Category Escaping the Bonds of Earth

Had Gus Grissom lived longer, wrote Deke Slayton, he would have been the first man on the Moon. Slayton, who was grounded from flying throughout most of the Sixties, found himself in 1962 in charge of the selection and training of astronauts for the two-man Gemini and Moon-bound Apollo missions. It was Slayton who, after Grissom’s death in a spacecraft fire on the launch pad, chose Neil Armstrong to command the first manned lunar landing. Yet, he wrote, “had Gus been alive, as a Mercury astronaut, he would have taken that step. . . my first choice would have been Gus, which both Chris Kraft and Bob Gilruth seconded’’.

The man to whom Slayton, Kraft and Gilruth would have offered this honour was a small, tough fighter pilot, the first person to fly into space twice, the first astronaut to eat a corned beef sandwich whilst gazing down on Earth and a man who fiercely guarded his family’s privacy. “Betty and I run our lives as we please,’’ he

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once said. “We don’t care about fads or frills. We don’t give a damn about the Joneses.”

Virgil Ivan Grissom, America’s second man in space, was born in the Midwestern town of Mitchell, Indiana, on 3 April 1926. Small for his age, he was nicknamed ‘Greasy Grissom’ as a child and grew up with a determination to “prove I could do things as well as the big boys’’. His father worked for almost half a century on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and Grissom, too small to participate in school sports, eventually established himself as a Boy Scout, where he led the Honour Guard. Like Al Shepard, he delivered newspapers and, in the summer months, picked peaches and cherries for the local growers to earn enough money to date his school sweetheart, Betty Moore, whom he married in July 1945. By this time, he had left school – described by his principal as ‘‘an average, solid citizen, who studied just about enough to get a diploma’’ – and served a year as an aviation cadet. His hopes of joining the theatre of war evaporated a month later, when Japan surrendered.

Unwilling to fly a desk, Grissom left the Air Force and took a job installing doors on school buses, before deciding to study mechanical engineering at Purdue University. Whilst there, his wife worked as a long-distance operator and Grissom himself flipped burgers at a local diner. He received his degree in 1950, crediting Betty for making it possible, and eventually re-enlisted in the Air Force, finished cadet training and won his wings the following year. His completion of training coincided with the outbreak of war in Korea and Grissom soon found himself in the thick of the conflict for six months, flying a hundred combat missions in sleek F-86 Sabre jets as part of the 334th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron. An interesting tale surrounds his early days in Korea. Each morning, the pilots would ride an old school bus from the hangar to the flight line and only those who had been involved in air – to-air combat were permitted to sit. The uninitiated had to stand. Grissom stood only once; testament, perhaps, to the continued determination that had dogged him since boyhood, only now he planned to be even better than the big boys.

His first taste of war came as something of a surprise – ‘‘For a moment, I couldn’t figure out what those little red things were going by,’’ he said later, ‘‘then I realised I was being shot at!’’ – and he returned to the United States to be awarded both the Air Medal with a cluster and the Distinguished Flying Cross. Subsequent assignments, which he actually considered more dangerous than combat flying, included instructing new cadets at Bryan Air Force Base in Texas, studying aeronautical engineering at the Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and being chosen in October 1956 for the famous Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. By this time, Grissom had gained a reputation as one of the best ‘jet jockies’ in the service, with more than 3,000 hours of flight time, and was also father to two young boys, Scott and Mark. When the Soviets launched Sputnik, Grissom took notice, but was far too preoccupied with his job of wringing out new jets at Wright-Patterson to give much consideration to space travel. Then, a little over a year later, he received a teletype message, labelled ‘Top Secret’, which instructed him to go to Washington, DC, in civilian clothes for a classified briefing.

Mystified, Grissom found that he had been picked as one of 110 candidates for

Project Mercury and the events of 1959 would truly change his life. “I did not think my chances were very big when I saw some of the other men who were competing for the team,” he said later. “They were a good group and I had a lot of respect for them, but I decided to give it the old school try and take some of NASA’s tests.” Whilst at Wright-Patterson Aeromedical Laboratory, undergoing test after test, his run on the treadmill had to be stopped abruptly when his heart soared to almost 200 beats per minute. On the other hand, he endured the heat chamber perfectly, keeping cool by reading a dog-eared copy of Reader’s Digest, “to keep from getting bored’’.

