cm Mylar balloon, painted fluorescent orange for visibility, was less than successful. Nine hours into the mission, he set cameras, attitude and spacecraft switches to release the balloon from Faith 7’s nose, but it refused to move. Another attempt also proved fruitless. The intention of the balloon – similar to that flown on Carpenter’s mission – was for it to inflate with nitrogen and extend out on a 30 m nylon tether, after which a strain gauge would measure the differences in ‘pull’ at Faith 7’s apogee of 270 km and perigee of 160 km. Sadly, the cause of the failure was never determined.

Cooper was, however, able to observe not only a flashing beacon in space, but also a xenon ground light of three million candlepower, situated at Bloemfontein in South Africa. He would also make detailed mental notes throughout the flight as he flew over cities, large oil refineries near Perth in Australia, roads, rivers, small villages and even saw smoke from Himalayan houses. Although he pointed out that the finer details could only be seen if lighting and background conditions were right, his sightings were disputed after the mission, but Gemini astronauts would later confirm them. Further theoretical confirmation came from visibility researchers S. Q. Dunt and John H. Taylor of the University of California at San Diego. In a paper published in October 1963, they highlighted Cooper’s observation of a dust cloud, presumably kicked up by a vehicle travelling along a dirt road near El Centro, on the border between Mexico and the United States.

‘‘Calculation shows that the vehicle, plus the dust cloud behind it, is more visible than the road itself,’’ agreed Dunt and Taylor in their report. ‘‘It is possible, moreover, that the appearance of the dust cloud would create the impression of having a lighter tip at its eastern end. There is reason to believe, therefore, that the presence of a moving Border Patrol vehicle on the dirt road near El Centro could have been seen from orbital altitude under the atmospheric and lighting conditions which we believe to have prevailed at the time of Major Cooper’s observation.’’

Several other scientific experiments, in fact, encompassed photography. Before the mission, Cooper spent time with University of Minnesota researchers on an investigation into the mysterious phenomena of the zodiacal light and the nighttime airglow layer, as part of efforts to better understand the origin, continuity, intensity and reflectivity of visible electromagnetic spectra along the basic reference plane of the celestial sphere. His work would also help to answer questions about solar energy conversion in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Many of the zodiacal light photographs turned out to be underexposed and the airglow shots overexposed, but they were nonetheless of usable quality and complemented Carpenter’s images from Aurora 7. Flying over Mexico, Cooper photographed horizon-definition imprints in each quadrant around his local vertical position, part of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology project to design a guidance and navigation system for Apollo. Light­heartedly complaining that all he seemed to be doing was taking pictures, Cooper acquired some excellent imagery, including infrared weather photographs.

Surpassing Wally Schirra’s nine-hour endurance record for the United States, Cooper settled down to a battery of radiation experiments to ascertain that the effects of the Operation Dominic artificial aurora were indeed diminishing. He also undertook the hydraulic tasks of transferring urine samples and condensate water between storage tanks. Physicians had expressed particular interest in urine checks and the Soviets had already highlighted significant accumulations of calcium in their cosmonauts’ urine, suggesting that extended spaceflights could adversely affect human bones. Cooper found the hypodermic-type syringes used to pump liquid manually from bag to bag to be unwieldy and exasperatingly leaky, even telling his on-board tape recorder that “this pumping under zero-G is not good. [Liquid] tends to stand in the pipes and you have to actually forcibly force it through”.

Ten hours into the mission, the Zanzibar capcom officially informed Cooper that his flight parameters – circling the globe every 88 minutes and 45 seconds – were good enough for 17 orbits. Shortly before retiring for a scheduled sleep period on his ninth revolution, Cooper ate a supper of powdered roast beef mush, drank some water and checked Faith 7’s systems to ensure that they could be powered down for the next few hours. His orbital speed was truly phenomenal: after speaking to Capcom John Glenn, based on the Coastal Sentry Quebec tracking ship, near Kyushu, Japan, he swept south-eastwards over the Pacific and gave a full report to the telemetry command vessel Rose Knot Victor, positioned near Pitcairn Island… just ten minutes later!

