Category Escaping the Bonds of Earth

The world’s first spacewalk lasted barely 15 minutes, ending over eastern Siberia, when Belyayev radioed instructions for Leonov to begin preparations to re-enter the airlock. It would only become clear years later that the seemingly effortless ‘swim’ through space had actually required every ounce of physical exertion: the Berkut had ballooned, making bending extremely difficult, and Leonov noticed that his feet had pulled away from the boots and his fingers away from the tips of the gloves. It was, he wrote, “impossible to re-enter the airlock feet first’’ and his only option was to break mission rules and ease himself back into the Volga chamber head-first.

Reports hint that returning to the airlock in this manner caused him to get stuck sideways when he turned to close the outermost hatch. To relieve some of the pressure in his ballooned suit and move more easily, Leonov began bleeding off some of its oxygen by means of a valve in its lining, which placed him at severe risk of the bends. The Berkut, he found, behaved in a totally different manner in space to its performance on Earth. “The work became impossible. I tried to grab the handles [on the airlock] and my fingers wouldn’t work – the gloves’ fingers would just bend on me … I decided I was breathing oxygen long enough to prevent boiling nitrogen in the blood. There was some risk, but I had nothing else to do, and once I did, everything started going normal.’’

However, even after bleeding off the oxygen pressure, the problem of how to turn himself around in the 1.2 m-wide airlock remained. “I literally had to fold myself to do this,’’ he said later. “I spent tremendous effort trying to do this. I had a total of 60 litres [of air] for ventilation and breathing, which was not enough for this kind of action.’’ Physicians would later discover that he almost suffered heatstroke – his core body temperature rising by 1.8°C during the 13-minute excursion – and the cosmonaut would later describe being up to his knees in sweat, to such an extent that it sloshed around in his suit as he moved. Similar problems of over-exertion were closely mirrored in the reports of American astronaut Gene Cernan following his own extravehicular outing in June 1966.

The world’s first spacewalk, hazardous though it had been, ended at 11:47 am when Leonov re-entered the airlock. A minute and a half later, the outer hatch was finally closed and at 11:51 am he began repressurising the Volga. Shortly thereafter, with both pilots safely aboard the capsule, Belyayev fired pyrotechnic bolts to discard the airlock. Unfortunately, the explosive effect of the bolts placed Voskhod 2 into a 17-degree-per-second roll – ten times stronger than predicted – and, with only enough fuel for one orientation correction, the two men realised that they would be forced to live with it for the remaining 22 hours of their mission. Exhausted, and with no other option, they felt that they could bear it. Voskhod 2’s real troubles, however, were only just beginning.

As Leonov worked his way through routine instrument checks, he noticed that the oxygen pressure in the cabin was steadily increasing from a normal level of 160 mm to 200 mm, then higher, eventually peaking at 460 mm, which – in the event of an electrical short – would be more than sufficient to cause an explosion. The cosmonauts were advised to lower Voskhod’s temperature and humidity and, although it halted the upward climb of pressure, the situation remained highly dangerous. After a few hours of sleeplessness, they noticed to their relief that pressures had dropped below the critical level. Later, thankfully, the spacecraft’s automatic landing system came into operation, stopped the rolling and, wrote Leonov, “we were able to enjoy a few delicious moments of tranquil flight’’.

Initiation of the automatic landing system, on Voskhod 2’s 16th orbit, came from the Kamchatka ground station, but a solar orientation sensor fault meant that one command was not processed properly. It has been suggested that the effect of pyrotechnic gas from the jettisoned airlock led to the sensor failure. As a result, the rolling began again and, five minutes before the scheduled retrofire, Belyayev was forced to deactivate the automatic system. It was becoming apparent that the cosmonauts would have to perform a manual retrofire as Voskhod 2 passed over Africa on its 17th circuit, with the intention to land at around 52 degrees North latitude. At 10:16 am Moscow Time on 19 March, radio listeners overheard a ground station telling the cosmonauts – using their callsign ‘Almaz’ (‘Diamond’) – to perform a manual descent. The crew was asked, with more than a hint of urgency, to respond via Morse code.

Belyayev and Leonov would employ the Vzor optical device to orient their spacecraft, but this kept them out of their seats and delayed the retrofire by 46 seconds, which, coupled with an incorrect attitude, would ultimately conspire to bring them down in the wild Siberian taiga. They would land to the north of the industrial city of Perm, more than 2,000 km from their intended site. As Voskhod 2’s navigator, Leonov felt that overshooting Perm should still bring them down in Soviet territory, but “we could not run the risk of overshooting so much that we came down in China; relations with the People’s Republic were poor at the time”. Nonetheless, in his autobiography, Leonov praised the superb skills of Belyayev, now charged with performing the Soviet Union’s first-ever manual re-entry.

“In order to use the [Vzor] he had to lean horizontally across both seats inside the spacecraft,’’ Leonov wrote, “while I held him steady in front of the orientation porthole. We then had to manoeuvre ourselves back into our correct positions in our seats very rapidly so that the spacecraft’s centre of gravity was correct and we could start the retro-engines to complete the re-entry burn. As soon as Pasha turned on the engines we heard them roar and felt a strong jerk as they slowed our craft.’’ The completion of retrofire was greeted with silence and should have been followed, ten seconds later, by the separation of Voskhod 2’s instrument module. It did not happen. Leonov would recall the sight, also beheld by his comrade Yuri Gagarin four years earlier, of the useless section being dragged in the spacecraft’s wake by the thread of a communications cable.

Not until an altitude of around 100 km, when the cable finally burned through, did the ride stabilise. In rapid succession, the cosmonauts felt a sharp jolt as, first, the drogue parachute and, next, the main canopy were automatically deployed. “Suddenly,” wrote Leonov, “everything became dark. We had entered cloud cover. Then it grew even darker. I started to worry that we had dropped into a deep gorge. There was a roaring as our landing engine ignited just above the ground to break the speed of our descent. Finally we felt our spacecraft slumping to a halt.’’ Voskhod 2 had landed in a couple of metres of snow, somewhere in the western Urals, at 59 degrees 34 minutes North latitude and 55 degrees 28 minutes East longitude. It was 12:02 pm Moscow Time and the mission had lasted a little over 26 hours, yet the cosmonauts had not even reached the halfway mark of their time aboard the capsule. A long, cold afternoon and an even colder night awaited them. Moreover, they would also have unwanted company.

For the outside world, everyone was bewildered by what might have happened to the two men. Official accounts gave away few details. Some media reports suggested that the cosmonauts were “resting” after their mission, while Radio Moscow suspended transmissions and played Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ and Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto over and over in a sombre manner which hinted that Belyayev and Leonov had been killed.

Nikolai Kamanin would later write in his diary that tracking stations at Odessa and Saransk, both directly beneath Voskhod 2’s re-entry flight path, had provided the first reports that the descent was underway, although he noted that no one knew about the cosmonauts’ fate for at least four hours. Meanwhile, the Alma-Ata station in south-eastern Kazakhstan picked up a telegraph code via the high-frequency radio channel, which repeated ‘VN’ – ‘Vsyo normalno’ (‘Everything normal’) – over and over and the capsule’s Krug radio beacon had provided a fix on its location, ‘‘but we wanted more convincing data as to the condition of the cosmonauts’’, wrote Kamanin. Voskhod 2 was eventually spotted, together with its red parachute and the two men, by the commander of one of the search-and-rescue helicopters, wedged between a pair of firs on the forest road between Sorokovaya and Shchuchino, some 30 km south-west of the town of Berezniki.

Immediately after impacting the snow, the first task for Belyayev and Leonov had been to release the spacecraft’s hatch and get outside; unfortunately, upon flicking a switch, the explosive bolts activated and the sturdy plate of metal jerked, but refused to burst open. Only when they looked through one of the portholes did it become clear that the capsule was jammed between two firs. After much rocking backwards and forwards, Belyayev finally pushed the hatch away and the two men plopped out into the snow. Above them was the main canopy of their parachute, which had snagged the upper branches of firs and birches some 40 m high. Below, the base of the capsule, still simmering from the heat of re-entry, rapidly melted the snow and it thumped down onto solid ground.

As daylight faded and fresh snow began to fall, the two cosmonauts had reason to be grateful for their extensive experience in harsh climates. Leonov himself, of course, had been brought up in Siberia, whilst his older comrade, born on 26 June 1925 in Chelizshevo, in the Vologda region, north of Moscow, had spent much of his boyhood hunting in the forests near his home. As a youth, Belyayev dreamed of someday becoming a hunter and graduated from the Soviet Air Force Academy at Sarapul in 1944 and the Military Fighter Pilot School in Yeis the following year. He subsequently served in various Air Force units for more than a decade and became a squadron commander in naval aviation shortly before being selected as a cosmonaut candidate in 1960. Although he was the oldest member of the first group, Belyayev was hired for his experience, education and 900 hours of flying time. He would, wrote Asif Siddiqi, probably have flown in space sooner, but for an injury sustained during a parachute jump in August 1961.

As one of the older members of the corps, Belyayev’s last claim to fame would occur on 10 January 1970, when he became the first flown spacefarer to die of natural causes: after several years overseeing the training of newer cosmonaut recruits, complications, including pneumonia, arose following an operation on a stomach ulcer. Colonel Pavel Ivanovich Belyayev, who had so expertly piloted Voskhod 2 through the Soviet Union’s first manual re-entry, died at the age of just 44. Although fellow cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov preceded Belyayev to the grave, his state funeral honours would be somewhat less than theirs. His remains would not be interred in the Kremlin Wall, but rather in Moscow’s Novodevich Cemetery, although pensions were paid to his wife and daughter and they were granted a seven-room apartment on Moscow.

With less than five years of life ahead of him, Belyayev, for now, felt that he could withstand anything. ‘‘Pasha and I both felt we had already been tested to our limits,’’ wrote Leonov, “though we knew there was no way of telling how long we would have to fend for ourselves in this remote corner of our country.” In the first few minutes after landing, they began transmitting their ‘VN’ code to confirm that they were alive and well. Interestingly, wrote Leonov, Moscow did not receive the signal, ‘‘because the vast expanse of forest in the northern Urals… interfered with the radio waves’’, although listening posts as far afield as Kamchatka in the Soviet Far East and Bonn in West Germany did pick it up.

However, the area was so heavily wooded and so deeply coated in snow that the rescue helicopters could not hope to reach them until loggers had cleared a landing site. One civil helicopter, Leonov recalled, tried to extend a rope ladder, but in their bulky pressure suits the two cosmonauts had no chance of scaling it. As the afternoon wore on, other aircraft dropped supplies – two pairs of wolf-skin boots, thick trousers and jackets, a blunt axe and even a bottle of cognac – to keep the men alive through the night. The news of the safe landing was announced by Yuri Levitan at 4:44 pm Moscow Time, almost five hours after it had occurred, and, later that evening, a helicopter succeeded in touching down a few kilometres away, although its crew could not reach the cosmonauts.