He nearly flunked, however, when the physicians discovered he was a hay fever sufferer, but Grissom, without missing a beat, convinced them that the absence of ragweed pollen in space would not pose a problem. He viewed the psychological tests, too, as illogical. “I tried not to give the headshrinkers anything more than they were actually looking for,’’ he said. “I played it cool and tried not to talk myself into a hole.’’ Fortunately for Grissom, ‘talking’ was not one of his strengths. Astronauts and managers alike would recall that he rarely spoke unless he had something to say and during a visit to the Convair Corporation in San Diego, prime contractor for the Atlas rocket, he told the workers to ‘‘do good work’’. Ironically, those three words turned into a motto of incalculable value for the Convair workforce.

Even after his selection as one of the Mercury Seven, Grissom would privately question why he had volunteered to fly a bomb-carrying missile into space. The answer came instantly: ‘‘I happened to be a career officer in the military and, I think, a deeply patriotic one. If my country decided that I was one of the better-qualified people for this new mission, then I was proud and happy to help out.’’ However proud he might have been, one thing that Grissom despised was the moniker ‘astronaut’. In his mind, it had an irritating PR undertone. One day, he even announced: ‘‘I’m not ‘ass’ anything. I’m a pilot. Isn’t that good enough?’’

For Birmingham, Alabama, the early months of 1963 were a time of turmoil. Its 350,000-strong population was two-thirds white and a third black and it had earned itself a reputation as one of the United States’ most racially segregated cities. Indeed, this segregation affected, as a legal requirement, all public and commercial facilities, covering every aspect of everyday life and was rigidly policed. Barely ten per cent of the city’s blacks were registered to vote and their average income was less than half that of the whites. No black police officers, firefighters, bus drivers or shop assistants could be found anywhere in the city and manual labour in steel mills or work in black neighbourhoods were among the few available options. Racial violence was rife: since 1945, some 50 bombings had earned Birmingham the nickname ‘Bombingham’, one area even being dubbed ‘Dynamite Hill’.

Efforts to implement change, spearheaded by Fred Shuttlesworth and Martin Luther King, initially focused on challenging the city’s segregationist policies through partially-successful legal action and protests. These began with a selective buying campaign to impose pressure on business leaders to open retail jobs to blacks and end segregated facilities in stores; when this failed, King and his followers instituted sit-ins at libraries and white churches and marches to provoke arrest, even irresponsibly recruiting children to their campaign at one stage. The demonstrations were denounced by white religious leaders, who argued that their case should be pressed in the courts and not on the streets, and the infamous public safety commissioner Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor obtained an injunction to bar future protests. The injunction was ignored as a denial of constitutional rights but on Good Friday, 12 April 1963, King was among 50 Birmingham residents, aged between 15 and 81, who were arrested. King’s four-day incarceration in ‘Birmingham Jail’ inevitably focused the eyes of the nation on the city. The Children’s Crusade, although it attracted criticism from Attorney-General Bobby Kennedy, served to maintain this focus.

By the first week of May, Birmingham’s jails were overflowing and Connor’s efforts to keep protestors out of the downtown business area had degenerated into

using high-pressure fire hoses and police dogs. Witnessing the traumatic events was photographer Charles Moore, then working for Life magazine, who was hit by a brick meant for the police and one of whose “era-defining” images showed three teenagers being hit by a water jet powerful enough to rip bark off a tree. When published, it was labelled ‘They Fight A Fire That Won’t Go Out’. Television cameras broadcast harrowing pictures of unprotected protestors being attacked by police dogs. A photograph of student Walter Gadsden being charged by one of the dogs ended up on the front page of the New York Times, which President Kennedy called ‘‘sick’’ and the scenes in Birmingham ‘‘shameful’’. Moore would later reflect that the events of those violent days were ‘‘likely to obliterate in the national psyche any notion of a ‘good Southerner’’’.