The Pitcairn communicator told Cooper to get some rest, but that proved almost impossible. Passage over South America, then Africa, northern India and Tibet, during daylight, offered wonderful viewing and photographic opportunities. The Tibetan highlands, with their thin air and visibility seldom obscured by haze, allowed him to make rudimentary estimates of his speed and ground winds from the direction of chimney smoke. In their paper, Dunt and Taylor suggested that ground – reflectance modelling made it not impossible for Cooper to have seen such fine details. Thirteen and a half hours into the flight, Glenn told him that the communicators would leave him alone and Cooper pulled a shade across Faith 7’s window to get some sleep. The astronaut dozed intermittently for around eight hours, anchoring his thumbs at one stage inside his helmet restraint strap to keep his arms from floating freely. He woke briefly when his pressure suit’s temperature climbed too high and over the next several hours he napped, took photographs, taped status reports and cursed to himself as his body-heat exchanger crept either too high or too low.

Faith 7 swept silently over the Muchea tracking site on its 14th orbit and Cooper, by now fully alert, again checked its systems, finding his oxygen supply to be plentiful and around 65 per cent and 95 per cent of hydrogen peroxide fuel, respectively, in his automatic and manual tanks. At around this time, he said a brief prayer to offer thanks for an uneventful mission: “Father, we thank you, especially for letting me fly this flight. Thank you for the privilege of being able to be in this position, to be in this wondrous place, seeing all these many startling, wonderful things that you have created.’’ Slow-scan television images of Cooper, the first ever transmitted by an American astronaut, were broadcast during his 17th orbit and he even sang one revolution later. The prayers and light moments, it seemed, actually marked the beginning of Faith 7’s troubles.

Early on his 19th circuit of Earth, some 30 hours after liftoff, the first of several serious problems reared its head. Cooper was flying over the western Pacific, out of radio communications with the ground, when he dimmed his instrument panel lights… and noticed the small ‘0.05 G’ indicator glow green. This should normally have illuminated only after retrofire, as Faith 7 commenced its manoeuvre out of orbit, and should also have been quickly followed by the autopilot placing the spacecraft into a slow roll. Initial worries that Cooper had inadvertently slipped out of orbit were refuted a few minutes later by the Hawaii capcom, who told him his orbital parameters held steady, suggesting either that the indicator was faulty or that the autopilot’s re-entry circuitry had been triggered out of its normal sequence.

An orbit later, the astronaut was advised to switch to autopilot and Faith 7 began to roll. This had its own implications. For proper flight, Time magazine told its readers a week later, there were other functions for the autopilot to perform prior to retrofire. Since each function was sequentially linked to the next, Mercury Control knew that several earlier steps had not been performed. Cooper would have to control them by hand, a situation not entirely unpalatable, since Scott Carpenter had flown part of his re-entry in a similar manner. Still, at Cape Canaveral, a training mockup of the spacecraft in Hangar S was set up to practice various scenarios and provided an assurance that all would be well. Then, on its 20th orbit, Faith 7 lost all attitude readings and, a revolution later, one of its three inverters, needed to convert battery power to alternating current and operate the autopilot, went dead. Cooper tried to activate a second inverter, but could not. (The third inverter was needed to run cooling equipment inside the cabin throughout re-entry.) His autopilot, in effect, was devoid of all electrical power.

As flight controllers scrambled to relay questions, corrections and instructions and practice procedures on the ground – including the possibility of bringing Cooper back to Earth on battery power alone – the astronaut himself remained calm, though he watched in dismay as carbon dioxide levels rose both inside the cabin and within his pressure suit. The lack of electrical power meant that he could not rely on his gyroscopic system to properly orient Faith 7 for re-entry; it would have to be lined up manually. He could not even rely on the spacecraft’s clock. “Things are beginning to stack up a little,’’ he told Capcom Scott Carpenter in a cool and typically understated manner, but acquiesced that he still had fly-by-wire and manual controls as a backup. “We would have found some way to fire the retros,’’ Mercury engineer John Yardley said later, “if it meant telling him what wires to twist together.’’