As the last vestiges of daylight disappeared, the temperature in the taiga began to drop precipitously and the pool of sweat in Leonov’s boots started to chill him. Fearing the onset of frostbite, both men stripped naked, wrung out their suits and underwear and separated the rigid sections from the softer linings, which they donned, together with boots and gloves. Their attempts to pull the snagged parachute from the trees for extra insulation proved fruitless and, as night approached, the snow started falling and temperatures plummeted still further to -30°C. Leonov would relate a cold and lonely night in the now-hatchless capsule, but stories would persist over the years that they were harassed by wolves which prevented them from disembarking and building a fire. Still others argued that mountain bears drew near Voskhod and others that the cosmonauts heard ‘strange noises’ outside.

Leonov mentioned nothing of this in his autobiography, although he admitted that when an Ilyushin-14 aircraft flew overhead at daybreak, the pilot revved his engine to scare away wolves in the vicinity. Later that morning, another helicopter reported seeing the cosmonauts chopping wood and setting a fire. At 7:30 am Moscow Time, an Mi-4 helicopter lowered a rescue team, including two physicians, to a point 1.5 km from the capsule and the first efforts began to fell trees and provide a suitable landing spot. Visibility was too poor to risk lifting them to a hovering helicopter and, as a result, the cosmonauts spent a second night in the dense taiga, together with their rescuers. ‘‘But this second night was a great deal more comfortable than the first,’’ wrote Leonov. ‘‘The advance party chopped wood and built a small log cabin and an enormous fire. They heated water in a large tank flown in especially by helicopter from Perm… And they laid out a supper of cheese, sausage and bread. It seemed like a feast after three days with little food.’’

It was a welcome relief to be among other human beings. At length, two landing spots were cleared, one of which lay just a few kilometres from the capsule, and at 8:00 am on 21 March the cosmonauts skiied there. They were then airlifted to Perm airport for a telephone call from Leonid Brezhnev and finally returned to Tyuratam

at 2:30 pm, more than two full days after landing. Belyayev and Leonov would be rewarded and decorated for their efforts: each received a Hero of the Soviet Union award, together with 15,000 roubles, a Volga car and six weeks’ leave. By the beginning of May, they had joined the circuit of official visits, international symposia and conferences and meetings with world leaders.

Deep within the Gulf of Cazones, on the southern coast of Cuba, is a place known as Bahia de Cochinos. In English, ‘cochinos’ is sometimes translated as ‘pigs’, although this may be erroneous and could refer instead to a species of triggerfish. In mid-April 1961, events at this small, nondescript place – the ‘Bay of Pigs’ – would lead to a major diplomatic incident between the United States, Russia and the newly – established pro-communist regime of Fidel Castro on the island. It would leave the Kennedy administration, still reeling from Yuri Gagarin’s flight, severely embar­rassed and, in the eyes of socialists, would significantly raise the profile of both the Soviet Union and Communism.

The roots of the debacle had actually been laid during the presidency of Kennedy’s predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, in March I960. A year after Castro had come to power with his own brand of revolutionary rule, the CIA had begun secret efforts to train and equip a force of up to 1,500 Cuban exiles, with the intention of invading the island and overthrowing the dictator. Initial plans sought to land a brigade close to the old colonial city of Trinidad, some 400 km south-east of Havana, where the population was known to generally oppose Castro’s regime.

Already, the dictator was beginning to align himself with the Soviet Union, agreeing in February 1960 to buy Russian oil and expropriating the American – owned refineries in Cuba when they refused to process it. The Eisenhower administration promptly cut diplomatic ties with the fledgling nation, which only served to strengthen Castro’s links with the Soviets. When Eisenhower reduced Cuba’s sugar import quota in June 1960, Castro responded by nationalising $850 million-worth of American property and businesses. Although some of his policies proved popular among the Cuban poor, they alienated many former supporters of the revolution and precipitated over a million migrations to the United States.

In February 1961, less than a month after his inauguration, an opportunity presented itself for Kennedy to topple Castro: the Cuban armed forces possessed Soviet-made tanks and artillery, together with a formidable air force, including A-26 Intruder medium-range bombers, Harrier Sea Fury fighter-bombers and T-33 Shooting Star jets – surely a tangible threat to the United States’ security. As these plans were being thrashed out, the landing site for the anti-Castro brigade was changed to an area in Matanzas Province, 200 km south-east of Havana, at the Bay of Pigs. The exiles’ chance of success here was limited still further by warnings from senior KGB agents, by loose talk in Miami and by the interrogation of over 100,000 Cuban suspects, which gradually exposed the plans for the invasion.

Of critical importance to these plans was Operation Puma, which sought to undertake 48 hours of air strikes, eliminating Castro’s air force and ensuring that the exiles – known as ‘Brigade 2506’ – could land safely at the Bay of Pigs. This failed when additional waves of air support were cancelled; Kennedy wanted the invasion to appear as if engineered wholly by the Cuban exiles and not by his own government. For this reason, he had insisted the landing site be moved from Trinidad to the Bay of Pigs – the former was a popular resort and would undoubtedly grab unwanted headlines if the invasion should fail. It was a fatal

mistake. Trinidad was actually an ideal spot: in addition to the broadly anti-Castro sentiment of its people, it offered excellent port facilities, armaments and was close to the Escambray Mountains, an anti-communist rebel stronghold. In order to maintain the ability of his administration to claim ‘plausible deniability’ and avoid admitting that it was actually an American-financed operation, Kennedy doomed the invasion to failure.

On 17 April 1961, two days after the first bombing run and still under the impression that they could rely upon several more waves of decisive air cover, over 1,500 Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs in four chartered transport ships. They were joined by a pair of CIA-owned infantry craft, together with supplies, ordnance and equipment. The hope that they would find support in the local populace, however, proved fruitless. Cuban militia had already contained the Escambray rebels, Castro had executed several key suspects thought to be involved in the plot and troops were waiting at the Bay of Pigs. The hard-fighting exiles, by now aware that they would not receive effective air support and were likely to lose, were forced back to the beach. By the time the fighting ended on 21 April, 68 exiles were dead, together with four American pilots, and the remainder captured. Some would be executed and over 1,100 imprisoned. After lengthy negotiations, the latter were released 20 months later in exchange for $53 million in food and medicine from the United States.

The fiasco proved extremely embarrassing for the Kennedy administration and was quickly followed by the forced resignations of the CIA director, his deputy and the deputy director of operations. Although he admitted responsibility for the bungled invasion, as the fighting in Cuba drew to an end, on 20 April, Kennedy refined his plans to draw the Soviets into a space race and perhaps gain more credibility for his government. ‘‘Is there any space programme,’’ he asked Vice­President Lyndon Johnson in one of the 20th century’s most influential memos, ‘‘that promises dramatic results in which we could win? Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space or a trip around the Moon or by a rocket to land on the Moon or by a rocket to go to the Moon and back with a man?’’ His motives, of course, were chiefly political, but he was clearly pinning his colours to the space flag.

One of the main personalities approached by Johnson as he weighed up the options was the famed rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who, in a 29 April memo, felt that the ‘‘sporting chance’’ of sending a three-man crew around the Moon before the Soviets was somewhat higher than putting an orbital laboratory aloft. Others, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, would even push for a landing on Mars, although his motivations for such a proposal have been questioned. Von Braun, who had designed Nazi Germany’s infamous V-2 missile before coming to the United States in 1945 as a key player in its rocketry and space programmes, felt that a lunar landing was the best option, since ‘‘a performance jump by a factor of ten over their present rockets is necessary to accomplish this feat. While today we do not have such a rocket, it is unlikely that the Soviets have it’’. The rocket to which von Braun referred, known as Saturn, remained in the early planning stages, but a commitment to its development had been one of the conditions he had applied before agreeing to join NASA in October 1958. “With an all-out crash effort,” he told Johnson, “I think we could accomplish this objective in 1967-68.”

Von Braun’s judgement won the day for Johnson. Three weeks later, still smarting from Bay of Pigs humiliation, Kennedy delivered the speech which – perhaps more than any other – would truly define his presidency.

‘‘Who let a Russian in here?’’ Louise Shepard joked on the evening of 19 January 1961, when her husband announced that she had her arms around the man who would be first to conquer space. Her light-hearted words hinted at the closeness of the race between the United States and the Soviet Union in achieving that goal, but would prove unfortunately prophetic when, in less than three months’ time, Yuri Gagarin would rocket into orbit. Al Shepard would not be the first man in space, but would come close, missing out by barely three weeks. Privately and publicly, the gruff New Englander would fume over the lost opportunity to make history. ‘‘We had ‘em by the short hairs,’’ he would growl, ‘‘and we gave it away.’’

Shepard had been born in East Derry, New Hampshire, on 18 November 1923, the son of an Army colonel-turned-banker father and Christian Scientist mother and the progeny of a close-knit, fiercely loyal and wealthy family. His key qualities – bravery, a spirit of adventure and an absolute determination to be the best – emerged at a young age: as a boy, he did chores around the home and a paper round gave him enough money to buy a bicycle, which he rode to the local airport, cleaning hangars and checking out aircraft. At school, his boundless energy led teachers to advise that he skip ahead two grades, making him the youngest in each class he attended. After spending a year at Admiral Farragut Academy in New Jersey, Shepard entered the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, receiving his degree in 1944 and serving as an ensign aboard the destroyer Cogswell in the Pacific theatre during the closing months of the Second World War.

He subsequently trained as a naval aviator, taking additional flying lessons at a civilian school, and received his wings from Corpus Christi, Texas, and Pensacola, Florida, in 1947. Shepard served several tours aboard aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean and was chosen in 1950 to join the Navy’s Test Pilot School at Patuxent River – the famed ‘Pax River’ – in Maryland; whilst there, he established a reputation as one of the most conscientious, meticulous and hard-working fliers. On more than one occasion, he was hand-picked to wring out the intricacies of a new aircraft, purely on the basis of his technical skill and precision. His test work included missions to obtain data on flight conditions at different altitudes, together with demonstrations of in-flight refuelling systems, suitability trials of the F-2H-3 Banshee jet and evaluations of the first angled carrier deck.

Later, as operations officer for the Banshee, attached to a fighter squadron at Moffett Field, California, Shepard made two tours of the western Pacific aboard the Oriskany. A return to Pax River brought further flight testing: this time of the F-3H Demon, F-8U Crusader, F-4D Skyray and F-11F Tiger jets, together with posts as a project officer for the F-5D Skylancer and as an instructor at the school. Graduation from the Naval War College in Rhode Island in 1957 led to assignment to the staff of the commander-in-chief of the Atlantic Fleet as an aircraft readiness officer. By the time he was selected as an astronaut candidate by NASA in April 1959, Shepard had accumulated 8,000 hours of flying time, almost half of it in high-performance jets. His flight-test experience surpassed that of the other members of the Mercury Seven, although he was alone among them in having never flown in combat.