The tactics employed by King in Birmingham certainly focused the entire nation on the troubles. New York Senator Jacob Javits declared that America would refuse to tolerate such scenes, pressing Congress to pass a civil rights bill, while Oregon Senator Wayne Morse compared the situation to South Africa’s loathsome apartheid regime. President Kennedy sent Assistant Attorney-General Burke Marshall to Birmingham to negotiate a truce. As the crisis deepened and the city’s infrastructure virtually collapsed, it aroused international debate and condemnation. The Soviet Union devoted a quarter of its news broadcasts to the demonstrations, accusing Kennedy’s administration of neglect and “inactivity”.

By 8 May, white business leaders had agreed to most of the protesters’ demands and two days later Shuttlesworth and King told journalists that they had received an agreement from the City of Birmingham to desegregate lunch counters, restrooms, drinking fountains and fitting rooms within three months and to hire black workers as salesmen and clerks. President Kennedy urged a number of workers’ unions to raise bail money to free the demonstrators from the city’s jail – a move condemned by Connor and Birmingham’s outgoing mayor, Art Hanes – and 3,000 federal troops were deployed to restore order. A new mayor, Albert Boutwell, took office and Bull Connor ended his time as Commissioner.

Desegregation took longer to achieve. Indeed, at around the same time, bombs destroyed the hotel where King had stayed and damaged the house of his brother, Reverend A. D. King. Many observers felt that the protestors had settled for ‘‘a lot less than even moderate demands’’; it was feared that the three-month desegregation agreement meant, in effect, that a single black clerk hired by mid-August would suffice. Nonetheless, by the summer of 1963, some lunch counters in department stores had complied with the new rules, while parks and golf courses opened to blacks and whites and Mayor Boutwell established a committee to discuss additional changes. At the same time, however, no black policemen, firefighters or clerks were hired and no black lawyers were admitted to the city’s bar.

The reputation of King, though, had soared. Later that year, he would deliver his famous ‘‘I have a dream’’ speech in Washington, DC, and receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Longer-term consequences of the ‘Birmingham Campaign’ and other protests included the drawing up a Civil Rights bill by President Kennedy to prohibit racial discrimination in employment and access to public places, eventually passed into law and signed by his successor, Lyndon Johnson.

Kennedy’s civil rights drive extended, indirectly, to the space programme, too. By mid-1963, NASA had two groups of astronauts in training – a new nine-man team having been picked under Deke Slayton’s auspices the previous September – and a third was expected before the year’s end. Bobby Kennedy, in particular, felt that a black pilot should be a member of Group Three. Unfortunately, wrote Slayton, “the Navy didn’t have anyone remotely qualified, but in the Air Force there was a black bomber pilot, Captain Edward Dwight’’. With a multi-engine flying background, no engineering degree and no test piloting credentials, Dwight was underqualified, but, in what Aerospace Research Pilot School (ARPS) commandant Chuck Yeager felt was a case of ‘reverse racism’, the Attorney-General pressurised Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay to accept the black pilot.

A deal was struck, whereby Dwight was admitted to ARPS, on condition that better-qualified white pilots ahead of him were also accepted. In a laughable chain of events, which even obliged Yeager to appoint a tutor for the pilot, Dwight graduated from ARPS ‘‘and did okay’’, Slayton wrote, ‘‘but okay wasn’t really enough: had he been white, he wouldn’t even have been a serious candidate’’. NASA was not simply looking for test pilots, but for Navy, Marine and other Air Force fliers, together with civilians and research scientists, many of whom had far better qualifications than Dwight. Some of those candidates – including the Air Force’s Mike Collins and the Navy’s Dick Gordon – were actually among the best pilots in their respective services and had been passed over in the September 1962 astronaut intake to gain additional experience before being picked the following year.

‘‘As I heard it,’’ wrote Slayton, ‘‘Dwight himself wasn’t particularly driven to become an astronaut: he wanted to move up in the Air Force.’’ Dwight himself, it seemed, was being used as little more than a pawn in the Kennedys’ civil rights crusade; a crusade which would win them both enemies and admirers in the coming years.

