Category Escaping the Bonds of Earth

Despite the Saturn V’s woes, the situation was somewhat brighter for Spacecraft 101, the command and service module assigned to Apollo 7, the first manned flight. Heavily refurbished and quite different from the machine which had claimed Grissom, White and Chaffee’s lives, it finally arrived at Cape Kennedy on 30 May 1968. By this time, its crew had already been training for more than a year. Commander Wally Schirra, senior pilot Donn Eisele and pilot Walt Cunningham were personally announced before Congress by NASA Administrator Jim Webb on 9 May 1967, with Tom Stafford, John Young and Gene Cernan as their backups. Schirra wanted to call his spacecraft ‘The Phoenix’ – the mythical firebird of classical lore, said to end its 500- year lifespan on a pyre of flames, then return from the ashes – but NASA, fearing unpleasant reminders of Apollo 1, vetoed the idea. Schirra’s crew was also granted a three-man ‘support’ team, drawn from a new pool of astronauts announced in 1966: Jack Swigert, Ron Evans and Bill Pogue. In effect, each Apollo crew would now comprise nine dedicated members, emphasising its complexity over previous Mercury and Gemini missions. In Schirra’s words, the support crew’s role was to ‘‘maintain a flight data file, develop emergency procedures in the simulators and prepare the cockpit for countdown tests’’. Interestingly, Schirra asked Swigert to devise techniques to handle a fuel tank explosion in space. Less than two years after Apollo 7, Swigert would find this task very helpful. . .

From the time that their spacecraft arrived in Florida to the day of their launch on 11 October 1968, Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham would spend nearly 600 hours in the command module simulator, operating the 725 manual controls and responding to countless simulated emergencies and malfunctions. Moreover, they had occupied Spacecraft 101 during an altitude chamber test, had checked out the Chrysler-built slidewire to practice escaping from Pad 34 in the event of a pre-launch emergency, had crawled out of a mockup command module in the Gulf of Mexico and had pored over hundreds of pages of documentation and flight plans.

As Apollo’s first manned flight draws closer, backup senior pilot John Young is inserted into the spacecraft prior to a test at North American’s Downey plant.

North American’s attitude towards the astronauts had changed dramatically, with the company now heartily opening its doors to their inspections, and Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham had not been shy in prowling the Downey plant to check on progress. This irritated Frank Borman, who had been attached to Downey as the astronaut office’s representative. He considered the Apollo 7 crew to be obnoxious and felt that they were just causing disruptions and doing more harm than good. Borman even went so far as to complain to Deke Slayton, who spoke in turn to Schirra. However, it was understandable that the crew behaved as it did: they had seen poor workmanship from North American in the past and three of their comrades had died as a result of it. They wanted to make sure that they would be flying into space in the best possible ship. When Schirra saw an increasingly positive response and commitment from North American, from engineers to managers to the president, Lee Atwood, himself, he was appeased.

On one occasion, Schirra got into trouble himself … albeit to his pleasure. One day in early 1968, he was visiting Downey and, dressed in the required clean-room garb, carefully tried to clamber aboard Spacecraft 101 without damaging any mechanical or electrical parts. “But it was a tight fit,’’ he wrote, “and my knee landed on a bunch of wires. When it did, I felt a sharp slap on my face and I heard a woman’s voice: ‘Don’t you dare touch those wires. Don’t you know we lost three men?’’’ When she found out who Schirra was, the woman was embarrassed and apologetic, but for the commander of Apollo 7, she was just the person NASA needed on its contractor workforce. Schirra’s new-found confidence was shared by John Young, who tracked Spacecraft 101’s progress and concluded that it was ‘‘a pretty clean machine’’.

Elsewhere, fellow astronauts Jim Lovell, Stu Roosa and Charlie Duke simulated how quickly the command module could right itself if it flipped upside down – nose down – in the water (the so-called ‘Stable 2’ position) and for how long it might support them after splashdown. They experienced no difficulties in getting to the manual control switches which inflated three airbags and turned the ship into its upright ‘Stable 1’ orientation. Occasionally, water would splash into the cabin through a post-landing air vent, but the urine collection device proved more than adequate to vacuum this away and dump it overboard. Their consensus: not only was the command module seaworthy, but it could support the astronauts for a prolonged wait of up to two days until recovery. Other astronauts, including Joe Kerwin, Vance Brand and Joe Engle, spent weeks working in test vehicles and concluded that the ship’s systems were virtually trouble-free.

In late July 1968, Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham spent nine hours inside Spacecraft 101 itself under conditions which simulated an altitude of 68.9 km. This gave them the opportunity to perform some of their actual mission tasks and evaluate their ability to work inside pressurised space suits. Technicians purged the cabin, using a mixture of 65 per cent oxygen and 35 per cent nitrogen, then ‘dumped’ the atmosphere so the men were obliged to rely upon their suits as the pressure dropped to almost zero. After an hour in a near-vacuum, the cabin was repressurised with pure oxygen, the normal atmosphere to be used in orbit. A few days later, the backup crew of Stafford, Young and Cernan repeated the exercise with similar success.

For Schirra, it was the altitude chamber testing which ‘sold’ Spacecraft 101 to him. ‘‘I said many times that we would not accept [it] until it had completed its run in the altitude chamber,’’ he wrote, ‘‘similar to the launch pad test where fire killed Grissom, White and Chaffee.’’ The success of these tests prompted him to chortle that Apollo 7 was now on a high-speed track and ‘‘the train is moving out’’.

Spacecraft 101 had begun its manufacturing cycle at North American in early 1966 and, by July of that year, had been assembled, wired, fitted with subsystems and was ready for testing. In the wake of the Apollo 1 fire, it went through a recertification and modification process, during which time its wiring was upgraded and its two-part hatch replaced with the newer unified version. In December 1967, it was finally ready for testing to resume and it passed its three-part acceptance review at Downey in May of the following year. No items were found which might prove ‘‘constraints to launch’’ and on the penultimate day of that month, North American shipped the spacecraft to Cape Kennedy. A flight readiness review in September confirmed that Spacecraft 101 was ‘‘a very good spacecraft”. By that time, wrote Schirra, the crew was ready to go.

For Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham, the events surrounding the Apollo 1 fire and its aftermath were laced with irony. Initially assigned as the prime crew for the original Apollo 2, it had been Schirra’s reluctance to duplicate Gus Grissom’s flight that led him to request its cancellation. In doing so, he had been assigned Apollo 1 backup chores, with no ‘prime’ mission to aspire to. The events of 27 January 1967, in a roundabout way, landed Schirra with the kind of flight he really wanted: something new and challenging. During Apollo 7, he and his crew would spend 11 days in space – the second-longest manned mission to date – and were tasked with the comprehensive and systematic evaluation of the command and service module in Earth orbit.

In theory, Schirra’s mission objectives could be ‘achieved’ in as little as three days, but according to Sam Phillips in a letter to Jim Webb it would be open-ended to 11 days in order ‘‘to acquire additional data and evaluate the aspects of long-duration space flight’’. The countdown, punctuated by three built-in holds to correct any last – minute problems, began on the evening of 6 October and proceeded without incident until ten minutes before launch on the 11th. At that point, thrust-chamber jacket chilldown was initiated for the Saturn’s S-IVB second stage, but took longer than anticipated, forcing a hold of two minutes and 45 seconds. (After launch, analysis confirmed that the chilldown would have occurred without the hold, but waiting, in real time, was prudent in order to meet revised temperature requirements.) The countdown resumed at 10:56 am and the Saturn 1B lifted-off at 11:02:45 am, watched by more than 600 accredited journalists.

If the early stages of the ascent seemed laborious, Time magazine told its readers, they should not have been surprised: the booster weighed 590,000 kg, only slightly less than the 725,750 kg thrust of its first stage. Acceleration from the astronauts’ point of view, therefore, was much calmer and less oppressive than the G loads experienced by previous Mercury and Gemini crews.

Inside the command module, the crew experienced a clear sense of movement, but only Eisele had a good view of the commotion that was going on outside. ‘‘We had a

boost protective cover over the command module,” Cunningham recalled later. “There’s an escape rocket that you can use anytime until you get rid of it, and that’s a little after a minute into the flight. Because that rocket puts out a plume, you had to have a cover over the command module so that you wouldn’t coat the windows and you wouldn’t be able to see anything out of the windows in the event you were coming down on a parachute during an abort. So, the only place you can see out is over Donn’s head in the centre seat. There’s a little round window, about six inches across, and he was the only one that could see out. We had no windows until the boost protective cover [was jettisoned].’’

Two and a half minutes into the thunderous ascent, the eight H-l engines of the Chrysler-built S-IB first stage burned out and it was released, allowing the S-IVB and its single J-2 engine to pick up the thrust and deliver Apollo 7 into orbit. A little under six minutes after launch, as he, Eisele and Cunningham became the first men ever to fly atop a load of liquid hydrogen rocket fuel, Schirra reported that the Saturn was “riding like a dream’’. On the ground, the situation was not quite so dreamy: for a minute or so, the Manned Spacecraft Center had suffered a power failure which temporarily knocked out its lights, control consoles, screens and instruments. Fortunately, generator power took over and no telemetred data was lost.