His standoffish attitude also set him apart from the others. Since childhood, perhaps in light of his family’s wealth, Shepard had been a loner and in his years at NASA many fellow astronauts would comment on his notorious dual personalities: warm and smiling one minute, icy and remote the next. ‘‘If you were a friend of Al’s,’’ said Deke Slayton’s wife Bobbie, ‘‘and you needed something, you could call him and he’d break his neck trying to get it for you. If you were in, you were in. It was just tough to get in.’’ During the mid-Sixties, when he was grounded from flying due to an inner-ear ailment and serving as NASA’s chief astronaut, Shepard’s secretary would put a picture of a smiling or scowling face on her desk each morning to pre-warn astronauts of which personality to expect from ‘Big Al’ that day.

Reputation-wise, though, he was quick-witted, a top-notch aviator and, as a leader, possessed all of the characteristics of a future admiral – a rank which, even whilst attached to NASA and never having commanded a ship, he attained in 1971. In fact, when he told his father of his selection as an astronaut candidate, the older Shepard expressed grave misgivings that he was abandoning a promising naval career for what was perceived by many as an ill-defined programme with limited

prospects, run by a newly-established civilian agency. For Shepard, though, Project Mercury represented a logical extension to a life spent looking for the next challenge. His competitive nature had become the stuff of legend years before Mercury and had gotten him into hot water with superiors on more than one occasion: after several illicit, close-to-the-ground flying stunts, known as ‘flat-hats’ – one over a crowded naval parade ground, another looping under and over the half-built Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland and a third blowing the bikini tops off sunbathing women on Ocean City beach – he had come dangerously close to court-martial.

Undoubtedly, Shepard’s less-than-reputable exploits had come to the attention of the NASA selection board, but Neal Thompson speculated that it was viewed as an aspect of his fearless and competitive personality, rather than as an excuse to discard his application. He indulged in other hobbies, too. After taking up water-skiing, he progressed rapidly from two skis to one and, later, even experimented on the soles of his bare feet. His wife, Louise, whom he had married in 1945 whilst at Annapolis, would remark that it was ‘‘characteristic’’ of Shepard to always be restless for new challenges. His biggest feat – and, he would say later, his proudest professional accomplishment – was selection to fly the first American manned space mission. ‘‘That was competition at its best,’’ he said, ‘‘not because of the fame or the recognition that went with it, but because of the fact that America’s best test pilots went through this selection process, down to seven guys, and of those seven, I was the one to go. That will always be the most satisfying thing for me.’’

When Carpenter was named to pilot MA-7 in March 1962, he decided on the moniker ‘Aurora 7’ for his capsule. “I think of Project Mercury and the open manner in which we are conducting it for the benefit of all as a light in the sky,’’ he wrote later. ‘‘Aurora also means ‘dawn’ – and, in this case, the dawn of a new age. The Seven, of course, stands for the original seven astronauts.” By now, the suffix had become commonplace and, coincidentally, ‘Aurora’ also happened to be the name of one of two streets bordering Carpenter’s boyhood home in Boulder. The capsule which bore this name was Spacecraft No. 18 off the McDonnell production line and arrived at Cape Canaveral on 15 November 1961, followed by its Atlas booster just two weeks after John Glenn’s mission.

Owing to the ‘experimental’ nature of Friendship 7 – ‘‘for all its first-time danger,’’ wrote Carpenter and Stoever, ‘‘MA-6 had been designed to answer the simple question: Could it be done?’’ – the next mission was intended to encompass far more engineering and scientific tasks, including observations, photography and extensive manoeuvres. Deke Slayton, when the flight was still his to fly, had expressed consternation at the sheer volume of tests and experiments. ‘‘Everybody and his brother came out of the woodwork,’’ Slayton wrote. ‘‘One guy wanted me to

release a balloon to measure air drag. Another guy had some ground observations I was supposed to make. One damn thing after another. I had my hands full trying to resist it.” From 16 March 1962, with barely ten weeks to go, Scott Carpenter found that the scientific demands of MA-7 were his to handle: they included combined yaw-roll manoeuvres to study orbital sunrises, using terrestrial landmarks and stars for navigational reference and flying in an inverted attitude to determine the effect of ‘Earth-up/sky-down’ orientation on the pilot’s abilities.

Furthermore, Homer Newell, head of NASA’s Office of Space Sciences, had established a formal panel to outline experiments and objectives for future flights. Astronomer Jocelyn Gill of NASA Headquarters was appointed to run this ‘Ad-Hoc Committee on Scientific Tasks and Training for Man-in-Space’ and her enthusiasm for Carpenter, who had an impressive background in navigational astronomy following his experience aboard the P2V with Patrol Squadron Six, was evident. Gill’s committee considered a number of possible experiments and Kenny Kleinknecht, now in charge of the Mercury Projects Office, appointed Lewis Fisher to lead a newly-established Mercury Scientific Experiments Panel. With the Fisher group overseeing the Gill committee ‘‘from an engineering feasibility standpoint’’ and on the basis of their ‘‘scientific value, relative priority and suitability for orbital flight’’, a consensus was reached on 24 April to propose five major experiments for Aurora 7. In his autobiography, Carpenter wrote that he ‘‘liked and admired scientists’’ and ‘‘liked being a champion of embattled groups with high purpose . . . And in 1962, the scientists at NASA were already a beleaguered group’’.

Deke Slayton’s perspective had always been that scientific tasks should be kept to a minimum, particularly in light of John Glenn’s problems with the flight controls. ‘‘Scott had a different perspective,’’ Slayton wrote. ‘‘He was always at home with the doctors and scientists – I think he was genuinely curious about the things that interested them. But it bit him in the ass during his flight.’’ Within NASA, added Carpenter, scientific experiments were viewed ‘‘with a mixture of suspicion and ridicule, the butt of jokes when the reporters weren’t around’’ and the astronaut found himself at loggerheads with Flight Director Chris Kraft. Although their relationship would never turn antagonistic, many observers have commented over the years that Carpenter’s performance during Aurora 7 would lead Kraft to declare openly that he would never fly in space again.

The five experiments recommended by the Fisher panel required Carpenter to observe, measure, analyse and photograph (1) a tethered, multi-coloured balloon, (2) the behaviour of liquids inside a sealed flask, (3) different visual phenomena – both celestial and terrestrial – using a modified photometer, built by psychologist Bob Voas and nicknamed ‘The Voasmeter’, (4) weather patterns and land masses and (5) the ‘airglow’ layer of the upper atmosphere. Of these, the balloon was the most visible. Measuring 76.2 cm in diameter and weighing 900 g, it was an inflatable Mylar sphere, divided into five equal sections painted an uncoloured aluminium, Day-Glo yellow, Day-Glo orange, white and a phosphorescent coating which appeared ‘white’ by day and ‘blue’ by night. The intention was for it to be inflated with a small nitrogen bottle immediately after release from Aurora 7’s antenna canister at the end of the first orbit. Carpenter would then observe and photograph the effects of space and sunlight on the different colours at different times, perhaps aiding in the design of future lunar spacecraft and their docking systems, which would require exceptionally good visibility. To better understand atmospheric density at orbital altitudes, it would be fitted with a ‘tensiometer’ – a strain gauge – to measure tension on the 30 m tether. Carpenter would add his own observations, monitoring the amount of atmospheric drag and turbulence in the balloon’s slipstream by carefully watching its oscillations and general behaviour as it trailed behind Aurora 7. During launch, the balloon would be folded, packaged and housed with its nitrogen bottle in the antenna canister on the spacecraft’s nose.

Meanwhile, the fluid flask – just behind Carpenter’s right ear in the cabin – was designed to build on theoretical and experimental work at NASA’s Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, where it was already known that liquids behave differently under microgravity conditions. Its inclusion was intended to provide preliminary answers to questions of how fuels and other spacecraft fluids could be transferred from one storage tank to another during the long-duration Gemini and Moon-bound Apollo missions. Terrestrial aircraft flights and drop-tower tests conducted at Holloman Air Force Base and the service’s School of Aviation Medicine in Texas had been too short. One of the leading suggestions was that surface tension could be used to pump fluids, using capillary action, between tanks. The flask on Carpenter’s mission contained a small capillary, or meniscus, tube and by observing the behaviour of the fluid it would be possible to determine how effectively surface tension translated into pumping action, simply by measuring how far the liquid was drawn up into the tube. It was 20-per cent-filled with some 60 ml of a mixture of distilled water, green dye, an aerosol solution and silicone.

Observations of the constellations were also planned and considered important for future navigational purposes. Moreover, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had requested photographs of the ‘daylight’ horizon through blue and red filters to define more precisely the Earth’s limb as seen from above the atmosphere. John O’Keefe of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, sought a distance measurement of the airglow above the atmosphere, together with its angular width and a description of its characteristics. For this study, Carpenter would use the Voasmeter. (It was lucky that Voas lent his name to the device, for its formal title was the ‘extinctospectrophotopolariscopeoculogyrogra – vokinetometer’; a name requiring 20 syllables!) The astronaut would also have a German-made 35 mm SLR camera, called a ‘robot recorder’, capable of exposing two frames per second from a 250-frame magazine, which would provide images of the daylit horizon, considered valuable for the design of Apollo’s navigation system. Another Goddard scientist, Paul Lowman, requested images of North America and Africa.

In addition to analysing events beyond his spacecraft, Carpenter was also charged with monitoring himself: by performing numerous exercises at specified intervals, followed by blood pressure readings. Aurora 7 would be the most science-heavy Mercury mission so far and the numerous problems encountered by Carpenter would be at least partly attributed to an overloaded work schedule.

On the face of it, the Soviets remained in the lead in terms of space endeavours – even the first manned Gemini mission, launched a few days after Voskhod 2, ran for barely five hours and the United States’ first spacewalk would not occur until June 1965. However, before the year’s end, American astronauts would have not only surpassed Valeri Bykovsky’s five-day endurance record, set on Vostok 5, but would have nearly tripled it. Moreover, they would have experimented with fuel cells for longer flights, demonstrated ‘real’ rendezvous techniques necessary for lunar sorties and their Apollo project was gearing up for its own missions from 1966 onwards. At the time, of course, many western observers would find it hard to fathom why the Soviets – once so far ahead – fell so far behind during this period. Their next manned mission, Soyuz 1, would not fly until April 1967 and would end with the death of its cosmonaut pilot, Vladimir Komarov.