Only days after Gemini 2’s splashdown, Charles Mathews revealed that late March seemed the most achievable target to launch Gus Grissom and John Young on the first manned mission. The two men and their backups, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford, had been training since mid-April 1964; indeed, wrote Stafford, they ‘‘became virtual citizens of St Louis, Missouri. . . flying in on Sunday night or Monday morning in our T-33s and T-38s, spending days at the McDonnell plant at Lambert Field then going back to Houston on Thursday or Friday’’. At St Louis was the Gemini mission simulator, which provided them with the sights, sounds and vibrations that they could expect on a real flight; moreover, it was adaptable for each crew, whose objectives would differ markedly. Grissom, an Air Force officer promoted from captain to major in July 1962, would become the first man to be launched into space twice. He had been one of the earliest astronauts assigned to

Grissom (in water) and Young undergo water survival training exercises in preparation for their Gemini 3 mission.

Project Gemini and the spacecraft reflected, among other things, his short stature. Whereas Grissom, at 1.6 m, could comfortably fit the cockpit, the taller Stafford “was jammed in, especially when I had to wear a pressure suit and helmet”.

For Stafford and fellow ‘tall’ astronaut Jim McDivitt, this posed a figurative and literal pain in the neck. “Eventually,” wrote Stafford, ‘‘the McDonnell engineers removed some of the insulation from the inside of the hatch to create a slight bump that gave us room for our helmets’’. First fitted for Gemini VI – which Stafford flew, alongside Schirra, on the first rendezvous mission – it became known, naturally, as ‘The Stafford Bump’. Among the astronauts, Gemini had already earned itself the nickname ‘Gusmobile’, because Grissom was the only man small enough to scrunch himself into his seat and close the hatch without banging his head. The prime and backup crews spent around 35 hours apiece in the St Louis simulator in the late spring and early summer of 1964, learning its quirks and idiosyncrasies, before it was finally dismantled and shipped to MSC in Houston towards the end of July. Another, near-identical simulator was also set up at the Cape in October.

During their early months of training, the four men closely monitored the development of the ‘real’ spacecraft at St Louis, watching as it passed through various systems tests and inspections, then spending many hours in its cockpit. Elsewhere, in Dallas, Texas, they participated in exercises on a Gemini moving-base abort simulator, which projected their ascent profile in striking detail and enabled them to rehearse their responses to malfunctions. At Ellington Air Force Base, not far from MSC, they were dunked in a ‘flotation tank’ to practice getting out of a boilerplate mockup of the Gemini capsule, with and without space suits, both floating and submerged. Only weeks before launch, in February 1965, Grissom and Young rode a boat out into the Gulf of Mexico to a mockup capsule, which they had to board and run through their post-splashdown checklists, their emergency egress procedures and the opening of their one-man liferafts.

Mission planning sessions, centrifuge training at Johnsville in Pennsylvania, space suit fit checks, physical exams and preparation for the Gemini 3 experiments quickly turned their training schedule into an unending marathon. ‘‘The days just seemed to have 48 hours, the weeks 14 days and still there was never enough time,’’ Grissom would recall later. ‘‘We saw our families just enough to reassure our youngsters they still had fathers.’’ By the time the mission simulator had been set up at the recently- renamed ‘Cape Kennedy’ – the old Canaveral – in October 1964, it would become the astronauts’ second home: Grissom would put in more than 77 hours of training in it, rehearsing every phase and every minute of what would be a five-hour mission, with Young slightly eclipsing him at 85 hours. As launch day neared, Grissom had sat through 225 abort scenarios, compared to 154 for his rookie pilot. By February, when queried by journalists, Grissom confirmed that, after nine months of training, he and Young were ready to go. Indeed, even Jim Webb confidently expected a launch as soon as 15 March.

Meanwhile, the development and testing of the Gemini 3 capsule was gathering pace. Its construction had been completed in December 1963 and, following six months of engineering changes and installation of equipment, it began integrated testing in the summer. McDonnell’s ‘in-house’ testing was completed by September and on 27 December, after its own inspections and a simulated flight, NASA accepted the spacecraft for delivery. It arrived at Cape Kennedy aboard a C-124 transport aircraft on 4 January 1965 and was ready for transfer to Pad 19 early the following month. At the same time, its Titan II launch vehicle – GLV-3 – arrived in late January and was mechanically mated with Gemini 3 on 17 February.