Despite the successful launch, Schirra would later admit to some anger. Months earlier, during a meeting in Downey, he had learned that Apollo 7 would fly with old Block l-style couches, rather than the improved Block 2 type. The latter, it was realised, would offer better protection for the crew if they happened to inadvertently touch down on land. Schirra felt that if Block l couches had to be used on his flight, the mission rules dealing with wind speeds at launch needed to be revised, since an abort over Florida could push their command module back over land. He agreed to accept Block l couches, on condition that Apollo 7 would not launch if wind conditions were unfavourable. On ll October 1968, winds at the Cape were around 40 km/h, considerably higher than the maximum-allowable 32 km/h needed to avoid a touchdown on land. It was felt that the Saturn lB’s record of reliability made it unlikely that an abort would occur in the early stage of ascent, but to Schirra, commanding the crew that would be flying the thing, it was black and white. “A mission rule had been broken,’’ he wrote. “Needless to say, I was not the happiest guy in town.’’

Ten and a half minutes after launch, following little bumpiness and loads which never exceeded l G, Apollo 7 was inserted perfectly into an orbit of 227-285 km and the S-IVB duly shut down. Both stages of the Saturn performed to near-perfection. Two hours and 55 minutes into the flight, the spacecraft undocked from the S-IVB and pulsed its reaction controls twice to turn back in a simulated rendezvous approach which Moon-bound crews would use to pick up their lunar module. Although there was no lunar module housed inside the stage, it provided useful practice and Schirra brought his ship within l.2 m of the spent S-IVB. Unfortunately, said Cunningham, one of the four adaptor panels had not fully deployed, due to a stuck retention cable, although they would be jettisoned explosively on subsequent flights to ensure lunar module extraction. It “had sort of

bounced back,” wrote Deke Slayton. “It posed no danger to the crew, but had this flight carried a lunar module, it might have been tough to get it out of there.”

Elsewhere, the performance of the big SPS engine was highly successful. It was fortunate, indeed, that this was the case, for this was a component which simply ‘had to work’ or lunar crews would not be able to return home. During their mission, Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham oversaw no fewer than eight SPS firings, the first of which posed something of a surprise. In contrast to the exceptionally smooth Saturn IB liftoff, the SPS noticeably jolted the astronauts, prompting Schirra to whoop ‘‘Yabadabadoo!’’ in imitation of Fred Flintstone. Eisele, too, said that the entire crew ‘‘got more than we expected’’ and that the additional boost literally plastered them back into their seats. Eater SPS burns lasted anywhere from half a second to more than a minute in duration and simulated virtually everything from a return from the Moon to a rendezvous with a phantom lunar module.

Other systems aboard Apollo 7 performed equally well. Occasionally, one of the three electricity generating fuel cells would develop unwanted high temperatures, but load-sharing hookups prevented any power shortages. The astronauts complained about noisy fans in the environmental circuits and turned one of them off, but, when this did not help, switched off the other. Visibility through the windows was mixed, with sooty deposits noted shortly after the jettisoning of the Saturn IB’s escape tower and spots of water condensation seen at other times. Two days into the flight, however, Cunningham reported that most of the windows were in fairly good condition, although moisture was gathering between the inner panes in one case. A similar situation was seen by Schirra a few days later. Nonetheless, the windows proved adequate, particularly during the rendezvous and station-keeping with the S – IVB, when they were almost clear. Navigational sightings with a telescope and sextant on any of 37 pre-selected stars proved difficult if done too soon after a waste­water dump and, indeed, the astronauts typically had to wait several minutes for the frozen droplets to disperse. Eisele reported that unless he could see at least 40 or 50 stars at a time, it was tough to decide which part of the sky he was looking at.

On a more mundane level, the ‘waste-management system’ – a somewhat euphemistic term for Apollo’s rudimentary toilet – proved adequate, if annoying. Its defecation bags, which contained a blue germicidal tablet to prevent bacterial and gas formation, could be sealed easily and stored in empty food containers in the command module’s lower equipment bay. However, they were far from ideal, still produced unpleasant odours and took each astronaut 45-60 minutes to complete. Bill Anders, who flew Apollo 8, would later tell Andrew Chaikin that, since nothing in microgravity ‘falls’, it was necessary to ‘‘flypaper this thing to your rear end and then reach in there with your finger [the bags had ‘fingers’ for this] – and suddenly you were wishing you’d never left home!’’ To add insult to injury, the germicidal tablets then had to be kneaded into the contents of the defecation bag to ensure that they were fully mixed. Not surprisingly, many astronauts found themselves postponing their ‘need to go’ for as long as possible and particularly to wait until there was no work to do.

The urine-collection device took the form of a hose with a condom-like fitting on the end, which led, by way of a valve, to a vent on the outside of the command module, out of which would periodically spill a cloud of frozen droplets. (One Apollo astronaut, when asked what he thought was the most beautiful sight in space, responded “Urine dump at sunset!”) During one toilet session, as Cunningham fitted the urine hose to his suit, he instinctively turned his back to the window for privacy. “Walt,” Schirra asked with some humour in his voice, “who is out there?”

As for moving around in the new spacecraft, the astronauts turned, in Schirra’s words, into spacegoing gymnasts. “You can move any place you want to fairly freely,’’ said Cunningham, “and you certainly don’t need strong handholds to take care of it.’’ Exercise was important, though. At first, when they slept in their couches, their bodies curled up into foetal positions, giving them lower back and abdominal pains; these were relieved by working on a stretching device called an Exer-Genie, which relaxed their cramped and aching muscles.

Sleep brought mixed blessings, with Schirra complaining about the around-the – clock operations which disrupted their normal routine. Sometimes they might go to bed as early as 4:00 pm or as late as 4:00 am, he said, and a consensus was finally reached whereby Eisele kept watch on Apollo 7’s systems whilst Schirra and Cunningham slept and vice versa. Two sleeping bags were mounted beneath the couches and the astronauts typically zipped themselves inside, although the incorrect positioning of restraint straps made them less than ideal. Cunningham, certainly, preferred to sleep in his couch with a shoulder harness and lap belt to keep still. However, if two crew members did this, they invariably disturbed their colleague who was awake. By the third day of the flight, thankfully, they had worked out a routine to get enough sleep.

All three men expressed unhappiness over their food, which tended to crumble and whose particles floated around the cabin. Following his Gemini VI-A mission three years earlier, Schirra requested taking coffee with him aboard Apollo, which he did. Not so fulfilling were the head colds which, first Schirra, and then Eisele and Cunningham, developed during the mission. To be fair, this caused severe discomfort, because it proved extremely difficult to clear the ears, nose and sinuses in microgravity. Mucus rapidly accumulated, filling their nasal passages and stubbornly refusing to drain from their heads; indeed, their only relief was to blow their noses hard, which proved painful on their ear drums. A little under a day into the mission, an irritable Schirra, already annoyed that Mission Control had added two thruster firings and a urine dump to their workload, cancelled the first planned television transmission from Apollo 7, “without further discussion’’. It was the first of many conflicts with ground staff.

Indeed, according to Schirra in his autobiography, Donn Eisele, watching over the spacecraft systems at the time, began the dispute with Mission Control over rescheduling the first television transmission early on 12 October. “When I awoke,’’ Schirra wrote, “I could hear Eisele in an argument. I put on a headset and heard a ground controller say, rather insistently, that our first television transmission was on the agenda for that day.’’ Schirra butted in and backed Eisele that they had enough to do on their second day in orbit, with engineering objectives, rendezvous practice and SPS preparations, without having to worry about the transmission. However, there was more to it than that. “We were scheduled to test the TV circuit later that day,” explained Schirra, “and we’d test it before using it. It was an electrical circuit and I had not forgotten than an electrical short had resulted in the loss of the Apollo 1 crew.’’

In fact, Schirra had complained about the scheduling of the transmissions on the ground, before launch, “but hadn’t been able to win the battle,’’ wrote Deke Slayton. “He probably figured there wasn’t much we could do to him while he was in orbit, and he was right, but it made my life kind of difficult.’’ The commander’s antics also upset the flight directors, including Chris Kraft and Glynn Lunney, when he began sarcastically criticising “the genius’’ who designed a particularly balky piece of equipment. “He might have been right,’’ continued Slayton, “but it sure didn’t endear him to the guys on the ground to have the astronaut implying they were idiots over the open line for everyone to hear.’’ Eisele and Cunningham, despite their admonitions to the contrary, followed Schirra’s lead. After one test which he perceived as pointless, Eisele, clearly annoyed, quipped that he “wanted to talk to the man, or whoever it was, that thought up that little gem’’. ‘The man’ turned out to be Flight Director Lunney himself. Going over the mission tapes and transcripts after the flight, Cunningham would conclude that he ‘‘never had any problem with the ground’’, although Deke Slayton felt that all three men ‘‘were pretty testy’’. One flight controller even muttered, only half-jokingly, about letting the Apollo 7 crew land in the middle of a typhoon . . .