Guided by John Glenn, aboard the Coastal Sentry, Cooper ran smoothly through his pre-retrofire checklist, steadying Faith 7 with the hand controller and lining up a horizontal mark on his window with Earth’s horizon; this brought the spacecraft’s nose down to the desired 34-degree angle. Next, he lined up a vertical mark with pre­determined stars to gain the correct yaw angle. Glenn counted him down to retrofire and Cooper hit the button on time, receiving no light signals, because of his electrical system problems, but he confirmed that he could feel the three small engines igniting. Re-entry was uneventful, with Cooper damping out unwanted motions and manually deploying his drogue and main parachutes. The spacecraft broke through mildly overcast skies and splashed into the Pacific, some 130 km south-east of Midway Island, only 6.4 km from the recovery ship Kearsarge. Floundering briefly, Faith 7 quickly righted itself and Cooper requested permission, as an Air Force officer, to be allowed aboard a naval carrier.

Forty minutes later, permission having been granted, the hatch was blown and America’s sixth astronaut set foot on the deck of the Kearsarge. His mission had lasted 34 hours, 19 minutes and 49 seconds – nowhere close to the four days chalked – up by Andrian Nikolayev a year earlier, but a significant leap as NASA prepared for its ambitious series of long-duration Gemini flights. Even more significantly, Cooper had returned to Earth as all the astronauts had wanted: as a pilot in full control. It also offered a jab at the test pilot community, some of whom had ridiculed Project Mercury as little more than ‘a man in a can’ or, even more deridingly, as ‘spam in a can’. Walt Williams, who only days earlier had tried to have Cooper removed from the flight, now warmly shook the astronaut’s hand. ‘‘Gordo,’’ he told him, ‘‘you were the right guy for the mission!’’

The future seemed bright. Ahead, in a year’s time, lay Gemini. . . and then the Moon.

Shortly after their arrival in orbit, with a packed five hours ahead of them, things did not appear to be going well for the Gemini 3 crew. Twenty minutes into the mission, as Molly Brown passed out of range of the mid-Atlantic tracking station in the Canary Islands, Young noticed the oxygen pressure gauge suddenly drop. At first, he suspected a malfunction, but his attention was soon drawn to a number of peculiar readings from other instruments, suggesting that he and Grissom may have a power supply problem on their hands. Quickly, Young switched from the primary to the backup electrical convertor, which powered the dials, and the glitch vanished as abruptly as it had appeared. From the moment Young first spotted the problem to its resolution took barely 45 seconds.

The cell-growth study, to be run by Grissom, proved a dismal failure; perhaps, he said, the adrenaline was pumping a little too much and he twisted the handle too hard, broke it and ruined the whole experiment. (Ironically, the scientist on the ground, operating the control sample, also broke his handle!) For his part, Young experienced difficulties with the radiation investigation on his side of the cabin and, although he completed it correctly, the results were inconclusive. Exposed to nearly identical doses of radiation, the in-flight blood samples showed higher levels of damage than their control counterparts on the ground. After the mission, both men would blame differences between the experiment packages they flew with and trained with as the cause of the problem, but admitted that observing sea urchins did not carry the same ‘‘oh, wow’’ factor as manoeuvring their spacecraft and experiencing the wonders of microgravity.

At the end of the first orbit, with Molly Brown flying nose-first, Grissom fired the forward-facing OAMS thrusters for a carefully timed 74 seconds to slow down by about 15 m/sec and almost circularise the orbit. Then, passing over the Indian Ocean in darkness on the second orbit, he yawed 90 degrees to one side and fired first the forward-facing thrusters and then the aft-facing thrusters in an effort to cancel out the 3 m/sec of the previous burn, which he was almost able to do, with the residual marginally increasing the inclination of their orbit with respect to the equator. These two manoeuvres had been made ‘out of plane’ so as not to disturb their circular orbit.