The mission itself was too short, many felt, for any meaningful rendezvous data to be gathered. In October 1963, MSC had suggested flying the Rendezvous Evaluation Pod (REP) on Gemini 3 and releasing it into orbit to test the rendezvous radar, although this was cancelled and rescheduled for a later mission. The astronauts themselves soon got in on the act. Word leaked out in the summer of 1964 that Grissom and Young were pushing for an ‘open-ended’ flight, in effect giving them the option to decide how many orbits to fly. ‘‘Gus and John and the rest of us thought a 30-orbit flight, almost two days, was the next logical step after Gordo’s MA-9,’’ recalled Slayton, but on this occasion the astronauts’ judgements were overruled.

The limitations of the existing tracking network and worries about erring on the side of caution on Gemini’s first manned mission won the day and it remained at five hours. Even Grissom acquiesced that he felt sufficient data could be extracted from a three-orbit flight. That ‘data’ would come primarily in the form of demonstrations of the spacecraft’s manoeuvrability, using its OAMS thrusters, and a decision was made to conduct three firings to insert Gemini 3 into a ‘fail-safe’ orbit, from which it could still re-enter in the event of a retrorocket failure. In reality, Grissom and Young would fly in too low an orbit to be permanent, but the fail-safe option at least ensured that the spacecraft could return promptly and, insofar as possible, that the crew would survive.

To achieve it, the aft OAMS would be fired to separate Gemini 3 from the second stage of the Titan. This would insert the spacecraft into an elliptical path of 122-182 km, whilst a second burst about 90 minutes into the mission would slightly cut the velocity and near-circularise the orbit. Then, whilst over the Indian Ocean around two hours and 20 minutes after launch, a series of ‘out-of-plane’ burns would be conducted to thoroughly gauge the performance of the OAMS. Finally, above Hawaii on the third pass, a pre-retrofire burst would insert the spacecraft into an elliptical re-entry orbit with a perigee of just 63 km.

Scientific and technical experiments would consume a small portion of the astronauts’ time. A Panel On In-Flight Scientific Experiments (POISE) had already been established within NASA and proposed a series of investigations which would largely run themselves. Two promising candidates for Gemini 3 were those originally assigned to Al Shepard’s ill-fated MA-10 mission. One explored the combined effects of radiation and microgravity on cells, the other focused on cell growth in space. The former sought to expose human blood samples to a known quantity and quality of radiation, both within the capsule and on Earth, allowing the frequency of chromosomal aberrations in the space-flown and ground-control specimens to be compared. On Gemini 3, it was mounted on the right-hand hatch, inside a half­kilogram hermetically-sealed aluminium box. To activate it, Young had to twist a handle to commence irradiation of the blood samples.

The second experiment was Grissom’s responsibility and was situated inside his left-side hatch. Since it was considered easier to detect the effects of microgravity in simple cell systems than more complex organisms, it consisted of the eggs of a sea urchin. These were fertilised at the beginning of the experiment and the possible changes observed at several stages of their development. Grissom was required to turn a handle 30 minutes before launch to fertilise the eggs, then four times in flight to fix the dividing cells at specific stages of growth. Each handle turn effected by Grissom would be mirrored in a control experiment on the ground.

Additionally, a third investigation, originally envisaged for MA-10, was a re-entry communications demonstration. It had been theoretically shown that by adding fluid to ionised plasma during the period of re-entry blackout, communications could be restored by lowering the plasma’s frequency sufficiently to allow UHF transmissions to get through. The lengthy blackout during John Glenn’s fiery plunge to Earth and Scott Carpenter’s heart-stopping overshoot may have benefitted from such an experiment, despite its $500,000 price tag. It involved the fitment of a water – expulsion system, whose starter switch would be thrown by Young when the capsule descended below 90 km. Water would be automatically injected into the plasma sheath around the spacecraft in timed pulses for two and a half minutes, while ground stations monitored and recorded UHF radio reception.