Still, on the third day of the mission, the first of seven eagerly awaited transmissions began, marking the first live televised event from an American manned spacecraft. Each one took place as Apollo 7 passed between Corpus Christi in Texas and Cape Kennedy, the only two ground stations equipped to receive the transmissions. The crew opened the first telecast with a sign which read ‘From the lovely Apollo room, high atop everything’, then aimed their camera through the window as they passed above New Orleans and over Florida. Later transmissions included tours of the command module, demonstrations of the Exer-Genie and explanations of how food was prepared in space and how dried fruit juice was reconstituted with water. All in all, the telecasts were well-received and the astronauts enjoyed them, displaying cards with ‘Keep Those Cards and Letters Coming In, Folks’ . . . and offering Schirra a chance to gain revenge on Deke Slayton by asking him, live, if he was a turtle. Sitting in Mission Control, the gruff Slayton acknowledged that he had recorded his answer, switching off his microphone to utter the necessary answer: ‘‘You bet your sweet ass I am!’’ After the flight, these ‘Wally, Walt and Donn Shows’ proved so popular that the astronauts even won a special Emmy award.

By 12 October, the day that Schirra cancelled the first transmission, Apollo 7 had drifted about 130 km from the S-IVB. The crew’s task was to re-rendezvous with it. This was not as straightforward as it had been on Gemini, since the command module lacked a rendezvous radar and the astronauts were unable to read their range and closing velocity to the target. However, wrote Schirra, ‘‘we made it through the rendezvous, with each of us ageing about a year’’, and Apollo 7 edged to within 20 m of the discarded stage. The manoeuvre proved quite traumatic, with no clear awareness of their closing motions, and the S-IVB itself was spinning throughout like an angry whale. Twenty metres was close enough, before moving away. The stage eventually re-entered the atmosphere on 18 October, its debris splashing into the Pacific Ocean.

Experimental work included synoptic terrain photography, employing a hand­held 70 mm Hasselblad 500C camera to monitor the Carolina bays in the United States and examine wind erosion in desert regions, tropical morphology and the origin of the African rift valley. Imagery was also acquired of Baja California, parts of Mexico and the Middle East in support of geological inquiries and geographical urban studies were aided by photographs of New Orleans and Houston. Islands in the Pacific, extensive coverage of northern Chile and Australia and other areas added to Apollo 7’s photographic haul. Overall, that haul amounted to some 500 images, of which more than a third proved usable, although the need to change film magazines, filters, settings and keep cameras steady accounted for the improper exposure of many frames. Weather photography was also important, with numerous images of various cloud and meteorological structures, including the best-ever photographs of a tropical storm, in this case Hurricane Gladys and Typhoon Gloria. Pre-flight and post-flight X-rays of bones also contributed towards a demineralisa­tion study, whilst sampling before launch and after splashdown helped to determine cellular changes in the astronauts’ blood.

The final days of what both Wernher von Braun and Sam Phillips were lauding as “the perfect mission’’ were marred by the worsening head colds. Schirra’s, indeed, had materialised barely 15 hours after launch, forcing him to admit that he had “gone through eight or nine Kleenexes’’, so he had to endure it for most of the 11- day mission. (He also took Actifed, to which he became so attracted that he helped sell it on television commercials after leaving the astronaut corps.) Years later, Walt Cunningham would blame Schirra’s cold on a dove-hunting trip that the Apollo 7 crew took in a rainy Florida shortly before launch. “Wally was kind of a General Bull Moose complex,’’ Cunningham said. “What’s good enough for Bull Moose is good enough for the world. So, when Wally had a cold, everybody had to be miserable.’’

A head cold anywhere is miserable, but in the pressurised confines of a spacecraft, it proved much more so, and Eisele and Cunningham quickly succumbed. Physician Chuck Berry advised them to take aspirin and decongestant tablets and, as re-entry neared, they began to worry that the build-up of pressure whilst wearing their helmets might burst their eardrums. ft was not an idle fear. During his days at test pilot school, Schirra had made a short flight in a propellor aircraft, with a head cold, and “almost busted an ear drum’’. The choice he now faced on Apollo 7 – not wearing a helmet or running the risk of lifelong hearing loss – was an easy one to make.

Deke Slayton explicitly ordered the crew to wear their helmets, but Schirra refused, agreeing only to keep them stowed in case of emergencies. There were, admittedly, contingency options in place for returning home suitless, perhaps in the event of contamination, but after almost 11 days it seemed unlikely that cabin pressure would fail during re-entry. Each man took a decongestant pill an hour before hitting the atmosphere and endured no major problems. As the command module’s pressure was raised to conditions approximating normal sea-level, Schirra,

Eisele and Cunningham performed the Valsalva manoeuvre – holding their noses, closing their mouths and vigorously exhaling through their nostrils – to keep their middle ears equal to the increasing cabin pressure. In doing so, they avoided ruptured ear drums… but aroused the wrath of flight controllers. All three men would be “tarred and feathered” for their insubordination during the mission. Schirra had already announced his retirement from NASA and probably could not have cared less, but Eisele and Cunningham, who had followed their commander’s lead, would never fly again.

The immediate aftermath of a launch, Jack Albert said later, was normally something of an anticlimax. Except, that is, on 4 December 1965, when spirits remained high. Another Gemini would be despatched in just a few days’ time, and, judging from the minimal damage sustained by Pad 19, one major obstacle standing in the way of the joint mission had dissolved. The next day, the two stages of GLV-VI had been erected and by sundown the Gemini VI-A spacecraft was added. A computer problem quashed hopes to launch on 11 December, but the installation of a replacement part brightened prospects for Schirra and Stafford to fly a day later.

On the morning of the 12th, the astronauts awoke, showered, breakfasted and suited-up just as they had seven weeks earlier, albeit on this occasion Schirra dispensed with smoking a cigarette. Launch was scheduled for six seconds past 9:54 am and the countdown clock ticked perfectly toward an on-time liftoff. Precisely on cue, the Titan’s first-stage engines ignited with a familiar whine. Then, after less than 1.2 seconds, they shut down. Instantly, Schirra, his hand clasping the D-handle which would have fired his and Stafford’s ejection seats and boosted them to safety, faced a life-or-death decision. The mission clock on the instrument panel had started running, as it would in response to the vehicle lifting off, but Schirra could feel no movement in the rocket. If the Titan had climbed just a few centimetres from the pad at the instant of shutdown, there was a very real risk that its 150,000 kg of volatile propellants could explode in a holocaust, known, darkly, among the astronauts, as a Big Fucking Red Cloud (BFRC).

In his autobiography, Stafford remembered vividly the moment that the behemoth came alive and, just as vividly, the instant at which its roar ceased. ‘‘The sound of the engines died even though the clock started and the computer light came on, both indications that we had lifted off,’’ he wrote. ‘‘But I could feel that we hadn’t moved. More important, there was no word from [Capcom] Al Bean, confirming liftoff, which was critical.’’ In fact, it was the feeling of stillness in the

Titan that convinced Schirra not to risk ejecting. Kenneth Hecht, head of the Gemini escape and recovery office, was surprised that he did not eject, but in reality, neither Schirra nor Stafford had much confidence in the seats and, as test pilots, instinctively desired to remain with their ‘bird’ for as long as possible. Stafford felt that the 20 G acceleration of an ejection would have left him with, at best, a cricked neck for months. Moreover, there was a very real risk of death. ‘‘Given that we’d been soaking in pure oxygen for two hours,’’ Stafford wrote, ‘‘any spark, especially the ignition of an ejection seat rocket, would have set us on fire. We’d have been two Roman candles shooting off into the sand and palmetto trees.’’ Yet Schirra would not have put them in undue danger. ‘‘If that booster was about to blow,’’ he said, ‘‘if we really had a liftoff and settled back on the pad, there was no choice. It’s death or the ejection seat.’’

In emotionless tones, the unflappable Schirra reported that propellant pressures in the Titan were lowering and Martin’s test conductor, Frank Carey, responded in a similarly calm manner with ‘‘Hold kill’’, a missile-testing term denoting a shutdown. Although Schirra knew that the rocket had not left the pad and that the mission clock – which should have started at the instant the Titan began to climb – was wrong, his ‘gutsiness’ that morning would win him deserved praise from his fellow astronauts. Had he and Stafford ejected, the entire rendezvous would have been over. There would have been no way that Gemini VI-A could have been readied for another launch attempt in less than the six remaining days of Borman and Lovell’s mission. Moreover, with the increasing likelihood that another Agena-D would not be ready until the spring of 1966, the crucial step of proving rendezvous as a means of getting to the Moon would have been seriously jeopardised.

When the smoke had cleared, and after receiving assurances that the ejection seat pyrotechnics had been safed, Guenter Wendt and his team returned to the capsule to begin extracting the two disappointed astronauts. ‘‘It took 90 minutes to raise the erector and get us out, a lot longer than it should have,’’ wrote Stafford. ‘‘Although he had kind words for Guenter and the pad crew, Wally was furious.’’ The families of the two men were also understandably anxious and, from then onwards, it would become standard practice to have another astronaut present with them during a launch attempt. The day itself was already a bad one: a Cape Kennedy rescue helicopter had crashed in the nearby Banana River and Randy Lovelace – bane of the astronauts’ lives during their selection – and his wife had been killed in a private aircraft crash in Aspen, Colorado.