On the third and final orbit, with Molly Brown flying base-first, a 109-second ‘fail-safe’ burn lowered the perigee to 72 km to ensure a successful re-entry in the event of a retrorocket malfunction. No such malfunction materialised, thankfully, and, after running through their checklists, Young fired the pyrotechnics to separate the equipment module from the adaptor and armed the automatic retrofire switch. One by one, the four braking engines ignited, another set of pyrotechnics released the spent retrorocket compartment and Molly Brown plunged, its ablative base forward, into the atmosphere. ft was during this dynamic phase of the mission, at an altitude of 90 km, that another experiment – the communications task – was to begin and Young duly threw the switch on his side of the cabin as the plasma sheath broke the radio link with Mission Control. Unlike the other experiments, this one proved encouraging: at high rates of water flow, investigators later concluded, both UHF and C-band signals from the spacecraft could be received by ground stations. ‘‘We could see the whole retro pack burning up as it came in right behind us,’’ Grissom remembered of the dramatic re-entry.

By monitoring the trajectory during re-entry, the on-board computer could predict the splashdown point and display this to Grissom, who could adjust the ‘lift vector’ by using the thrusters in the nose to roll left or right of the ‘neutral’ position in order to steer towards the target. When this indicated that they were coming in short, his efforts to ‘extend’ made little difference. ft was later concluded that theoretical and wind tunnel predictions of Gemini’s lift capability did not match its actual lift. fn fact, Molly Brown would splashdown 84 km short of the intended point and 110 km from the recovery ship, fntrepid. Nevertheless, the role of an engineering test flight was to determine the vehicle’s performance and this empirical data would be taken into account on future missions.

As the drogue parachute deployed, Molly Brown was oriented with its heat shield down. However, after the main canopy had inflated, Grissom threw a switch to adjust the parachute line to a two-point configuration that would angle the capsule’s nose at a 45-degree angle to the horizontal. Even though both men were strapped in, this transition was so violent that it pitched them into their windows, cracking Young’s helmet faceplate and punching a hole in Grissom’s. Fortunately, splash­down at 2:16:31 pm was relatively smooth, although Grissom could see little through his window, as the still-attached parachute caught the wind and dragged Molly Brown’s nose underwater. Fearing a similar demise as had happened to Liberty Bell 7, Grissom jettisoned the parachute and Gemini 3 bobbed upright. This time, he had not lost his spacecraft. . . but, alas, with the swelling waves, quickly lost his breakfast.

That breakfast had, of course, been augmented somewhat by Young’s crafty corned beef sandwich, one of the few events of the mission still remembered decades later. “I was concentrating on our spacecraft’s performance,” Grissom recalled after the flight, “when suddenly John asked me: ‘You care for a corned beef sandwich, skipper?’ If I could have fallen out of my couch, I would have! Sure enough, he was holding an honest-to-john corned beef sandwich!’’ As Grissom sampled the treat, bits of rye bread began to float around the pristine cabin, forcing him to put it away. His only complaint was that there was no mustard on it. Still, it proved somewhat tastier than Gemini 3’s staple of reconstituted apple sauce, grapefruit juice and chicken bits.

In his autobiography, Deke Slayton admitted that he had given permission for Young to carry the sandwich, but in view of the complaints NASA later received over its ‘frivolous’ astronauts’ antics, he was obliged to render a formal, though mild, reprimand. For Grissom, though, it would be a highlight of the mission. It did not affect Young’s career and on 6 April, barely two weeks later, he and Grissom were assigned to the backup crew for Gemini VI, the rendezvous mission, scheduled to take place in the autumn.

With Intrepid still some distance from them, it is hardly surprising that Grissom refused to open Molly Brown’s hatches until Navy swimmers from a rescue helicopter had affixed a flotation collar to the spacecraft. The splashdown point was in the vicinity of Grand Turk Island in the Atlantic. Although the spacecraft proved lousy as a boat, its performance in orbit had been nothing short of outstanding. ‘‘I do know that if NASA had asked John and me to take Molly Brown back into space the day after splashdown, we would have done it with pleasure,’’ said Grissom. ‘‘She flew like a queen, did our unsinkable Molly, and we were absolutely sure that her sister craft would perform as well.’’ Still, the seasick Grissom was first to leave the capsule and Young kidded him about his failure to adhere to the old saying about captains being last to leave. Without missing a beat, Grissom replied ‘‘I just made you captain as I got out!’’ Indeed, in a little more than a year’s time, Young would captain his own Gemini into orbit.