Early in March 1965, a flight readiness review confirmed that, with the exception of several minor problems, Gemini 3 was ready to fly. The Titan II passed its final test on the 18th and launch was scheduled for 9:00 am on the 23rd. The countdown commenced at 2:00 am on launch morning, which dawned dull and overcast, but the decision was taken to proceed. Three hours later, Grissom and Young were awakened, sat down to the traditional low-residue breakfast of tomato juice, half a cantaloupe melon, porterhouse steaks and scrambled eggs. Young received a long good-luck telegram signed by 2,400 Orlando residents, from whose high school he had graduated years before. The two men then donned their space suits. Unlike Project Mercury, the Gemini ensembles were white, not silver, and comprised a nylon material overlaying a rubberised inner lining. The gloves were removable and were attached to rotating wrist joints, permitting full movement, and learning from the experiences of the Mercury pilots, included ‘fingertip lights’ to help read cockpit instruments.

The prime and backup crews had all spent the past several days in the new quarters at the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building, whose accommodations, wrote Ray Boomhower, ‘‘were a far cry from the ones the astronauts were used to at Hangar S in their Mercury days’’. They were comfortably furnished, quiet and even boasted a gym with exercise bicycles and punch bags. Shortly after 7:00 am on launch morning, the astronauts headed for Pad 19, where technicians inserted them into their couches in the capsule which Grissom had light-heartedly dubbed ‘Molly Brown’. The name came from the unsinkable Titanic survivor popularised in the 1960 Broadway musical and 1964 movie.

Grissom hoped, it seemed, that borrowing Brown’s name for Gemini 3 would ward off the demons of watery bad luck which had hit him at the end of his Liberty Bell 7 mission. ‘‘I’ve been accused of being more than a little sensitive about the loss

of my Liberty Bell 7,” he explained before launch, “and it struck me that the best way to squelch this idea would be to kid it.” Kidding or not, NASA officials doubted that the name conveyed the right message, but when offered either Molly Brown or Grissom’s other choice – Titanic – they quietly backed off. However, they never named it as such in official documents. In fact, at an earlier stage, Grissom had suggested the name ‘Wapasha’, after a Native American tribe from his home state of Indiana, although the risk of the media renaming it ‘The Wabash Cannonball’ meant that was also removed from the list.

Inside the spacegoing Molly Brown, a near-flawless countdown proceeded smoothly, leaving them 20 minutes ahead of schedule and giving Young reason to complain about the extra time spent lying flat on his back in his uncomfortable space suit. The overcast weather refused to lift and the clock was halted at T-30 minutes when a first-stage oxidiser line in the Titan sprang a leak. Although this problem was quickly resolved, the countdown had to be held for 24 minutes to ensure that the leak had stopped. Thankfully, by this point, the grey clouds had cleared, and at 9:24 am the Titan II took flight. ‘‘You’re on your way, Molly Brown!’’ yelled Capcom Gordo Cooper. Liftoff, the two astronauts recalled later, was so smooth that they felt nothing; their only real cues were the startup of the mission clock on Gemini 3’s instrument panel and hearing Cooper’s words. In fact, the early stages of the ride were smoother than they had experienced in the moving-base simulator in Dallas.

For the first 50 seconds, Grissom kept both hands firmly on the ring which would trigger Molly Brown’s ejection seats in the event of a booster malfunction. Young, wrote Ray Boomhower, also had such a ring on his side of the cabin, but, looking over, Grissom noted that the unflappable rookie had his hands calmly folded in his lap. ‘‘During this time,’’ Young recalled later, ‘‘we didn’t say a word to each other because there was so much to do so fast.’’

The Titan’s first stage was exhaused two and a half minutes into the climb and second-stage ignition bathed the entire cabin with a flood of eerie orange-yellow light which surprised Young. The rocket, Cooper told them, had slightly exceeded its predicted thrust and the astronauts could expect a larger-than-predicted pitchdown after second-stage ignition as it began to steer a course for orbit. Five and a half minutes after launch, the second phase of the ascent was over and, with a bark like a howitzer, pyrotechnics severed Gemini 3 from the Titan. Grissom fired Molly Brown’s aft OAMS thrusters to pull away from the booster. The Titan over­performed slightly, but Gemini 3 still ended up in a close-to-expected orbit of 122­175 km. For his part, Young, who was making the first flight of what would turn into a six-mission career, was simply astounded by the sense of speed and the stunning view of Earth.