Later that same afternoon, President Johnson told Jim Webb that he was ‘‘greatly disturbed’’ by the abort, although he was assured that enough time remained to identify the Titan glitch, fix it and get Gemini VI-A into orbit before the end of Borman and Lovell’s mission. That glitch did not take long to find: an electrical tail plug had dropped prematurely from the base of the rocket and activated an airborne programmer – a clock in Gemini VI-A’s cockpit which should not have started until liftoff. The plug was supposed to require 18 kg of ‘pull’ in order to separate, but had rattled loose from its housing. Although it had been installed properly, tests revealed that some plugs did not fit as snugly as others and pulled out more easily.

Then, as engineers pored over engine trace data, it became clear to Ben Hohmann of the Aerospace Corporation that the Titan’s oxidiser pressure and overall thrust had begun to decline before the plug fell out. Subsequent analysis of oscilloscope wiggles identified a blockage in the gas generator and, eventually, an Aerojet technician found the answer: a thimble-sized dust cover had been accidentally left on its fuel inlet port during processing. Months earlier, when the engine was still at Martin’s plant in Baltimore, the gas generator had been removed for routine cleaning and when the check valve at its oxidiser inlet was detached, a plastic cover was installed to keep dirt out. As checkout of the engine proceeded, the dust cap was overlooked and forgotten. To be fair, its location would have been almost impossible to find. However, had the initial tail plug dropout not stopped the launch, the gas generator blockage certainly would have done. “It was serendipitous that we shut down,’’ said Joe Wambolt, then a Gemini propulsion engineer, in an interview published years later in Quest magazine, “because the other engine was not going to thrust.’’ In his autobiography, Wally Schirra wrote that, had he known of this ‘second’ brewing problem at the time, he probably would have chosen to fire the ejection seats.

By 13 December, the gas generator had been cleaned and replaced and the launch was provisionally targeted for the 16th, just two days before Borman and Lovell were due to return to Earth. However, Elliot See radioed the Gemini VII crew with the news that, barring any further problems, the 15th seemed a more likely launch date.

In addition to demonstrating the steely nerves of the Gemini VI-A crew – one of Schirra’s first messages had been ‘‘We’re just sittin’ here breathing’’ – the abort also verified, in the most dramatic manner possible, that the Titan’s malfunction detection system worked. Sensing no upward movement, it had correctly and automatically closed the valves to prevent more fuel entering the combustion chambers and had duly shut down the engines. Catastrophe had been averted. In the Soviet Union, Nikolai Kamanin, fuming over his nation’s failure to catch up with the Americans, admitted in his diary that, despite the abort, a successful Gemini rendezvous was only a matter of days away. Indeed it was.

Deke Slayton and others have freely admitted that they were forced to rethink the practicalities of EVA in the seven-week interval between Geminis IX-A and X. Fortunately, the latter mission would star as its spacewalker a man who, perhaps more so than any other astronaut, knew the G4C pressure suit literally inside out. Michael Collins, who described himself as “nothing special’’, “lazy” and “frequently ineffectual”, would later gain eternal fame as ‘the other one’ on the Apollo 11 crew.

Before that, as John Young’s pilot on Gemini X, he would become the first man to make two extravehicular activities, the first man to physically touch another vehicle in space… and, alas, the first spacewalker to bring home absolutely no photographic record of his achievement.

Slayton saw Young and Collins as a perfect team. Both were obsessive hard – workers, but in contrast to Young’s reserved and publicity-shy nature, the gregarious Collins was “smooth and articulate”. Prior to his selection in October 1963, to improve this smoothness, the Air Force sent its astronaut applicants to ‘charm school’, in which Collins learned more social skills essential for spacefarers: wearing knee-length socks ‘‘that go on forever’’, abhorring hairy legs and needing to hold hands on hips in a particular way ‘‘because people you don’t want to talk about hold ‘em the other way!’’

With a father, uncle and elder brother who would all rise through the ranks to become generals, it was obvious that Collins would follow in their military footsteps. He entered the world in Rome on 31 October 1930, becoming the first American astronaut born outside the United States, and throughout his childhood was often on the move: from Italy to Oklahoma, to Governor’s Island in Upper New York Bay, to Maryland, to Ohio, to Puerto Rico and to Virginia. Whilst in Puerto Rico, Collins took his first ride in a twin-engined Grumman Widgeon, although he would admit that as graduation from West Point neared in 1952, his ‘‘love affair with the airplane had been neither all-consuming nor constant’’.

Nonetheless, he graduated from the Military Academy in the same class as fellow astronaut-in-waiting Ed White and his eventual choice of the Air Force as his parent service was based on two factors. The first was sheer wonder over where aeronautical research would lead in years to come. . . whilst the second was simply to avoid accusations of nepotism, ‘‘real or imagined’’, since his uncle happened to be the Army’s chief of staff at the time! As a cadet, Collins completed initial flight training in Mississippi aboard T-6 Texans, before moving on to jets at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, flying the F-86 Sabre.

Nuclear-weapons-delivery training followed at George Air Force Base in California, as part of the 21st Fighter-Bomber Wing, and Collins transferred with the detachment to Chaumont-Semoutiers Air Base in France in 1954. Two years later, whilst participating in a NATO exercise, he was forced to eject from his F-86 when a fire erupted behind his cockpit. He met Pat Finnegan in the officers’ mess and, despite their differing religious beliefs – she being a staunch Roman Catholic, he a nominal Episcopalian – the couple married in 1957.

Subsequent work as an aircraft maintenance officer, during which ‘‘dismal’’ time he trained mechanics, was followed by a successful application to join the Experimental Flight Test Pilot School at Edwards in August 1960. It involved flying on a totally new level. ‘‘Fighter pilots can be impetuous; test pilots can’t,’’ Collins recounted years later. ‘‘They have to be more mature, a little bit smarter. . . more deliberate, better trained – and they’re not as much fun as fighter pilots.’’ By this time, he had accumulated over 1,500 hours in his logbook, the minimum requirement for a prospective student at the exalted school. (In fact, his class included future astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Irwin.)

An exhausted Cernan puts on a brave face for Tom Stafford’s camera after finally removing his helmet. The world’s longest EVA to date had uncovered a chilling reality: that spacewalking was hazardous and by no means routine.

Two years later, when John Glenn completed America’s first orbital spaceflight, Collins took notice and submitted his application for the 1962 astronaut intake. He underwent the full physical and psychological screening process, narrowly missing out on selection and, despite his disappointment, moved on to study the basics of spaceflight, flying the F-104 Starfighter to altitudes of 27 km and receiving his first taste of weightlessness. He had barely returned to fighter operations when, in June 1963, NASA announced its intent to choose more astronauts. Years later, Deke Slayton would write that the 1962 selection panel considered Collins a good candidate who had been “held back to get another year of experience”.

Initial instruction as part of the third class of 14 spacefarers, whom the press widely dubbed ‘The Apollo Astronauts’, included lunar geology, a subject for which Collins had no great enthusiasm or interest; ironic, perhaps, in view of where his career would eventually take him. Although he felt, like Slayton, that the New Nine was probably the best all-round astronaut group yet chosen, Collins admitted that the Fourteen were the best-educated: with average IQs of 132, an average 5.6 years in college and even an ScD among them.

Completion of initial training led to assignment to oversee the G4C extravehicular suit and he would express annoyance at being left out of the loop in May 1965 when a closed-door decision was made to give Ed White a spacewalk on Gemini IV. In his autobiography, Collins described the suit and the astronaut’s relationship with it, as “kind of love-hate… love because it is an intimate garment protecting him 24 hours a day, hate because it can be extremely uncomfortable and cumbersome”. The suit, and the timeline for which astronauts were to get fitted for it, provided a never – ending source of rumour as to who would be assigned next to a mission slot.

Recognition for this work came in June 1965 with a backup assignment, teamed with Ed White, to Gemini VII. Despite falling ill with viral pneumonia shortly thereafter, Collins recovered promptly and performed admirably, even taping a ‘Home Sweet Home’ card inside Jim Lovell’s window on launch morning. His eventual assignment, with John Young, to Gemini X came in January 1966, by which time White had been named to the first Apollo mission. ‘‘I was overjoyed,’’ wrote Collins. ‘‘I would miss Ed, but I liked John, and besides I would have flown by myself or with a kangaroo – I just wanted to fly.’’

In truth, Air Force Major Donn Fulton Eisele’s NASA career was waning by the time Apollo 7 splashed down. Born in Columbus, Ohio, on 23 June 1930, Eisele had followed the classic path to become an astronaut: a bachelor’s degree from the Naval Academy in 1952, a master’s credential in astronautics from the Air Force Institute of Technology and graduation from the Aerospace Research Pilots’ School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Prior to his selection as an astronaut, along with Cunningham, in October 1963, Eisele served as a project engineer and test pilot at the Air Force’s Special Weapons Center at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.