Key to the Soviet slowdown was the death of Sergei Korolev, the famed Chief Designer, whose identity had been kept such a closely guarded secret that his importance would not become widely known until years later. In his autobiography, Alexei Leonov lamented that, even compared to Wernher von Braun, Korolev was both a giant and a genius. At a conference in Athens in August 1965, Leonov asked von Braun why America’s supposed technological superiority had not enabled them to launch their own Sputnik, their own Gagarin, their own Voskhod 2, first. The man who designed the Saturn rocket which would win the Moon race in barely three years’ time responded respectfully that the ‘Chief Designer’, his name still unknown in the west, was a far more determined man.

Determined, indeed, but by the middle of the Sixties, Korolev was also a sick man. Nikolai Kamanin had made numerous references in his diaries that Korolev had not been well and towards the end of 1965, as two American Gemini capsules rendezvoused in orbit, he was diagnosed as suffering from a bleeding polyp in his intestine, then admitted into hospital early in the new year. Released temporarily on 10 January to celebrate his birthday at home, he spent an evening with his closest friends, including Leonov and Yuri Gagarin, to whom he told the story of his remarkable life: from his early work in the field of rocketry to his incarceration in one of Stalin’s gulags, near Magadan in the Kolyma region of the Soviet Far East, then his recall to Moscow to support Russia’s war effort and, later, its space effort.

Only days later, on 14 January, after complications arose in what should have been a routine operation, Korolev died. The effect on the cosmonaut corps and upon the Soviet Union’s direction in space was dramatic, with many recognising that the death of this previously-unknown man would severely affect future endeavours.

Pravda ran an obituary, Yuri Gagarin delivered a solemn eulogy – describing Korolev as “a name synonymous with one entire chapter of the history of mankind” – and Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Mikhail Suslov took turns to carry his ashes for interment in the Kremlin Wall. The men who followed Korolev – his deputy, Vasili Mishin, who succeeded him, together with Georgi Babakin, Vladimir Chelomei and rocket engine designer Valentin Glushko – exhibited entirely different personalities which many cosmonauts felt damaged the Soviet Union’s chances of beating America to the Moon.

In particular, Alexei Leonov has said, the lack of co-operation between Korolev and Glushko led to problems with the choice of propellants and the number of engines needed for the gigantic N-l lunar rocket, while Mishin’s apparent favoritism of newly-selected engineer-cosmonauts over the veteran pilots alienated many in the corps. Summing up, Leonov is not alone in having suggested that, had Korolev lived a little longer, “we would have been the first to circumnavigate the Moon’’. His optimism was far from misplaced. In fact, even under Mishin’s leadership, early plans called for Leonov himself to command the first loop around the back of the Moon, scheduled, at one point, for mid-1967.

Judging from the ambitious Voskhod follow-on flights planned while Korolev was still alive, there is much reason to suppose that a Soviet man on the Moon was possible. Voskhod 3, notably, endured a lengthy and convoluted development and reared its head, drearily, on several occasions as yet another effort to upstage the Americans, this time by attempting a mission of almost three weeks in duration. Early plans from March 1965 envisaged a 15-day flight in October of that year, carrying a pair of cosmonauts – a pilot and a scientist – followed by the longer, 20-day Voskhod 4 in December, crewed by a pilot and a physician. By April, the first hints of crews appeared: Boris Volynov and Georgi Katys were favoured by Nikolai Kamanin for Voskhod 3, although some within the Soviet leadership contested this. Volynov, for example, was Jewish, whilst Katys’ father, of course, had been executed by Stalin and the cosmonaut had half-siblings living in Paris. As the months wore on, Volynov was retained, paired firstly with Viktor Gotbatko and, finally, with Georgi Shonin. The next Voskhod to feature a spacewalk proved yet more controversial, with a crew of two female cosmonauts: Valentina Ponomaryova and Irina Solovyeva, backed-up, interestingly, by two men, Gotbatko and Yevgeni Khrunov.

In terms of space endurance, the United States seized the lead in August 1965, when Gemini V astronauts Gordo Cooper and Pete Conrad spent eight days in orbit, an endeavour which the Soviets, even with Korolev still alive, were powerless to prevent. Hopes of launching Voskhod 3 before the year’s end to at least upstage Gemini V faded when it became clear that the challenges of modifying the spacecraft, its environmental system and controls to handle such a long flight were simply too great. The 14-day Gemini VII mission pressed the American lead still further in December. In the final months of his life, Korolev was overburdened with the development of the new Soyuz (‘Union’) spacecraft, the massive N-l lunar rocket and plans to soft-land a probe on the Moon in early 1966. Privately, and with little direction from the government, he had already abandoned work on Voskhod 3.

The Soviet armed forces provided the impetus to jumpstart the proceedings when it became apparent that military activities had been conducted by the Gemini V astronauts. Ballistic missile detection experiments were duly added to Voskhod 3 and one of Korolev’s projects, an artificial gravity investigation, which utilised a tether between the spacecraft and the final stage of the R-7 rocket, was also approved. Short-lived plans were even floated by the Soviet Air Force in August 1965 to stage a one-man Voskhod 4, lasting around 25 days, for exclusively military tasks. One of these would centre on a set of high-quality, Czech-built cameras known as ‘Admira’. By the end of the year, Voskhod 3 had slipped into February 1966, much to the chagrin of many in the cosmonaut corps, who had already written to Leonid Brezhnev, complaining that the Soviet Union’s lead in space was being hampered by its lack of focus and clear management.

Following Korolev’s death, his successor Vasili Mishin pushed on with plans for a third Voskhod, pencilling it in for March 1966, although this date quickly became untenable due to nagging problems with ripped parachutes and an environmental control system which could not be qualified for missions longer than 18 days. On 22 February, the prime crew, Volynov and Shonin, passed their final examinations and were cleared to fly. In readiness for their launch, an unmanned Voskhod – under the cover name of‘Cosmos 110’ – entered orbit on 28 February and completed a 21-day flight with two dogs, Veterok and Ugulyok. However, Voskhod 3 itself continued to drift further and further to the right. An R-7 failure provided the first postponement and Voskhod 3 was scheduled for May, but Leonid Smirnov, chairman of the Military-Industrial Commission, argued that the flight served no purpose for the Soviet government. Despite achieving a new record duration, it was not enough, Smirnov reasoned, to have a profound impact on the world.

For his part, Kamanin argued that valuable military experiments would be conducted by Voskhod 3 and Smirnov relented a little and the launch was rescheduled for sometime in late May. A state commission convened early that month and confirmed that problems with the R-7’s engines, which had exhibited high-frequency oscillations in test-stand runs, would probably not occur under ‘real’ flight conditions. Later plans moved Voskhod 3 to July and even as late as October 1966, Mishin was ordered to prepare for its launch, but did so with little enthusiasm that it would actually go ahead as the new Soyuz project gained momentum. It has also been speculated that, just months after being appointed the new Chief Designer, Mishin simply did not want to begin his tenure under the cloud of a now-obsolete spacecraft which provided its cosmonauts with a limited margin of safety. In this way, as Mark Wade has pointed out on his website www. astronautix. com, Voskhod 3 was never really cancelled; it simply faded away.

Nikolai Kamanin had long since seen the writing on the wall: that Smirnov had killed the mission in favour of the more ambitious Soyuz project, which would demonstrate rendezvous and docking, long-duration flights, spacewalking, the potential to support an orbital station and whose crews would circumnavigate and land on the Moon. Placing their eggs in the Soyuz basket, it seemed, would give the Soviets a far better chance than Voskhod of decisively beating the American lead achieved by Gemini. The maiden voyage of the new spacecraft would suffer more than its own fair share of technical obstacles, but the loss of the Apollo 1 crew in a January 1967 flash fire offered increased hopes that the Soviets might yet beat the United States to the lunar surface. Then, just three months after the Apollo disaster, tragedy would strike the Russians in a manner that even their best propaganda apparatus could not fully conceal.

Gherman Titov’s dismay at having lost the chance to fly first in space was tempered somewhat by the realisation that his own orbital journey in August 1961 would be more than ten times longer. In fact, one of the reasons cited by Nikolai Kamanin for deferring the poetry-loving teacher’s son from the first Vostok to the second had been his greater physical endurance to handle a longer period in the peculiar state of weightlessness. Ironically, Titov’s response to this environment would earn him the unenviable record of becoming the first person to suffer space sickness.

The plans for a lengthy mission had been sketched out earlier in 1961, with Sergei Korolev wanting a cosmonaut to spend 24 hours aloft. Kamanin, together with many cosmonauts and their physicians, believed such an endeavour to be too ambitious – “too adventurist’’, he wrote in his diary – and advocated a shorter, three-orbit mission, lasting around five hours and landing in the eastern Soviet Union. Korolev rejected it. His opposition was based on sound judgement: a recovery during this period, and specifically between the second and seventh orbits, would not be possible, since retrofire would need to occur whilst in Earth’s shadow. If this happened, Vostok 2’s solar orientation sensor could not function reliably.

With typical single-minded determination, Korolev ordered his deputy, Kon­stantin Bushuyev, to lay plans for a 24-hour flight. His unwavering effort, devotion and – to a great extent – obstinacy was the result of a hard, driven, thankless life of service to the Soviet Union by a man of pure technical genius. Born in 1907 in the central Ukraine, Korolev’s interest in aviation and rocketry emerged at a young age. Under Stalin’s regime, with its ingrained fear of the power of the individual, there was little opportunity for the ‘intelligentsia’ to prosper and, as a highly respected and brilliant engineer, Korolev quickly found himself arrested and sentenced to ten years of hard labour in the Siberian gulag. The Nazi invasion of 1941, however, prompted his release to support the war effort. Subsequently, Korolev set to work developing an arsenal of rockets and missiles which he hoped could someday transport instruments into the high atmosphere and, eventually, into space. His masterpiece, the R-7, though principally intended for the Soviet military as a ballistic missile, would indeed eventually put satellites and men into orbit. By giving it this dual­purpose use, he kept his military critics quiet by satisfying their needs and his own.

Nikita Khrushchev’s regime proved generally supportive of Korolev and his projects, but for different reasons: the Presidium – later known as the Politburo – was far more interested in the glamour, political and military impact of spacegoing rocketry than purely upon scientific advancement. Indeed, on the evening of 11 April 1961, when Korolev informed Khrushchev of the final preparations to launch Vostok, the Soviet leader’s exasperated response amounted to a demand for him to “get on with it’’. Even in the wake of Gagarin’s triumph, Korolev – still officially a state secret and known only as the ‘chief designer’ to the outside world – received no congratulation, was barred from wearing his medals and even had to thumb a lift into Moscow when his antiquated Chaika limousine broke down. Later efforts by the Nobel Prize Committee to create an award for the anonymous chief designer fell on deaf ears in the Soviet leadership.