On 9 July 1962, an event which would have important ramifications for two Soviet cosmonauts and an American astronaut got underway on Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean. It was part of a joint effort between the Defense Atomic Support Agency (DASA) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and was known under its umbrella designation of ‘Operation Dominic’. Its objective, nicknamed ‘Starfish Prime’, was to detonate a thermonuclear warhead some 400 km above Earth’s surface. The testing of such devices in both the Pacific and Nevada in 1962-63 sought to evaluate new weapons designs, their effects and their reliability. Its timing was crucial: in August 1961, Nikita Khrushchev had announced the end of a three – year moratorium and resumed Soviet weapons testing a few weeks later, when the most powerful hydrogen bomb ever built – nicknamed ‘Ivan’ by the Russians – was detonated over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.

Both it and Operation Dominic would arouse much condemnation and, indeed, despite their own efforts, the Soviets would request diplomatic assurances that the Americans refrain from their nuclear weapons testing whilst cosmonauts Nikolayev and Popovich were in orbit. Starfish Prime was one of five tests conducted by the United States ‘in outer space’, although an initial launch attempt on 20 June 1962 had failed when its Thor carrier missile experienced an engine malfunction, crashed, showered the Johnston area with radioactive metal and caused ‘‘slight’’ nuclear contamination.

Less than three weeks later, atop another Thor, the test commenced. Its warhead produced an explosive yield equivalent to 1.4 megatons of TNT and, although too high and too far beyond the ‘sensible’ atmosphere to create a fireball, triggered a whole host of problems back on Earth. Across Hawaii, for example, some 1,500 km

An iron man and “a puzzle” 41

to the east of Johnston Island, the effects of its electromagnetic pulse caused 300 street lights to fail, television sets and radios to malfunction, burglar alarms to sound in unison and power lines to fuse. On the westernmost Hawaiian island of Kauai, telephone links with the other islands were severed when a microwave link burned out and much of the Pacific skyline was lit by an eerie, man-made aurora, lasting for more than seven minutes. Observers in the far-off Samoan Islands, more than 3,200 km from the blast, even recorded the aurora on film.

According to a witness of the test, whose remarks were published in August, “a brilliant white flash burned through the clouds” at the stroke of 9:00 am, “rapidly changing to an expanding green ball of irradiance extending into the clear sky above the overcast. From its surface extruded great white fingers, resembling cirrostratus clouds, which rose to 40 degrees above the horizon in sweeping arcs turning downward toward the poles and disappearing in seconds to be replaced by spectacular concentric cirrus-like rings moving out from the blast at tremendous initial velocity, finally stopping when the outermost ring was 50 degrees overhead… All this occurred, I would judge, within 45 seconds. As the greenish light turned to purple and began to fade at the point of burst, a bright red glow began to develop on the horizon. . . expanding inward and upward until the whole eastern sky was a dull, burning-red semicircle…”

Despite the risk, ‘rainbow bomb parties’ were offered by Hawaiian hotels on their rooftops to view the effects of the Starfish Prime detonation. By the end of July, however, circumstances had changed markedly. Another test, ‘Bluegill Prime’, suffered an engine failure on the pad. It was detonated, after ignition, by range safety officers, completely destroying both it and the launch facility. More than three months of repairs – and extensive decontamination – would follow. The largest nuclear weapons testing project ever conducted by the United States would also be its last in the high atmosphere. In August 1963 and coming into effect just two months later, the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed by the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain to restrict all future detonations to underground. For a time, at least, it helped to enforce a dramatic slowdown of the arms race between the superpowers.