The easygoing Eisele’s performance as an astronaut is hinted at by Deke Slayton in his autobiography, when he notes that his original intention was to “try out some of the guys who, frankly, I thought were weaker’’ on the Apollo 1 mission. “My original rotation had Donn Eisele and Roger Chaffee as the senior pilot and pilot, working for Gus,’’ he continued. Had it not been for the fact that Eisele damaged his shoulder during a zero-G training flight aboard a KC-135 aircraft just before Christmas 1965, he might have been in the senior pilot’s seat aboard Apollo 1, instead of Ed White. Instead, Slayton considered it easier to swap Eisele for White, the latter of whom was previously attached to Wally Schirra’s original Apollo 2 crew.

Eisele quickly assumed the moniker ‘Whatshisname’, bestowed upon him by Schirra and Cunningham, when nobody seemed to be able to pronounce his surname. Phonetically, it ran EYE-SEL-EE, but when NASA Administrator Jim Webb tried to introduce the crew to President Lyndon Johnson, he mistakenly called him Donn ‘Isell’. ‘‘From then on,’’ Schirra wrote, ‘‘Donn was ‘Whatshisname’’’.

Eisele’s career, in addition to Apollo 7, was harmed by a particularly ugly divorce from his wife Harriet, the result of an affair which caused his work in the astronaut office to suffer. Indeed, the pressures of the job had led many astronauts to look elsewhere, outside the marital home, and after Eisele it would be John Young who would next go through a divorce. Unlike Eisele, however, Young did not allow his personal life to disrupt his work and remained devoted to the space programme. Stories would abound over the years that the funeral of one astronaut killed in the early Sixties – his name was never divulged – was attended not only by his wife and family. . . but also by his long-term mistress, discreetly escorted to the ceremony by a close and trusted friend.

In spite of the criticisms levelled at them in the wake of Apollo 7, both Eisele and Cunningham were at least considered for backup roles on future missions. The former had already been assigned to serve as the backup command module pilot on Apollo 10, the dress-rehearsal for the first lunar landing. For Tom Stafford, the commander of that mission’s prime crew, however, Eisele’s assignment was little more than “a temporary step into oblivion’’. Cunningham, on the other hand, would work for several years on the United States’ space station project, Skylab, and even trained as backup commander for its first mission. He “wanted to fly again,’’ wrote Deke Slayton. “In spite of the flight operations opinion that he shouldn’t, I wasn’t going to rule him out. But it was a numbers game.’’ Cunningham, like Eisele, never flew again.

Ronnie Walter Cunningham was born on 16 March 1932 in Creston, Iowa, and came to be seen as one of ‘the scientists’ among the astronaut corps, owing to his credentials as a civilian physicist. He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1960 and 1961, respectively, then began doctoral research, which he completed, save for his final thesis. However, his military experience certainly paralleled his scientific knowledge: he joined the Navy in 1951, began flight training and served on active duty, then as a reservist, with the Marine Corps. ‘‘In the Navy, in those days, you ran the risk of being assigned to torpedo bombers or transport pilots,’’ Cunningham recalled, ‘‘and the Marine Corps guaranteed you that your first tour. . . would be flying single-engine fighter planes.’’ He remained a reservist throughout his astronaut career. Prior to selection as one of ‘The Fourteen’ in October 1963, Cunningham worked for the Rand Corporation, performing research in support of classified projects and problems relating to the magnetosphere.

‘‘I was working on defence against submarine-launched ballistic missiles, trying to write in… the crudest fashion the equations that would intercept a missile on the rise,’’ Cunningham explained. ‘‘At the same time, I was doing my doctoral work on the Earth’s magnetosphere. It was a tri-axial search coil magnetometer and we were trying to measure fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field. It was during this period that I applied and got accepted at NASA. I never did finish the thesis.’’

As a non-test pilot, possessing an air of academia and a self-confessed irreverance to authority, Cunningham stood out among the Fourteen. He ‘‘seemed determined to be different from the rest of us,’’ wrote his 1963 classmate Gene Cernan, ‘‘whether reading The Wall Street Journal while we busted our asses during a classroom lecture or driving a Porsche instead of a Corvette.’’ He would also lose support through his criticisms, notably over the performance of Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott during the Gemini VIII emergency. When Cunningham claimed years later that he, Schirra and Eisele had been tarred and feathered for their antics on Apollo 7, Cernan would retort that it was ‘‘probably with good reason’’.

It was third time lucky when Wally Schirra – newly raised from commander to captain in June 1965, part of President Johnson’s spot-promotion of active-duty military astronauts – and Air Force Major Thomas Patten Stafford Jr boarded their spacecraft under clear blue skies on the warm morning of 15 December. Launch at 8:37:26 am was perfect, the Titan behaving flawlessly and inserting them into an elliptical orbit of 160-260 km. The bald-headed Stafford was another of NASA’s 1962 astronaut intake whom Deke Slayton described as ‘‘too green’’ to have been a realistic candidate for the Project Mercury selection. Indeed, as Slayton and his six colleagues were announced in April 1959, Stafford was barely graduating from test pilot school and his height would have rendered him ineligible anyway. Further, had it not been for the decision to increase the height limit for the larger Gemini spacecraft, Stafford would not have been picked at all.

In time, he would become one of NASA’s most accomplished astronauts, flying four times into space, including a lunar voyage and command of the joint Apollo – Soyuz mission with the Soviets. His habit of trying to speak faster than he could think led fellow astronauts to nickname him ‘Mumbles’. During Al Shepard’s training to command Apollo 14, Stafford would also take charge of the astronaut office as its chief. He was born in Weatherford, Oklahoma, on 17 September 1930, the son of a dentist father and a teacher mother, becoming an avid reader and an enthusiastic watcher of each silvery DC-3 airliner which frequently soared above his childhood home. After the Pearl Harbour bombings, Stafford took a paper round to buy parts and build his own balsa wood model aeroplanes and in 1944 he took his first flight in a two-seater Piper Cub. That flight alone, he wrote, ‘‘made me eager to become a fighter pilot and help win the war’’.

The young Stafford would not engage in combat in the Second World War, but his dream would one day come true. In high school, he excelled in football, eventually becoming captain, although he recounted in his autobiography that he was far from perfect: shooting out streetlights with a BB gun, throwing a firecracker into the police station and attempting, with his friends, to disrupt their English lessons with a cleverly orchestrated symphony of coughing. ‘‘The neighbours could always tell when I had been caught,’’ he wrote. ‘‘I would be out front painting the fence as a punishment, like Tom Sawyer.’’

His footballing abilities, though, drew the attention of the University of Oklahoma’s coach, although Stafford had also applied for, and would receive, a full ROTC scholarship from the Navy to study there. He had already undertaken some military training in 1947 as part of the Oklahoman National Guard and was even called to temporary duty when the small town of Leedey was hit by a tornado. Stafford also worked on manoeuvres to plot howitzer targets and his calculations contributed to his battery receiving an award for the most outstanding artillery unit. The following year, 1948, brought both success and tragedy: acceptance into the Naval Academy, tempered by the death of his father from cancer.

During four years at Annapolis, he was assigned to the battleship Missouri, where he met another midshipman named John Young. ‘‘We would have laughed,’’ Stafford wrote, ‘‘at the suggestion that someday we would become astronauts flying in space and circling the Moon together.’’ After graduation in 1952 with a bachelor’s degree, his decision to opt for an Air Force, rather than naval, career was inspired by his eagerness to fly the F-86 Sabre jet. He achieved his coveted silver wings from Connally Air Force Base in Waco, Texas, late the following year. By now married to Faye Shoemaker, Stafford underwent advanced training in the F-86 – ‘‘the hottest thing in the sky’’ – and the T-33 Shooting Star. He was then assigned to an interceptor squadron, based in South Dakota, and later moved to Hahn Air Base in Germany as a flight leader and flight test maintenance officer for the Sabre.

Few opportunities for promotion almost led Stafford to resign from the Air Force in 1957 and he even drafted application letters to numerous airlines. . . before deciding to stay in the service when he first saw the F-100 Super Sabre jet and the forthcoming F-104 Starfighter. “If I went to an airline,” he wrote, “I’d be flying the equivalent of cargo planes and could say goodbye to high-performance fighters.’’ He tore up the letters and was promoted to captain the following year, together with selection for the Air Force Experimental Test Pilot School at Edwards. His time there, he remembered, saw him working harder than ever before. “Each morning’s flight generated a pile of data from handwritten notes, recording cameras, oscilloscopes and other instruments. We had to reduce this data to a terse report that we submitted to the instructors and we had a test every Friday.’’ From such schools, pilot astronauts were, are and will continue to be drawn.

Stafford graduated first in his class in May 1959, stayed on at Edwards as an instructor and, over the next couple of years, oversaw a number of newer test pilot candidates, including Jim McDivitt, Ed White, Frank Borman and Mike Collins. He also met a visitor from the Navy’s test pilot school, an aviator named Pete Conrad. Additionally, he co-authored two flight test manuals: the Pilot’s Handbook for Performance Flight Testing and the Aerodynamics Handbook for Performance Flight Testing. By the spring of 1962, he was due for a permanent change of station and confidently expected to study for an advanced master’s degree in a technical field, but was picked to attend Harvard Business School; a business administration credential, he realised, would benefit both his military career and any subsequent plans he had. In April, Stafford also learned that NASA was recruiting its second class of astronauts and submitted his application. Five months later, and three days after starting his master’s degree at Harvard, he received the call from Deke Slayton that would truly change his life.