It is astonishing, therefore, that the resilience of the man – whose sufferings in Stalin’s gulag had left him physically weakened – was so high in the light of so little tangible reward. Under pressure from Korolev to fly the 24-hour mission, Kamanin reluctantly acquiesced, but imposed a condition that a manually-implemented retrofire could be conducted between the second and seventh orbits if the cosmonaut felt unwell. Opposition to the long flight, though, remained strong. As late as June 1961, Soviet Air Force officers, physicians and cosmonauts felt more comfortable with a three-orbit mission and the dispute remained unsettled until Korolev took his plan all the way to Leonid Smirnov, head of the State Committee for Defence Technology, who opted in favour of spending 24 hours in space. Later that month, the Vostok 2 State Commission convened, named Titov as the prime cosmonaut and Andrian Nikolayev as his backup.

A summertime launch was highly desirable for Korolev. Already, since Gagarin’s pioneering flight, no fewer than two American astronauts had ventured into space, albeit on 15-minute suborbital ‘hops’ from Florida into the Atlantic Ocean. Khrushchev wanted a summertime launch, too, but at a specific point and possibly for specific reasons. In mid-July, he summoned Korolev to his Crimean vacation home and hinted strongly that Vostok 2 should fly no later than 10 August; some observers have since speculated that this was deliberately engineered to provide propaganda cover for the initial steps to build the Berlin Wall just a few days later. ‘‘While it was not the first case in which Khrushchev had suggested a particular time for a specific launch,’’ wrote Asif Siddiqi in ‘Challenge to Apollo’, ‘‘it was clearly the first occasion in which the launch of a mission was timed to play a major role in the implementation of Soviet foreign policy.’’

The western world knew little of the Vostok 2 plans, of course, and persistent rumours abounded that other Soviet efforts to put men – and a woman – into space had backfired and ended disastrously. One notable example suggested that a woman had been launched on 16 May, a few weeks after Gagarin, but that her re-entry had been delayed, perhaps due to damage incurred by her Vostok capsule’s heat shield. A decision to come home on 23 May, due to dwindling oxygen supplies, was apparently taken. . . and on the 26th, the state-run Tass news agency announced the return of a large unmanned satellite, which burned up during re-entry. More notorious was a story penned by the pro-communist London newspaper The Daily Worker, which revealed, two days before Gagarin flew, that a renowned Soviet test pilot had been killed during his return from space. Such stories did not seem to go away for many years and, as late as 1979, the British Interplanetary Society suggested that the son of

Russian aircraft designer Sergei Ilyushin had flown before Gagarin, but had landed “badly shaken” and had “been in a coma ever since”.

These rumours have since been shown for what they are, but they certainly demonstrate the lack of knowledge of exactly what was going on behind the Iron Curtain at this time. Indeed, news of Titov’s impending launch did not reach even the keenest western ears until 5 August. Late that evening, the Agence-France-Presse issued a cable from Moscow, reporting that further ‘rumours’ from the Soviet capital hinted at a manned launch within 24 hours.

Early the following morning, Titov headed for Gagarin’s Start in an old eggshell – blue bus and rode the elevator to the capsule that would be his home for more than a day. Following an unfortunate incident during training, he had been reminded, only half-jokingly, by his fellow cosmonauts not to get his parachute lines entangled after ejecting from Vostok 2 or ‘‘they would be forced to expel him from the corps’’. As he was being strapped in, Titov was handed a notepad and pencil to log his experiences during the flight. Seconds after 9:00 am Moscow Time, American radar installations detected the launch of the R-7, although President Kennedy had been informed the previous night that a second Soviet manned shot was imminent.

Two hours into the flight, at 10:45 am, Radio Moscow’s famous wartime announcer Yuri Levitan boomed out the details for a listening world. Vostok 2 was in an orbit of 178-257 km, inclined 64.93 degrees to the equator. For the first time, and undoubtedly for propaganda purposes rather than in the interests of ‘true’ openness, Tass revealed the radio frequencies on which the cosmonaut was transmitting his reports. These appeared in the state-run Pravda newspaper on the morning of 7 August, together with details that the 143.625 MHz voice transmitter was frequency-modulated with a frequency deviation of plus or minus 30 kHz; obviously a clear invitation to western radio enthusiasts to listen in. Following the doubts over the authenticity of Gagarin’s mission, this would eliminate any suggestion that Titov’s flight might be a fake. In fact, listening posts in western Europe, including the Meudon Observatory, near Paris, heard the cosmonaut’s voice within two hours of liftoff, as did Reuters’ monitoring station outside London. The BBC also picked up an announcement from Titov, in which he provided details about Vostok’s cabin temperature – a pleasant 22°C, he reported – together with his personal callsign, ‘Oriel’ (‘Eagle’).

In his post-flight press conference, held a few days later, he would describe candidly the acceleration, noise and vibrations during the launch as having been endurable. Weightlessness, though, posed a different challenge. ‘‘The first impression,” he told a packed Moscow State University auditorium on 13 August, ‘‘was that I was flying with my feet up. After a few seconds, however, everything returned to normal. The Sun shone through the illuminators and there was so much light inside the cabin that I could turn off the artificial illumination. When the Sun did not shine directly into the illuminators, it was possible for me to observe, simultaneously, the Earth – which was illuminated by the Sun – and the stars above, which were sharp and bright little points on a very black sky.’’

Although he was undoubtedly impressed by his view of the heavens, Titov’s experience of the microgravity environment would be somewhat different. Shortly

after reaching orbit, he began to feel disorientated and uncomfortable and, even before beginning his sleep period at around 6:30 pm he exhibited symptoms of vertigo: dizziness, nausea, headaches. Titov, the teacher’s son from the village of Verkhnie Zhilino, in the Altai region, would be the first of many to suffer from the condition known as ‘space sickness’.

The day after Bob Gilruth picked Shepard for the first American manned space mission, another selection was being ratified in a cold and snowy Washington, DC, under the auspices of Chief Justice Earl Warren and accompanied by Robert Frost’s poetry. At 12:51 pm on 20 January 1961, the man who would truly define the United States’ space ambitions for the new decade officially became its 35th president. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the first incumbent of the office to have been born in the 20th century, famously encouraged Americans in his 14-minute, 1,300-word inauguration speech to participate as active citizens: to ‘‘ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’’. Only months later, speaking before a joint session of Congress in the wake of Shepard’s flight, Kennedy would rally hundreds of thousands of Americans from all corners of the nation to participate, actively, in the greatest scientific endeavour ever attempted: to land a man on the Moon.

Today, he holds a somewhat nostalgic, even mystical, place in the hearts of space aficionados, as the first major world leader to truly support a peaceful exploration programme with words, deeds and serious money. Indeed, the lunar landing effort, known as Project Apollo, would consume more than $25 billion in a little over a decade of operations. However, Kennedy’s motivations for funding it were at least partly political. At the time of his appointment, American missile and space technology had fallen seriously behind that of the Soviet Union, opening up a much – publicised ‘gap’ between the two superpowers and creating an issue which had been a central component of his election campaign. It is interesting to speculate when one considers Kennedy’s words – that ‘‘the world is very different now’’ – whether or not the lunar effort would have gone ahead if such issues with the Soviet Union and the steady march of communism into south-east Asia had not been present.

The son of a businessman-turned-ambassador, Kennedy’s grandfathers had both been important political figures in Boston, Massachusetts. After a stint in command of a torpedo boat in the Solomon Islands in 1943 – during which he famously brought his crew ashore after being hit by a Japanese destroyer – Kennedy remained undecided for a time over whether to enter journalism or politics in civilian life. He eventually settled on the latter, winning a seat in the House of Representatives in 1946, supporting President Harry Truman and advocating policies of progressive taxation, the extension of social welfare and increasing the availability of low-cost housing. Election to the Senate in 1952 was followed by his sponsorship of bills to provide federal financial aid for education, liberalise immigration laws and implement measures to require full disclosure of all employees’ pension and welfare funds. He also wrote the Pulitzer-winning Profiles in Courage in 1956, becoming the first president to achieve the coveted literary prize.

Kennedy officially declared his intent to run for the presidency on 2 January I960, defeating opponents Hubert Humphrey and Wayne Morse in the Democratic primaries. Despite his staunch Roman Catholic beliefs – which caused suspicion and mistrust of him in several states, particularly the largely-Protestant West Virginia – he succeeded in winning solid support and cemented his credentials. In a speech delivered to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, he revealed himself to be ‘‘the Democratic Party’s candidate for President, who also happens to be a Catholic’’. Further, he attacked religious bigotry and explained his belief in the absolute separation of Church from State. By mid-July, the Democrats had nominated him as their candidate, with Lyndon Johnson joining him for the vice-presidency.

During the first televised debate in American political history, Kennedy appeared relaxed opposite his Republican rival (and then-Vice-President) Richard Nixon, further increasing the momentum of his campaign. On 8 November 1960, he won the election in one of the most closely-contested votes of the 20th century, leading Nixon by just two-tenths of a per cent – 49.7 against 49.5 – although it might have been higher, had not 14 electors from Mississippi and Alabama refused to back him on the basis of his support for the brewing civil rights movement. Nevertheless, and despite Nixon lambasting Kennedy’s lack of experience in senior politics, the second- youngest man ever to win the presidency duly took office.

A little more than three years later, he would also become the youngest – and the last – to be assassinated.

Preparations for the MA-7 mission had begun long before Deke Slayton’s grounding. In mid-November 1961, Spacecraft No. 18 arrived in Hangar S at Cape Canaveral, followed, shortly after the Friendship 7 flight, by its Atlas. Checkout problems with capsule and rocket delayed an original mid-April launch to mid-May. The landing bag switches which had caused problems for John Glenn were rewired so that both had to be closed in order to activate a ‘deployed’ signal. Engineers also determined that the cause of the flight control system glitches lay in the fuel line filters, which were replaced with platinum screens and new, stainless steel fuel lines. Finally, on 28 April 1962, Aurora 7 was attached to its rocket at Pad 14. A simulated flight proved satisfactory, although decisions were made to install an extra barostat in the capsule’s parachute circuitry, fit temperature survey instrumentation and replace flight-control canisters in the launch vehicle. Additional delays were caused by Atlantic Fleet tactical exercises which required participation by the recovery ships and aircraft for several weeks. Other concerns arose following the failure of an Atlas – F missile a few weeks earlier. However, the different engine start-up sequences of the Atlas-F and Carpenter’s own Atlas-D eliminated any doubts over its reliability.