Gemini X overcame many of the obstacles encountered by its predecessors; for during the course of Young and Collins’ three days aloft, the techniques of rendezvous, docking, spacewalking and boosting themselves into a higher orbit would all be successfully accomplished. Nor would Gemini X perform just ‘any’ rendezvous. Its crew would conduct joint activities with not one, but two targets: with their own Agena and, after raising their orbit to around 400 km, with the now – dead Agena left in space by Armstrong and Scott back in March 1966.

‘‘We were going to be navigational guinea pigs,’’ wrote Collins, ‘‘and were going to compute on-board our spacecraft all the manoeuvres necessary to find and catch our first Agena, instead of using ground-computed instructions to get us within range of our own radar.’’ To help them, Gemini X would have an expanded computer memory, known as ‘Module VI’, which required Collins to use a portable sextant to measure angles between target stars and Earth’s horizon. ‘‘Combining Module VI data with a variety of charts and graphs carried on-board,’’ he continued, ‘‘we would be able to determine our orbit and predict where we would be at a given future time relative to our Agena target.’’

The downside was that Module VI would operate in a totally different manner to Apollo’s navigation system, rendering it, in Collins’ words, a ‘‘technological dead­end’’. Still, he and Young were being granted the test pilot’s dream job: to compute their own manoeuvres, autonomously of Mission Control, and the two men embraced it warmly. Yet there would be no avoiding the fact that completing all of their objectives in just three days would be a tough call. Young even approached Charles Mathews with a view to extending Gemini X to its four-day consumables limit, but his request was flatly rejected.

Young’s concerns, wrote Barton Hacker and James Grimwood, were twofold. Firstly there was the issue of whether he could slow the docked vehicles – his own Gemini and Agena-X – sufficiently to avoid hitting Agena-VIII and secondly was the very real possibility that he might be unable to find the second target using only on­board optical equipment. “The problem with an optical rendezvous,’’ Young said later, “is that you can’t tell how far away you are from the target. With the kind of velocities we were talking about, you couldn’t really tell at certain ranges whether you were opening or closing.’’

Moreover, since Agena-VIII was by now out of action and totally passive, Young and Collins and their Agena would need to be despatched from Cape Kennedy at very precise times, which presented its own problems should there be a launch failure or delay. By the opening months of 1966, a plan had crystallised: Gemini X would rendezvous and dock with its Agena during its fourth orbit, after which the second day of the mission would be dedicated to experiments and Agena-VIII operations would be deferred to the third day. Since many of its planned experiments could not be conducted whilst Gemini X and the Agena-X were docked, a happy balance of compromise would have to be struck between the engineering and scientific communities. In the eventuality that Young and Collins’ Agena, like that of Stafford and Cernan, should meet an unhappy end, it was decided to press on with the Agena – VIII rendezvous instead.

Preparations for Gemini X had gone relatively smoothly both before and after the assignment of the crew and their backups (Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin) in January 1966. In fact, when Young and Collins were named to the mission, their launch date did not change: they were scheduled for 18 July… and on 18 July, without a single delay, they would fly. The only change came in March, when Lovell and Aldrin were shuffled to the backup slot on Gemini IX and their places were taken by rookies Al Bean and Clifton ‘C. C.’ Williams.

Bean, who would one day become the fourth man to walk on the Moon, has been seen by some historians as an astronaut whose talent was overlooked by Deke Slayton; indeed, he would be the last of the surviving members of the 1963 class to fly in space. However, in his autobiography, Slayton vehemently disagreed. ‘‘Al was just a victim of the numbers game,’’ he wrote. ‘‘I would only point to the fact that he was the first guy from his group assigned as a crew commander. I was confident he could do the job if anything happened to John Young.’’ Ultimately, Bean would draw two of NASA’s best missions: a lunar landing and command of the second Skylab crew in 1973.

Meanwhile, the Titan II’s second-stage fuel tank had to be replaced with one previously earmarked for Gemini XI when a leaking battery caused some corrosion of its dome, but the remainder of the processing flow ran smoothly. After formal acceptance by Martin in mid-April 1966, the Titan’s two stages were shipped to Cape Kennedy late the following month, mated together and installed on Pad 19 on 7 June. Two days later, the Gemini X spacecraft itself arrived at the launch complex

and was attached to the top of the booster. Processing of the mission’s Agena target vehicle – designated GATV-5005 – proved similarly faultless and it was accepted by the Air Force and moved to the Eastern Test Range on 16 May. Nine days later, it was mated to its target docking adaptor and, following several weeks of further testing, was taken to Pad 14 and mounted atop its Atlas carrier rocket on 1 July.

There was no avoiding the reality that the Gemini X double rendezvous would be by far the most complex ever attempted. A late afternoon liftoff was necessary to intercept the Agena-VIII and, in the final few weeks, Young and Collins found themselves shifting their sleep patterns accordingly. “For the last couple of days,’’ Collins wrote, “we were staying up until 3 or 4 am and sleeping until noon. Granted, we were staying up studying, but somehow the late hours carried with them a connotation of leisure and relaxation.’’

They were awakened in their Cape Kennedy crew quarters around noon on 18 July 1966 and their Agena lifted-off without a hitch at 3:39 pm, barely two seconds late. It was followed promptly into orbit by the two astronauts at 5:20 pm. Collins would describe ‘feeling’ the rumble of the Titan, with minute sideways jerks, virtually no sensation of speed and, at first, a noticeable increase of little more than 1 G. The vibrations intensified as the rocket continued to climb, with mild pogo effects causing ‘‘a high-frequency quivering of body and instrument panel’’.

The violent shock of staging – as the Titan’s first stage, exhausted, fell away and its second stage picked up the thrust – was soon replaced by a sense of serenity as Gemini X headed towards its initial orbit. At one point, spectators at the Cape thought the rocket had exploded. In fact, it had. “An instant after the two stages separated,’’ Collins related, “the first-stage oxidiser tank ruptured explosively, spraying debris in all directions with dramatic, if harmless, visual effect.’’ The G forces gradually began to climb, peaking at close to 7 G, before ending abruptly when the Titan’s second stage shut down, precisely on time.

On the ground, Capcom Gordo Cooper flipped the wrong switch, opening the communications loop and allowing Young and Collins to overhear him summoning all launch personnel to a debriefing in the ready room. Collins radioed that he and Young were otherwise engaged and would be unable to attend.

There was much to do. Immediately after unstrapping, Collins unstowed the Kollsman sextant to begin the lengthy optical navigation procedure and Young manoeuvred the spacecraft into position to begin its six-hour pursuit of the Agena – X. Minor difficulties were encountered when Collins mistook the thin line of atmospheric airglow for Earth’s horizon, then could not get the lens of the sextant to work properly. He tried an Ilon instrument instead, with limited success.

Eventually, Gordo Cooper told the two men that they would have to rely on ground computations instead. More trouble, however, was afoot. When Young pulsed the OAMS thrusters to adjust Gemini X’s orbit to 265 x 272 km, he did not realise that the spacecraft was slightly turned, introducing an out-of-plane error, and needed to perform two large midcourse corrections. It was not Young’s fault, Deke Slayton wrote, because “there had been a mistake in loading the initial guidance program into the Gemini computer, so the spacecraft was never quite where the instruments said it was’’.

The computer had actually yielded a figure some 2 m/sec greater than that radioed up by Mission Control. Collins’ own slide-rule measurements agreed with Gemini X’s computer and, satisfied, Young opted to follow this double-checked on-board solution. Ten minutes into the OAMS manoeuvre, he quickly discovered that he had ‘overthrust’ the spacecraft and was heading into an orbital path several kilometres ‘behind’ and ‘above’ the Agena. He tried to ‘dive’ Gemini X back onto its correct trajectory through sheer brute force and succeeded in saving the manoeuve, but at the expense of losing a large quantity of fuel. Radar acquisition of the Agena-X was achieved during their second orbit. Young’s all-out effort to reach the target consumed 180 kg of propellant – three times more than any previous mission, leaving just 36 per cent remaining – but a successful docking was ‘in the bag’ at 11:13 pm, almost six hours after Gemini X’s launch.

The excessive fuel usage prompted Flight Director Glynn Lunney to abandon plans for ‘docking practice’, in which Young would have pulled away and then redocked with the Agena, and the astronauts were instead advised to press on with the Agena-VIII pursuit. In support of this goal, the Agena-X’s main engine roared to life, precisely on time, increasing the combined spacecraft’s velocity by 420 km/h and setting them on course. ‘‘At first,’’ Young explained later of the first ‘space switch’, ‘‘the sensation I got was that there was a pop, then there was a big explosion and a clang. We were thrown forward in the seats. Fire and sparks started coming out of the back end of that rascal. The light was something fierce and the acceleration was pretty good.” With abrupt suddenness, and precisely on time, the Agena-X’s engine shut down with what Young described as “a quick jolt’’. Since the Gemini and Agena were docked nose-to-nose, the firing propelled the astronauts ‘backwards’, producing so-called ‘eyeballs-out’ acceleration forces, as opposed to the ‘eyeballs-in’ experienced in a launch from Earth.

Comparing notes, Young and Collins both felt that the Agena’s acceleration and their change of direction – now travelling ‘backwards’ – were much greater than they had anticipated. The closest terrestrial analogy to the swift onset of thrust, they thought, was that it was similar to riding the afterburner of a J-57 jet engine, which Young had done as an F-8 Crusader aviator and Collins had experienced during his days flying the F-100 Super Sabre.

The first burn had effectively increased Gemini X’s apogee to 763 km, allowing the two astronauts to gaze down upon Earth from a greater vantage point than had ever been witnessed by human eyes; far higher than the 473 km achieved by Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov aboard Voskhod 2. It also marked the first time that a manned spacecraft had employed the propulsion system of another vehicle to power its own flight, a technique which had important implications for future orbital refuelling. As they busied themselves with calculations for the remainder of the pursuit and rendezvous, they snapped photographs through the windows, including some of the Red Sea, and both would later recount that their home planet from an altitude of 763 km possessed a definite curvature.

Sleep posed its own problems for Collins. ‘‘My hands dangle in front of me at eye level,’’ he wrote, ‘‘attached as they are to relaxed arms, which seem to need gravity to hold them down.’’ Fearful that they may accidentally trip switches whilst asleep, he debated whether to tuck them behind his head (uncomfortable) or in his mouth (ill – advised), before finally telling himself not to worry. Such worries were further allayed by the two window shades, onto which had been pasted ‘‘photos of two voluptuous, wildly beautiful girls’’. Nursing a painful knee, Collins popped a couple of aspirin and tried with limited success to nap.

After their first restless night, the astronauts were awakened early on 19 July by updated computations for their next Agena burn, which Young duly executed for 78 seconds to reduce Gemini X’s velocity by 300 km/h and lower its apogee to 382 km. This second firing of the rocket’s engine impressed them both: after almost a day in microgravity, the 1 G acceleration, said Young, was ‘‘the biggest 1 G we ever saw!’’ Since the thrust was against the direction of travel, it produced a braking effect, after which a third firing circularised the orbit by raising the perigee to 377 km, barely 17 km ‘below’ Agena-VIII. At this point, they were trailing their target by less than 1,800 km.

In addition to the rendezvous commitment, the two astronauts also busied themselves with their load of experiments. Twenty minutes after reaching orbit, they activated the tri-axis magnetometer to measure radiation levels in the South Atlantic Anomaly, an area in which the lowermost portion of Earth’s Van Allen belts dip to within a few hundred kilometres of the surface. Elsewhere, two other devices – a beta

“The light was something fierce,” said John Young of the first Agena-X firing, “and the acceleration was pretty good.” Unfortunately, the astronauts’ view ‘outside’ was somewhat impaired by the bulk of the target vehicle.

spectrometer and a bremsstrahlung spectrometer – also monitored radiation dosages. “I only know that if I ever develop eye cararacts,” wrote Collins, “I will try to blame it on Gemini X.”

The radiation measurements, however, left investigators on the ground surprised and relieved. In fact, they were so disbelieving of the small numbers reported by the astronauts – 0.04 rad here, 0.18 rad there – that they mildly accused them of having their detectors switched off. In truth, radiation levels, even passing through the South Atlantic Anomaly, were much lower than anticipated. Several other experiments could only be done outside Gemini X and their deployment was one of Collins’ main tasks during the first of two EVAs on the mission.

Midway through preparations for his first excursion, Deke Slayton came on the radio, asking the crew to “do a little more talking from here on’’. Neither Young nor Collins was in any mood for idle conversation, having their hands full with systems checks, Agena commands, navigation and a 131-step checklist to get everything ready for the EVA. Young’s ho-hum response to Slayton’s request was typical: “Okay, boss. What do you want us to talk about?’’

Gemini X’s cabin atmosphere was completely vented to vacuum at 4:44 pm, approaching orbital dusk, and Collins poked his head out of the hatch three minutes later. His first period of extravehicular activity actually took the form of standing up on his seat, during which time he set up a 70 mm general-purpose camera to study stellar ultraviolet radiation. “It was not enough simply to lift the camera above Earth’s atmosphere,’’ Collins explained later. “It had also to be moved outside the spacecraft, because the protective glass of the spacecraft windows screened out most of the ultraviolet rays which the astronomers wished to measure.’’ As a result, Collins aimed the camera towards the southern Milky Way and scanned it from Beta Crucis to Gamma Velorum. In total, he acquired 32 images.

The view, even from his vantage point, hanging out of the hatch up to his waist, was astonishing. “The stars are everywhere,’’ Collins wrote, “above me on all sides, even below me somewhat, down there next to the obscure horizon. The stars are bright and they are steady.’’ Since it was now orbital nighttime, he could see little of Earth, save for the eerie bluish-grey tint of water, clouds and land. Minutes later, approaching dawn and with a rollful of 20-second ultraviolet exposures completed, he prepared to move onto his next task.

This involved photographing swatches of red, yellow, blue and grey on a titanium panel to determine the ability of film to adequately record colours in space. Unfortunately, Collins was unable to complete this objective in its entirety, when his eyes suddenly filled with tears; as, indeed, did Young’s. “That’s all we need,’’ Collins related, “two blind men whistling along with the door open, unable to read checklists or see hatch handles or floating obstructions.’’ They wondered aloud if a new anti­fog compound on the inside of their visors, added in the wake of Gene Cernan’s experience, had caused the irritation. Mission Control’s suggestion that perhaps urine had contaminated their oxygen supply was rejected by the astronauts, who described the odour as nothing of the sort.

Eitherway, the first period of EVA on Gemini X ended six minutes early, at 5:33 pm on 19 July. In total, Collins had been ‘outside’ for 49 minutes. It would later become clear that lithium hydroxide, used to scrub exhaled carbon dioxide from the cabin atmosphere, was mistakenly being pumped into the astronauts’ suits. Switching off a troublesome compressor device, wrote Deke Slayton, solved the problem. “I was crying a little all night,’’ Young quipped later, “but I didn’t say anything about it… I figured I’d be called a sissy!’’

Alongside the Agena-VIII rendezvous commitment, the astronauts’ third day in space was consumed with further experiments, though, thankfully, M-5, the much – loathed bioassays of body fluids task, which required them to collect, store and laboriously label their urine, was deleted from Gemini X’s roster. In fact, Charles Mathews had removed M-5 on 12 July, barely a week before launch, together with an experiment to measure the ultraviolet spectral reflectance of the lunar surface as a means of devising techniques to protect astronauts’ eyes from ultraviolet reflectivity. Other work included measurements of the ion and electron structure of Gemini X’s wake after separating from Agena-X and terrain and weather photography targets.

Undocking from their Agena came at 2:00 pm on 20 July, after almost 39 hours linked together, which both men found tiresome. Young would describe the sight through his window as a little like backing down a railway line in a diesel engine with “a big boxcar in front of you… the big drawback of having the Agena up there is that you can’t see the outside world’’. Their view with Agena-X attached, Young added, was “just practically zilch’’. After undocking, the view returned and, as Gemini X drew closer to Agena-VIII, Collins connected his 15 m umbilical and prepared to go outside for his second EVA.

Forty-five hours and 38 minutes into the mission, Young reported what he thought was his first visual sighting of Armstrong and Scott’s Agena, which actually turned out to be their own Agena-X! The other Agena, in fact, was still 176 km away, prompting Mission Control to tell the astronauts that it was “a pretty long range’’. Young, a little embarrassed, perhaps, at the mix-up, replied: “You have to have real good eyesight for that.’’ In fact, he and Collins did not get their first glimpse of Agena-VIII until they were 37 km away; the target resembled “a dim, star-like dot until the Sun rose above the spacecraft nose’’.

Two hours later, at 4:26 pm, Young initiated his final closure on the Agena, with Collins – whom the command pilot had nicknamed ‘Magellan’ during training for his navigational prowess – busily computing figures for two midcourse correction burns. The target, which had by now been aloft for four months, appeared very stable and Young was able to station-keep at a distance of just a few metres ‘above’ it, before moving in to inspect a micrometeoroid package that Collins was to retrieve. The rendezvous was accomplished entirely manually; the long-dead Agena was giving off no radar signals and its lights had long since stopped working. ‘‘They really just had to eyeball their way in,’’ recounted Deke Slayton.

Shortly thereafter, approaching orbital dawn at 6:01 pm, Collins cranked open his hatch and floated outside. In doing so, he became the first person to complete two EVAs. His first real movements ‘outside’ the Gemini were, he found, equally as difficult as those of Cernan: all tasks took considerably longer than anticipated. However, on this occasion, he was equipped with a zip-gun which aided his move over to the Agena-VIII and he crisply removed its micrometeoroid detector. He then

moved to Gemini X’s adaptor section and attached his zip-gun to the nitrogen fuel supply, before returning to the cabin as Young closed to within a couple of metres of Agena-VIII. Collins pushed himself away from the spacecraft, floated over to the Agena and grasped its docking collar with his gloved hands.