The installation of the extra barostat postponed the mid-May launch attempt and, on the 19th, an effort to get Aurora 7 into space proved fruitless when irregularities were detected in a temperature control device on the Atlas’ flight control system heater. Five days later, however, Carpenter was awakened at 1:15 am and proceeded through the usual pre-flight breakfast ritual, was examined by Bill Douglas, suited – up by Joe Schmitt’s team and departed for Pad 14. He was aboard the capsule by 5:00 am, to enjoy one of the smoothest countdowns in Project Mercury, with only persistent ground fog and cloud and camera-coverage issues complicating matters. During a 45-minute delay past the original 7:00 am launch time, Carpenter sipped cold tea from his squeeze bottle and chatted to his family over the radio. His wife Rene and their four children represented the first astronaut family to journey to the Cape and watch the launch. To avoid media attention, a neighbour provided a private flight to Florida and a car, which Rene drove to the astronauts’ hideaway – nicknamed the Life House – near Pad 14, wearing huge sunglasses, a kerchief over her conspicuous blonde coif and her two daughters hidden under a blanket. The media, anticipating the arrival of a blonde mother of four, instead saw only a well – disguised mother of two. . .

Sixteen seconds after 7:45 am, the Atlas’ engines ignited, prompting all four Carpenter children to abandon the television set and rush onto the beach to watch their father hurtle spaceward. Elsewhere, at the Cape and across the nation, an estimated 40 million viewers watched as America launched its second man into orbit. Carpenter himself would later describe ‘‘surprisingly little vibration, although the engines made a big racket’’ and the swaying of the rocket during the early stages of ascent was definitely noticeable. In his autobiography, he would express surprise, after so many years of flying aircraft and ‘levelling-out’ after an initial climb, to see the capsule’s altimeter climbing continuously as the Atlas shot straight up.

Already, however, the first glitches of what would become a troubled mission

were rearing their heads. Aurora 7’s pitch horizon scanner, responsible for monitoring the horizon to maintain the pitch attitude of the spacecraft, immediately began feeding incorrect data into the automatic control system. When this ‘wrong’ information was analysed by the autopilot, it responded, as designed, by firing the pitch thruster to correct the perceived error – in effect, wasting precious fuel. Forty seconds after the separation of the LES tower, the scanner was 18 degrees in error, indicating a plus-17-degree nose-up attitude, whilst the Atlas’ gyros recorded an actual pitch of minus 0.5 degrees. It had reached 20 degrees in error by the time Carpenter achieved orbit. As the flight wore on, the error persisted and, wrote Carpenter and Stoever, produced ‘‘near-calamitous effects’’ as Aurora 7 neared re­entry.

Sustainer engine cutoff came as a gentle drop in acceleration, with a pair of bangs providing cues that explosive bolts had fired and posigrade rockets had pushed Aurora 7 away from the spent Atlas. The astronaut reported, with clear elation in his voice, ‘‘I am weightless! Starting the fly-by-wire turnaround.” Deciding not to rely on the automatic controls, his use of fly-by-wire smartly turned the capsule around at a fuel expense of just 725 g, as compared to 2.3 kg on Friendship 7. Carpenter would later describe that he felt no angular motion during the turnaround and, in fact, his instruments provided the only evidence that a manoeuvre was being executed. No sensation of speed was apparent, although he was travelling at 28,240 km/h and was soon presented with his first ‘‘arresting’’ view of Earth. Carpenter watched the Atlas’ sustainer tumble into the distance, trailing a stream of ice crystals two or three times longer than the rocket stage itself. As he flew high above the Canaries, he could still see its silvery bulk, tagging along with Aurora 7.

Five and a half minutes into the mission, Capcom Gus Grissom radioed the good news: Carpenter’s orbit was good enough for seven circuits of the globe. The astronaut got to work. ‘‘With the completion of the turnaround manoeuvre,’’ he wrote, ‘‘I pitched the capsule nose down, 34 degrees, to retro attitude, and reported what to me was an astounding sight. From Earth orbit altitude, I had the Moon in the centre of my window, a spent booster tumbling slowly away and looming beneath me the African continent.’’ He pulled his flight plan index cards from beneath Aurora 7’s instrument panel and Velcroed them into place; these would provide him with timing cues for communications with ground stations, when and for how long to use control systems, when to begin and end manoeuvres, what observations to make and when to perform experiments. Minute-by-minute, they mapped out his entire flight. First, he took out the camera, adapted with strips of Velcro – ‘‘the great zero-gravity tamer’’ – to begin photographing Sun-glint on the Atlas sustainer. Next came filters to measure the frequency of light emissions from Earth’s atmospheric airglow, followed by star navigation cards, worldwide orbital and weather charts and bags of food.

Orienting the capsule such that the sustainer was dead-centre in his window, Carpenter reported to the Canaries ground station that he could see ‘‘west of your station, many whirls and vortices of cloud patterns’’. His view of the heavens was somewhat less clear, with the stars too dim to make out against the black sky, although the Moon and terrestrial weather patterns were obvious. Then, 16 minutes after launch, the astronaut noted that his spacecraft’s actual attitude did not seem to be in agreement with what the instruments were telling him. Aware of problems that John Glenn had experienced with his gyro reference system, and cognisant of the fact that he had other work to do, Carpenter dismissed it.

“A thorough check, early in the flight, could have identified the [pitch horizon scanner] malfunction,” he later wrote. “Ground control could have insisted on it, when the first anomalous readings were reported. Such a check would have required anywhere from two to six minutes of intense and continuous attention on the part of the pilot. A simple enough matter, but a prodigious block of time in a science flight – and in fact the very reason [such] checks weren’t included in the flight plan.’’ With so much to do, it would not be until his second orbit that Carpenter would again report problems with the autopilot.

Passing over the ground station at Kano, in north-central Nigeria, Carpenter successfully photographed the Sun for physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then, over the Indian Ocean, acquired initial readings for John O’Keefe’s airglow study. However, conditions aboard the spacecraft were becoming uncomfortable, as the cabin temperature increased. Years later, in ‘The Right Stuff’’, Tom Wolfe would describe Aurora 7 as ‘‘a picnic’’ and that its astronaut had ‘‘a grand time’’; Carpenter, however, countered that his lengthy training as Glenn’s backup and shorter-than-normal preparation for his own mission made it anything but a walk in the park. ‘‘To the extent that training creates certain comfort levels with high-performance duties like spaceflight,’’ he wrote, ‘‘then, yes, I was prepared for, and at times may have even enjoyed, some of my duties aboard Aurora 7. But I was deadly earnest about the success of the mission, intent on observing as much as humanly possible, and committed to conducting all the experiments entrusted to me. I made strenuous efforts to adhere to a very crowded flight plan.’’

Admirably, for the first 90 minutes of his mission, Carpenter focused on his Earth-observation tasks, photographing rapid changes in light levels as the spacecraft crossed the ‘terminator’ – the dividing line between the darkened and sunlit sides of Earth – and expressing sheer astonishment as the Sun disappeared below the horizon. ‘‘It’s now nearly dark,’’ he remarked in the flight transcript, ‘‘and I can’t believe where I am!’’ Passing over Muchea in Australia, Carpenter discussed with Capcom Deke Slayton possible ways of establishing attitude control on the dark side of Earth with no moonlight and relayed what reliable visual references he had through the window or the periscope. Pitch attitude was not a problem, thanks to scribe reference marks on Aurora 7’s window, but accomplishing the correct yaw angle was much more difficult and time-consuming.

‘‘At night, when geographic features are less visible, you can establish a zero-yaw attitude by using the star navigation charts, a simplified form of a slide rule,’’ Carpenter wrote. ‘‘The charts show exactly what star should be in the centre of the window at any point in the orbit – by keeping that star at the very centre of your window, you know you’re maintaining zero yaw. But there are troubles even here, for the pilot requires good ‘dark adaption’ to see the stars and dark adaption was difficult during the early flights because of the many light leaks in the cabin.’’ Among the most annoying of these leaks were Aurora 7’s instrument panel lights and, particularly, the glowing rim around the spacecraft’s on-board clock. Carpenter told Slayton that his pressure suit’s temperature was higher than normal, before crossing over the Woomera tracking station, with the intention of observing four flares of a combined one million candlepower, fired from the Great Victoria Desert as a visibility check. To see the flares, Carpenter was required to undertake “a whopping plus-80 degrees yaw manoeuvre and a pitch attitude of minus-80 degrees’’, but, unfortunately, cloud cover was too dense. “No joy on your flares,’’ he told Woomera.

Another aspect of the mission about which no joy was forthcoming was the multi­coloured balloon, which he released an hour and 38 minutes after launch. For a few seconds, the expected ‘confetti spray’ signalled a successful deployment, but it soon became clear that the balloon had not inflated properly. Due to a ruptured seam in its skin, it deployed to a third of its expected size and only two of its five colours – Day-Glo orange and dull aluminium – were visible. Two small, ear-like appendages, each about 15-20 cm long and described as ‘‘sausages’’, emerged on the edges of the partially-inflated sphere. Its movements turned out to be erratic and, although Carpenter succeeded in acquiring a few drag-resistance measurements, the 30 m tether quickly wrapped itself around Aurora 7’s nose. Consequently, the aerodynamic data was of limited use. Carpenter attempted to release the balloon during his third orbit, whilst flying over Cape Canaveral, but it remained close to the spacecraft. There it stayed until retrofire and eventually burned up during re-entry.

By this time, Mission Control was keeping a close eye on Aurora 7’s fuel usage, which, by two hours into the flight, was at the 69-per cent capacity for both its manual and automatic supplies. As Carpenter passed over Nigeria early in his second orbital pass, the manual supply had dropped still further to just 51 per cent. He told the Kano capcom that he felt he had expended additional fuel trying to orient the spacecraft whilst on the dark side and blamed “conflicting requirements of the flight plan’’. During each fly-by-wire manoeuvre, very slight movements of the control stick would activate the small thrusters, whereas bigger movements would initiate larger thrusters. For every accidental flick of his wrist, Carpenter could activate the larger thrusters and would then have to correct them, thus wasting valuable fuel. ‘‘The design problem with the three-axis control stick, as of May 1962,’’ he wrote later, ‘‘meant the pilot had no way of disabling, or locking-out, these high-power thrusters.’’ Subsequent Mercury flights would employ an on-off switch for just that purpose.

The still-unknown problem with the pitch horizon scanner, though, remained. A little over two hours into the mission, the Zanzibar capcom informed Carpenter that, according to the flight plan, he should now be transitioning Aurora 7 from automatic to fly-by-wire controls. The astronaut opposed this, preferring to remain in automatic mode, which was supposedly more economical with fuel consumption. Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case, because the malfunctioning pitch horizon scanner was feeding incorrect information into the autopilot, which, in turn, was guzzling far more fuel than it should. A few minutes later, in communication with a tracking ship in the Indian Ocean, Carpenter reported difficulties with the automatic control mode and switched to fly-by-wire in an effort to diagnose the problem.

Although a malfunctioning automated navigational system in orbit was tolerable, its satisfactory performance was essential for retrofire to ensure that the spacecraft was properly aligned along the pitch and yaw axes to begin its fiery descent through the atmosphere. “Pitch attitude … must be 34 degrees, nose-down,” wrote Carpenter. “Yaw, the left-right attitude, must be steady at zero degrees, or pointing directly back along flight path. The [autopilot] performs this manoeuvre automatically, and better than any pilot, when the on-board navigational instruments are working properly.” Sadly, on Aurora 7, they were not. The astronaut could align his capsule manually, but with difficulty: by either pointing the nose in a direction that he thought was a zero-degree yaw angle and then watching the terrain pass beneath him (considered near-impossible over featureless terrain or ocean) or use a certain geographical feature or cloud pattern for reference.

“Manual control of the spacecraft yaw attitude using external references,” he wrote later, “has proven to be more difficult and time-consuming than pitch and roll alignment, particularly as external lighting diminishes… Ground terrain drift provided the best daylight reference in yaw. However, a terrestrial reference at night was useful in controlling yaw attitudes only when sufficiently illuminated by moonlight. In the absence of moonlight, the pilot reported that the only satisfactory yaw reference was a known star complex nearer the orbital plane.”

Carpenter had other worries, too. His cabin and pressure suit temperatures were climbing to uncomfortable levels; the former, in fact, peaked at 42°C during his third orbit, while the latter rose to 23.3°C and a “miserable” 71 degrees of humidity. The capcom’s query as to whether the astronaut felt comfortable, having fiddled with his suit’s controls, was greeted with a non-committal “I don’t know”. After the flight, the high cabin temperatures were attributed to the difficulty of achieving high air­flow rates and good circulation, as well as the vulnerability of the spacecraft’s heat exchanger to freezing blockage when high rates of water flow were used. Meanwhile, Carpenter was also required to take frequent blood pressure readings, pop xylose pills for post-flight urinalysis and monitor each of his scientific experiments. He did also manage to eat solid food during the mission: the Pillsbury Company had prepared chocolate, figs and dates with high-protein cereals, whilst Nestle provided some ‘bonbons’, composed of orange peel with almonds, high-protein cereals with almonds and cereals with raisins. These had been processed into particles a couple of centimetres square and were coated with edible glazes. The astronaut sampled them, but found them to crumble badly, leaving pieces floating around the cabin.

He succeeded in shooting photographs of the Sun for the Massachusetts researchers, acquired photometric readings on the star Phecda (more formally, Gamma Ursae Majoris) and his work on the liquid-behaviour experiment showed that capillary action could indeed pump fluids in space. However, he also reported worrying decreases in his fuel, which had hit just 45 per cent in the case of the manual supply. Indeed, Flight Director Chris Kraft, writing in his post-flight report on Aurora 7, would comment that the mission had run smoothly thus far, with the exception of the ‘‘over-expenditure of hydrogen peroxide fuel’’. At this point, Kraft felt that sufficient fuel remained to achieve the retrofire attitude, hold it steady and re-enter the atmosphere with either the automatic or manual control systems.

In his autobiography, Carpenter suggested that Kraft’s frustration with him began to emerge at this point, the flight director having apparently concluded that the astronaut had deliberately ignored a request to conduct an attitude check over Hawaii. Kraft also voiced serious concerns to California capcom Al Shepard that Carpenter was to tightly curb his automatic fuel use prior to retrofire. By this time, Aurora 7 was restricted to long periods of drifting flight, with both automatic and manual fuel quantities now dropping to less than 50 per cent. Years later, Gene Kranz would blame ground controllers for waiting too long before addressing the fuel status and felt that they should have been more dogged and forceful in getting on with the checklists. “A thoroughgoing attitude check, during the first orbit,’’ added Carpenter, “would probably have helped to diagnose the persistent, intermittent and constantly varying malfunction of the pitch horizon scanner. By the third orbit, it was all too late.’’ Whilst drifting, Carpenter beheld one of the most spectacular sights of the mission: his final orbital sunrise, witnessed four hours and 19 minutes after launch, shortly before retrofire. “Stretching away for hundreds of miles to the north and the south,’’ he wrote, sunrise presented “a glittering, iridescent arc’’ of colours, which faded into a purplish-blue and blended into the blackness of space.

This blackness, he would write in his post-flight report, together with brilliant shades of blue and green from the sunlit Earth, were “colours hard to imagine or duplicate because of their wonderful purity. Everywhere the Earth is flecked with white clouds’’. The South Atlantic, he recounted, was 90 per cent cloud-covered, but western Africa was completely clear and Carpenter was granted a stunning view of Lake Chad. He spotted patchy clouds over the Indian Ocean, a fairly clear Pacific and an obscured western half of Baja California. He described the atmospheric airglow layer in detail to Slayton when he came within range of Muchea. “The haze layer is very bright,’’ he reported. “I would say about eight to ten degrees above the real horizon. . . and I would say that the haze layer is about twice as high above the horizon as the bright blue band at sunset is.’’

His long period of drifting flight also meant that he had the opportunity to witness the ‘fireflies’ seen by John Glenn three months earlier. By rapping his knuckles on the inside walls of the spacecraft, he could raise a cloud of them and determined that they came from Aurora 7 itself. ‘‘I can rap the hatch and stir off hundreds of them,’’ he reported. To Carpenter, they appeared more like snowflakes and did not seem to be ‘luminous’, actually varying in size, brightness and colour. Some were grey, some white and one in particular, he said, looked like a helical shaving from a lathe. Carpenter then decided, with only minutes remaining before retrofire, to yaw the spacecraft in order to get a better view with the photometer. Shortly thereafter, he passed over Hawaii, whose capcom told him to reorient Aurora 7, go to autopilot and begin stowing equipment and running through pre – retrofire checklists.

More problems arose. Four hours and 26 minutes after launch, with retrofire barely six minutes away, Carpenter reported that the automatic system did not appear to be working properly and confirmed that the ‘‘emergency retro-sequence is armed and retro manual is armed’’. In his autobiography, he would recount that the autopilot was not holding the spacecraft steady and, indeed, that achieving the correct pitch and yaw attitudes were critical to ensuring that he would descend along a pre-determined re-entry flight path and plop into the waters of the Atlantic, just south-east of Florida. Carpenter promptly switched to the fly-by-wire controls, but forgot to shut off the manual system, which wasted even more fuel. At around the same time, two fuses overheated and the astronaut noticed smoke drifting through the cabin.

Concerned that the critically-timed retrofire would now be delayed by the autopilot malfunction, Carpenter initiated it manually. He fired the rockets three seconds late, but admitted later “at that speed, a lapse of three seconds would make me at least 15 miles ‘long’ in the recovery area”. Although he radioed to Shepard that he felt his spacecraft attitudes were good, privately, Carpenter was not sure and added, almost as an afterthought, that ‘‘the gyros are not quite right’’. Years later, he would describe the difficulty in dividing his attention between two attitude reference systems and attempting to accomplish a perfect retrofire. ‘‘It appears I pretty much nailed the pitch attitude,’’ he wrote, ‘‘but the nose of Aurora 7, while pitched close to the desirable negative 34 degrees, was canted about 25 degrees off to the right, in yaw, at the moment of retrofire. By the end of the retrofire event, I had essentially corrected the error in yaw, which limited the overshoot. But the damage was already done.’’

The 25-degree cant alone would have caused Aurora 7 to miss its planned splashdown point by around 280 km; however, the three-second delay in firing the retrorockets and a thrust decrement – some three per cent below normal – contributed an additional 120 km to the overshoot. On the other hand, if Carpenter had not bypassed the autopilot and manually fired the retrorockets, he could have splashed down even further off-target. At this stage, his fuel supplies were holding at barely 20 per cent for manual and just five per cent for automatic. Carpenter survived re-entry, but experienced a wild ride back through the atmosphere, with Aurora 7 oscillating between plus and minus 30 degrees in pitch and yaw. The astronaut was able to damp out many of these oscillations with the fly-by-wire controls and the post-flight report would commend him as having ‘‘demonstrated an ability to orient the vehicle so as to effect a successful re-entry’’. It provided clear evidence that a human pilot could overcome malfunctioning automatic systems.

Carpenter’s descent and the trapezoidal window offered a spectacular view of Earth, zooming towards him. ‘‘I can make out very small farmland, pastureland below,’’ he reported, some four hours and 37 minutes after launch. ‘‘I see individual fields, rivers, lakes, roads, I think.’’ Five minutes later, Gus Grissom, the Florida capcom, informed him that weather conditions in the anticipated recovery zone were good. By this time, shortly before ionised air surrounding the capsule caused a communications blackout at an altitude of around 22 km, Carpenter began to see the first hints of an intense orange glow as particles from the ablative heat shield formed an enormous ‘wake’ behind him. Then came distinct green flashes, which the astronaut assumed were the ionising beryllium shingles on Aurora 7’s hull. As the re­entry G forces peaked at 11 times their normal terrestrial load, telemetred cardiac readings at Mission Control revealed the substantial physical effort needed by

Carpenter to speak, announce observations and make status reports. His breathing technique, perfected in the Johnsville centrifuge, would come in useful.

Five minutes before splashdown, at an altitude of 7.6 km, he manually deployed the drogue parachute, which steadied the capsule and damped out what he had earlier described as “some pretty good oscillations”. The drogue was soon followed by the main chute, again manually deployed, although Carpenter’s announcements of each milestone over the radio to Grissom fell on deaf ears. The capcom could not hear his transmissions and was forced to broadcast ‘in the blind’ to inform him that his splashdown point would be some 400 km ‘long’ and advise that pararescue forces would arrive on the scene within the hour. A minute before splashdown, Carpenter acknowledged Grissom’s call. The impact with the water, 215 km north-east of Puerto Rico, was not hard, but Aurora 7 was totally submerged for a few seconds. It popped back up and listed sharply, 60 degrees over to one side, before the landing bag filled and began to act as a sea-anchor.

Keen to get out as soon as possible and probably thinking back to Grissom’s own misfortune, Carpenter opted to exit the capsule through the nose, becoming the first and only Mercury astronaut to do so. It took him four minutes and required him to remove the instrument panel from the bulkhead, exposing a narrow egress passage up through the spacecraft’s nose, where the two parachutes had resided. As he squirmed his way through the cramped space, Carpenter decided, in defiance of standard egress procedures, not to deploy his pressure suit’s neck dam. He was already overheating and felt the gently swelling seas would make it unnecessary. Next, still perched in the nose of the capsule, he dropped his life raft into the water, where it quickly inflated and a Search and Rescue and Homing (SARAH) beacon came on automatically. The latter would allow recovery forces to home in on his position.

Preparing himself for a long wait, Carpenter tied the raft to the side of the capsule, deployed his neck dam, said a brief prayer and relaxed. He stretched out on his raft and was joined, he wrote later, by ‘‘a curious, 18-inch-long black fish who wanted nothing more than to visit’’. It was his first physical contact with another living being and his first moment of calm in four hours and 56 minutes since launch.