Discussions with Gene Cernan had already taught him that moving around and holding himself steady would be difficult and, indeed, Collins quickly lost his grip and drifted away from the Agena. Perhaps recalling Cernan’s problems, he decided not to rely on the tether and instead used squirts from the zip-gun – successfully – to propel himself 5 m or so back towards Gemini X, then back to the Agena. He was then able, with relative ease, to grab the micrometeoroid detector, known as experiment ‘S-10’, although he decided against installing a replacement device for fear that he might lose the one he had just retrieved.

His efforts accidentally sent Agena-VIII into a slight gyrating motion, which caused some consternation for Young, who was tasked with keeping the two spacecraft close together. Not only did Young have to keep a close eye on three independent ‘bodies’ – the Gemini, the Agena and Collins – but he was also trying to keep sunlight from falling onto the right-hand ejection seat in the cabin. If it heated up too much, its pyrotechnics might have fired, taking both of Gemini X’s hatches and Young’s own seat with it. Meanwhile, Collins moved himself, hand-over-hand, along the umbilical back to the Gemini and handed S-10 to Young.

Not so successful was Young’s effort to photograph Collins’ work. In fact, not a single image or frame of footage exists from what was a quite remarkable spacewalk. ‘‘I had four cameras,’’ he told an interviewer two decades later, ‘‘and none of ‘em were working!’’ Nor was Collins able to photograph a human being’s first contact in orbit with another spacecraft; his hand-held Hasselblad camera inadvertently drifted off as he was struggling to control his tether.

Next came a demonstration of the tether itself, extended to its full 9 m length, but this ended almost as soon as it had begun, when Mission Control told Young that he could not afford to use any more fuel for station-keeping. Young instructed Collins to return inside, which proved difficult because the spacewalker had gotten tangled in the umbilical and the rigidity of his suit prevented him from ‘seeing’ or even ‘feeling’ where it had wrapped itself. Finally returning to his seat after 39 minutes outside, Collins had to be helped out of the snake-like tangle by Young. Closing the hatch, thankfully, posed no difficulties. The EVA was, however, disappointingly short in duration; a consequence of Gemini X’s dwindling fuel supply.

Also disappointing was the loss of the micrometeoroid collector, which apparently drifted outside and away into space during Collins’ ingress back into Gemini X. It had contained 24 sample slides of materials including nitrocellulose film on copper mesh, together with copper foil, stainless steel, silver-coated plastic, lucite and titanium-covered glass, with the intention of exposing them to the harsh environment of low-Earth orbit.

Fuel woes were by now causing concern on the ground and the capcom asked them to confirm that they were not using any of their thrusters. An hour after Collins’ return inside, at 7:53 pm, the two men briefly reopened his hatch for three minutes to throw the tether – whose presence in the cramped cabin had made ‘‘the snake house at the zoo look like a Sunday school picnic”, according to Young – and the chest pack into space. Time was still tight and at 8:58 pm, they performed their next task: pulsing their OAMS thrusters to reshape their orbit, reducing their perigee to 106 km and rendering the point of re-entry more precise. After a few end-of – workday tasks, including more synoptic terrain and weather photographs, Young and Collins retired for their final night’s sleep in space.

Seven hours after awakening, at 3:10 pm on 21 July, Gemini X began its fiery plunge back through the atmosphere, high above the Canton Island tracking station on its 43rd orbit. During re-entry, Young was able to ‘steer’ his spacecraft’s banking angles by computer solutions and they splashed down in the western Atlantic at 4:07 pm, barely an hour shy of three full days since launch and just 5.4 km from the prime recovery vessel, the amphibious assault ship Guadalcanal. So close, in fact, were they to the intended splashdown point that the ship’s crew were able to watch Gemini X descending through the clouds beneath its parachutes.

After the installation of a flotation collar by pararescue swimmers, Young and Collins were helicoptered away to the ship for a red-carpet welcome, a band playing ‘It’s a Small, Small World’ and the inevitable medical checks. Their mission, together with that of Gemini IX-A, had addressed many questions which demanded answers before Apollo could go to the Moon: the demonstration of rendezvous methods, orbit-shaping manoeuvres to avoid trapped-radiation hazards in deep space and, of course, docking. Using Agena-X as a switch engine – in effect, a kind of‘space tug’ – also had untold ramifications for future spacecraft and the establishment of orbiting laboratories. In the next few days, the Agena participated in a number of remotely – commanded manoeuvres, boosting its apogee at one stage up to 1,390 km and eventually returning to a near-circular 352 km orbit.

Still posing an obstacle, though, was EVA, to which Collins now added his opinion: more and better restraints and handholds were definitely needed for spacewalkers to work effectively outside and operating in a rigidised suit was far more difficult than previously thought. ‘‘A large percentage of the astronaut’s time,’’ Collins related after the flight, ‘‘is. . . devoted to torquing his body around until it is in the proper position to do some useful work.’’ With only two more Gemini missions remaining, time was tight to get such problems resolved.

It was not just the head colds that overshadowed Apollo 7. Schirra’s morale had been decidedly more sombre in the weeks before launch and many of his colleagues wondered what had happened to the normally good-humoured, ‘chummy’ astronaut. Schirra, in truth, was simply burned-out from nine years in the astronaut business. He had lost his best friend and neighbour, Gus Grissom, and was tired by the constant grind and long hours demanded of him. ‘‘I had changed over the span of time that encompassed my three flights,’’ Schirra wrote. ‘‘As the space programme had matured, so had 1.1 was no longer the boy in scarf and goggles, the jolly Wally of space age lore.’’ He steadfastly refused to allow Apollo 7 to be jeopardised by what he perceived to be the influence of ‘special interests’ – scientific or political – and declared that he ‘‘would not be an affable fellow when it came to decisions that affected the safety of myself and my two mates’’.

Despite his intense focus on Apollo 7, the monotony of the last few days – SPS burns, navigational sightings, water dumps, photography, experiments – proved somewhat less than fun or challenging. The astronauts became less enamoured with seeing 16 sunrises and sunsets each day. Years later, despite Sam Phillips’ assertion that the flight had been ‘‘101 per cent successful’’, Cunningham would state that both he and Eisele felt Apollo 7 could have achieved more. ‘‘The initial plan was no more than 60-75 per cent of what we should’ve had on it, because so many things got thrown off the flight, principally through Wally’s efforts. We felt like we could’ve accomplished a whole lot more. It turns out that the last several days were fairly boring.’’

Yet there were spots of fun and games in the cabin, with Cunningham making a ring with his thumb and forefinger and Schirra shooting a weightless pen through it. They learned to catch cinnamon cubes in their mouths, even blasting them off-course with an air hose for added fun. However, in spite of those ‘ho-hum’ closing days, the mission opened up exciting possibilities for the next flight, which had, since August, been under consideration to go to the Moon and back. By the end of the first week of Apollo 7, NASA confidently predicted that Apollo 8, with its crew of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, could liftoff atop the giant Saturn V rocket as early as 5 December. That date, ultimately, was untenable, but indicated the growing confidence in Apollo and the success that Schirra’s mission brought.

That success also established Apollo 7 as the second-longest manned mission to date. Its conclusion was brought about by the eighth and final SPS burn, lasting almost 12 seconds, executed at 6:41 am on 22 October as the spacecraft hurtled around the globe for the 163rd time. Four minutes later, the service module was jettisoned and at 6:55 am the command module hit the upper fringes of Earth’s atmosphere to begin its re-entry. Shortly thereafter, descending beneath three beautiful red-and-white parachutes, it dropped into the Atlantic, just south-east of Bermuda, after a mission of ten days, 20 hours, nine minutes and three seconds. Apollo 7 splashed down at 7:11:48 am, just 3.5 km from its target point and barely 13 km from the recovery vessel, the aircraft carrier Essex, which incidentally had been involved in the quarantine of Cuban waters prior to the Bay of Pigs fiasco seven years before.

It was fortunate that Jim Lovell, Stu Roosa and Charlie Duke had practiced ‘Stable 2’ splashdown positions, because gusty winds and choppy waves caused Apollo 7 to quickly assume an upside-down orientation, but its flotation bags righted it within minutes. An hour after splashdown, following a tense loss of communications, Schirra and his team were aboard the Essex. Shortly thereafter, the command module – part of the vehicle which Cunningham called a “magnificent flying machine” – was also safely on the carrier’s deck; it was too heavy to be hauled to safety with the men aboard. The astronauts, heavily bearded, weary and unsteady on their feet, had all lost weight, but their humour returned quickly. Deke Slayton, aboard the Essex, admitted to having “a few words in private’’ with Schirra, not so much about his own behaviour, but about his effect on Eisele and Cunningham. Others were less complimentary. Although he would later deny it to Cunningham’s face, Chris Kraft is said to have announced that nobody from Apollo 7 would ever fly into space again. “f made the selections,” admitted Slayton, “but f wasn’t going to put anybody on a crew that Kraft’s people wouldn’t work with. Not when f had other guys.’’

fn a year which had seen the steady rise of the hippie movement in America and protests ranging from civil rights to the war in Vietnam and outrage over the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, NASA’s public affairs officer Paul Haney knew precisely why the bearded Schirra and his crew had been so irritable. “Something happens to a man when he grows a beard,’’ Haney joked. “Right away, he wants to protest!’’

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.