For those watching the mission from afar, however, there was no relaxation. At Cape Canaveral, CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite played up the drama by describing for his audience Mission Control’s repeated attempts to contact Aurora 7, then highlighted that Carpenter had endured ‘‘half a ton’’ of pressure during re-entry and finally recapped that flight controllers were still ‘‘standing by’’ after losing voice contact with the astronaut. ‘‘While thousands watch and pray,’’ Cronkite told his audience, ‘‘certainly here at Cape Canaveral, the silence is almost intolerable.’’ In Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, a hush fell over the crowd gathered before a huge CBS screen, while in the White House a direct telephone link with the Cape had been set up to provide President Kennedy with news. In fact, the SARAH beacon had already given Carpenter’s co-ordinates and his telemetred heartbeat had been clearly heard in Mission Control throughout re-entry. Moreover, his splashdown point was almost exactly where the IBM computers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, had predicted him to be after factoring-in radar tracking data and the yaw error at the point of retrofire.

Aboard the destroyer John R. Pierce – nicknamed the ‘Fierce Pierce’ – the attitude was quite different thanks to the reception of the strong SARAH signal. ‘‘Believe you me,’’ reported CBS journalist Bill Evenson from aboard the destroyer, ‘‘this bucket of bolts is really rolling now and what a happy crew we’ve got!’’

It was a Lockheed P2V Neptune, one of the same breed of patrol aircraft that Carpenter had flown a decade earlier in Korea, which finally greeted him. The astronaut signalled the pilot with a hand mirror and was acknowledged when the Neptune began circling his position. Shorty Powers, upon hearing the news, announced that ‘‘a gentleman by the name of Carpenter was seen seated comfortably in his life raft’’. One hour and seven minutes after splashdown, at 1:48 pm Eastern Standard Time, Airman First Class John Heitsch and Sergeant Ray McClure from an SC-54 transport aircraft joined the astronaut in the water, opened their rafts and tethered them together. Carpenter offered them some of his food rations, which were politely declined. Eventually, the astronaut was picked up by the Intrepid, originally earmarked as the prime recovery ship, but delayed in its arrival by Aurora 7’s 400 km overshoot. The Fierce Pierce, meanwhile, successfully recovered the spacecraft itself and delivered it, on 28 May, to Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico.

Carpenter, meanwhile, was hot and wet after almost an hour on his back on the launch pad, followed by five hours in space and more than an hour in the Atlantic. Soon after boarding the rescue helicopter, he borrowed a pocket knife, cut a hole in the sock of his pressure suit and let his sweat and seawater drain out of the makeshift toe hole. Army physician Richard Rink asked Carpenter how he felt. In true Mercury Seven fashion, perfectly demonstrative of the ‘right stuff’ about which Tom Wolfe would later write, America’s fourth man in space replied simply: ‘‘Fine’’.

By the middle of 1963, shortly after Faith 7, Shepard’s chances of commanding the first Gemini looked bright. Then his career and health, figuratively and literally, started spinning. Years earlier, just after being selected as one of the Mercury Seven, he had complained about feeling light-headed during a game of golf; every time he attempted to swing the club, he felt that he was about to fall over. It was an isolated, peculiar incident, which did not resurface again until the summer of 1963. It came with a vengeance, usually striking him in the mornings and taking the form of a loud metallic ringing in his ears, coupled with feelings of intense dizziness and nausea. At first, Shepard dealt with the problem himself: he saw a private physician, who prescribed diuretics and vitamins such as niacin, which had little effect. It did not stop Slayton from assigning him to command Gemini 3 and, indeed, Shepard and Stafford completed the first six weeks of their training, visiting McDonnell’s St Louis plant in Missouri to watch their spacecraft being built.

He told no one in the astronaut corps of the problem. However, very soon, it became impossible to conceal. An episode of dizziness whilst delivering a lecture in Houston forced him to admit his concerns to Slayton, who sent him to the astronauts’ physician, Chuck Berry, for tests. In May 1963, unknown to everyone else in the corps, Shepard was temporarily grounded. The diagnosis was that fluids were regularly building up in the semicircular canals of his inner ear, affecting his sense of balance and causing vertigo, nausea, hearing loss and intense aural ringing. Although the incidents were intermittent, they proved sufficiently unpredictable and severe to render him ineligible to fly Gemini 3.

Known as Meniere’s Disease, the ailment was a recognised but somewhat vague condition. Indeed, formal criteria to define it would not be established by the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery until 1972. The academy’s criteria would describe exactly the conditions suffered by Shepard:

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fluctuating, progressive deafness – he would be virtually deaf in one ear by 1968 – together with episodic spells of vertigo, tinnitus and periodic swings of remission and exacerbation. Nowadays, it can be treated through vestibular training, stress reduction, hearing aids, low-sodium diets and medication for the nausea, vertigo and inner-ear pressure: such as antihistamines, anticholinergics, steroids and diuretics. In mid-1963, however, the physicians who examined Shepard had next to no idea what caused it, some speculating that it was a ‘psychosomatic’ affliction. Moreover, there was no cure.

His removal from flight status was temporarily revoked in August, with the prescription of diuretics and pills to increase blood circulation, in the 20 per cent hope that the condition would clear up on its own. This allowed Shepard to be internally assigned to Gemini 3, but when the early diagnosis was confirmed and no sign of improvement was forthcoming, he was formally grounded in October, after only six weeks of training with Stafford. During those weeks, the men had spent some time in the Gemini simulator, but little more. Not only was Shepard barred from spaceflight, but, like Deke Slayton, he also could not fly NASA jets unless accompanied by another pilot. Subsequent examinations revealed that he also suffered from mild glaucoma – a symptom of chronic hyperactivity – and a small lump was discovered on his thyroid. It was surgically removed in January 1964 and, the press announced, ‘‘would have no impact on his status in the space programme’’. In reality, Shepard had been effectively grounded for months by that point.

Ironically, at the same time, John Glenn, who had resigned from NASA after being told that his chances of flying again were slim, suffered damage to his own vestibular system. Glenn’s friendship with Attorney-General Bobby Kennedy had led to the first inkling of a political career and, after leaving the astronaut corps in January 1964, he announced his candidacy to run for the Senate in his home state of Ohio. A few weeks later, he slipped and cracked his head on the bathtub in his apartment, resulting in mild concussion and, more seriously, swelling in his inner ear, which produced similar symptoms to Meniere’s Disease. Glenn spent several weeks in a San Antonio hospital, virtually immobile, and was forced to withdraw from the Senate race in March.

Elsewhere, at the Rice Hotel in downtown Houston, Shepard pulled Stafford aside one evening that same March and asked him if Slayton had mentioned anything about the Gemini 3 assignment. No, Stafford replied, and could only listen open-mouthed as his former crewmate told him about the dizziness, the vertigo, the Meniere’s diagnosis. . . and the bombshell that Shepard was grounded. In his autobiography, Stafford recalled fearing for his own place on Gemini 3, and, indeed, in mid-April, the crew changes were announced. Slayton moved Gus Grissom up from the command slot on Gemini V to lead Shepard’s old mission and replaced him with Gordo Cooper, who had established himself as capable of enduring a long – duration flight on Faith 7. Unluckily for Stafford, however, Slayton felt that John Young was a better personality match with Grissom and designated him as Gemini 3’s new pilot. He had nothing against Stafford, of course, simply revealing in his autobiography that ‘‘Tom was probably our strongest guy in rendezvous, so it made sense to point him at [Gemini VI], the first rendezvous mission’’.

Stafford learned of his removal from the Gemini 3 prime crew from one of the flight surgeons, Duane Ross, who told him that he was now on Gus Grissom’s backup team, paired with Wally Schirra. Grissom’s original pilot, Frank Borman, would be “held for later’’ and another mission. In his biography of Grissom, Ray Boomhower cited fellow astronaut Gene Cernan as remarking that Grissom’s and Borman’s egos – both of them were strong-headed leaders – were too large to fit one mission. Indeed, in an April 1999 oral history for NASA, Borman hinted that he “went over to [Grissom’s] house to talk to him about it … and after that I was scrubbed from the flight’’. Borman, eventually, would command his own Gemini. Meanwhile, on 13 April 1964, the four-man unit for Gemini 3 set to work. Only days earlier, the first unmanned test to assess the compatibility of the spacecraft and its launch vehicle had proven a remarkable success. It came after almost three years of technical and managerial difficulties and a development programme laced with problems.

To this day, Gherman Stepanovich Titov remains the youngest person ever to have flown into space, a record he has held for almost five decades. On 6 August 1961, he was just a month shy of his 26th birthday. Born on 11 September 1935, he was named Gherman – an unusual name for a Russian – by his father, in honour of a favourite Pushkin character from ‘The Queen of Spades’. Titov’s own love of literature, though, went far beyond the inspiration for his name: in his cosmonaut days, he was well-known for quoting long reams of poetry or fragments from stories or novels. Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony have hinted that, in the “egalitarian workers’ and peasants’ paradise’’ that was the old Soviet Union, this may have harmed his chances of becoming the first man in space. Unlike Pushkin, whose liberal views and influence on generations of Russian rebels led the Bolsheviks to consider him an opponent to bourgeois literature, Titov’s pride, love of poetry and reading and a ‘‘suspicion of class’’ bestowed on him by his learned father made him somewhat less appealing to Nikita Khrushchev’s regime than Yuri Gagarin.

His breakthrough to reach the hallowed ranks of the first cosmonaut team in March 1960 came about through his excellence as a MiG fighter pilot. Titov had entered the Ninth Military Air School at Kustanai in Kazakhstan in 1953, transferring to the Stalingrad Higher Air Force School two years later, where he commenced military flight training. Following qualification, in September 1957 he was attached to two different Air Guard regiments in the Leningrad Military District and subsequently became a Soviet Air Force pilot in the Second Leningrad Aviation Region. His selection as a cosmonaut, he would recall more than three decades later, was almost a fluke, with the answers he gave to the physicians and psychologists bordering on arrogance. He seemed non-committal in his interviews even when the subject of ‘‘flying sputniks’’ in orbit was broached. However, he said, ‘‘I was curious about how it would be to fly a sputnik and I was told that I had been called to Moscow. I went to Moscow and I was enrolled into the cosmonauts’ team’’.

Titov’s selection was lucky in another way, too. At the age of 14, he had crashed his bicycle and shattered his wrist. Instead of revealing the injury to his parents, he nursed it secretly, unwilling to show any sign of weakness, particularly as he had already signed up for elementary training at aviation school. During his time as a cadet, fearful that his injury would be discovered, Titov bluffed them by performing early-morning exercises on a set of parallel bars, until his damaged wrist appeared as good as the other. When he underwent intensive X-rays for the cosmonaut selection in 1960, the medical staff found nothing amiss. Only years after his Vostok 2 flight, when they learned of the injury, did they tell him that his recruitment would never have been sanctioned if they had known.