Grissom’s efforts during his first two years as an astronaut proved pivotal in securing him his seat on Mercury-Redstone 4, planned as a virtual duplication of Freedom 7, in July 1961. It, too, would last barely 15 minutes, arcing high above the Atlantic Ocean and splashing down a few hundred kilometres east of Cape Canaveral. However, Grissom’s spacecraft – which he had nicknamed ‘Liberty Bell 7’ – would differ, visibly, from that of Shepard in an important way: it was the first to boast a large trapezoidal window, instead of two, 25.4 cm portholes. This window provided a field of view of 30 degrees in the horizontal plane and 33 degrees in the vertical, allowing him to look ‘upward’ and see directly outside, and had actually been one of the Mercury Seven’s earliest recommendations when they visited the capsules in production at McDonnell’s St Louis plant in Missouri. Manufactured by the Corning Glass Works of Corning, New York, the window comprised an outer pane of 8.9 mm-thick Vycor glass and a dual-layered inner pane. Its strength closely paralleled that of the capsule’s hull and during re-entry it was capable of withstanding temperatures as high as 980°C. To reduce glare, it was also treated with a magnesium fluoride coating.

Additional improvements implemented since Shepard’s flight included a make­shift urine collector, pieced together by the astronauts themselves the day before Liberty Bell 7 launched, which Grissom would later nonchalantly remark “worked as advertised”. More importantly, however, the second suborbital mission would feature an explosively-actuated side hatch. Early plans had called for the astronauts to exit their capsules through an antenna compartment in the nose, but the awkwardness of this exercise, coupled with the need to remove a small pressure bulkhead to do it, led the Space Task Group and McDonnell engineers to develop two hatches: one activated manually, the other explosively. The hatch itself was held in place by 70 titanium bolts, each measuring 6.35 mm in diameter, and the mechanical version was employed on both Ham’s and Shepard’s missions. However, it weighed 31 kg – three times as much as its explosive counterpart – and was deemed too heavy for the orbital Mercury flights. Thus, to put it through its paces, an explosively-actuated hatch was installed on Grissom’s capsule.

Built by Honeywell’s ordnance division of Hopkins, Minnesota, it contained a mild detonating fuse, installed in a channel between an inner and outer seal around the periphery of the hatch. When fired, the gas pressure between the two seals fractured each of the 70 screws and blew off the hatch. Small holes, drilled into each bolt, provided weak points and aided the fracturing process. The fuse could be triggered manually by the astronaut himself, using a knobbed plunger close to his right arm, or from outside the capsule by means of an external lanyard. The performance of the hatch on the Liberty Bell 7 mission would, in some eyes, tarnish Grissom’s reputation for the rest of his life and even today continues to arouse fierce debate.

The manual controls he would use during his 15-minute flight, too, had been extensively modified. A new rate stabilisation control system enabled him to manage the spacecraft’s attitude movements by small twists of the hand controller, rather than by simply jockeying the device into the desired position. It provided a kind of ‘power steering’, offering finer control and easier handling qualities. The instrument panel, moreover, had been upgraded with a new Earth-path indicator, showing Liberty Bell 7’s precise position. A redesigned fairing for the spacecraft adaptor clamp ring, a rearrangement of the instruments and more foam padding to the headrest of Grissom’s couch, it was hoped, would prevent a recurrence of the vibrations and blurred vision experienced by Shepard.

Other changes to the flight plan included adjusting the sequencing of retrofire to ensure that the Redstone and capsule would be at least 1.2 km apart on their suborbital paths as they neared the end of their mission. A new life raft, weighing less than 2 kg, had been provided by NASA’s Langley Research Center and the Space Task Group, and Grissom’s pressure suit featured a better wrist fitting for improved movement and a convex, chest-mounted mirror – the ‘Hero’s Medal’ – which would allow the spacecraft’s camera to record both the astronaut and the instrument panel readings.

During training and throughout the production of Liberty Bell 7, Grissom established his reputation as a ‘hands-on’ pilot, attending meetings, supervising some of the engineering work and, he said, ‘‘fretting a little over whether all of the critical parts would arrive from the subcontractors on time and get put together’’. Among his concerns were mistakenly-switched instruments, which caused the spacecraft to yaw to the left instead of the right, and the failure of the attitude controls, which did not properly centre themselves after manoeuvres. The capsule itself arrived at Cape Canaveral on 7 March 1961, followed by its Redstone three months later. On 22 June, the rocket was erected on Pad 5 and Liberty Bell 7 installed a few days thereafter. Throughout June, however, nagging problems were encountered whilst testing Grissom’s pressure suit and the need to replace the spacecraft’s rusted on­board clock. As for Grissom, to ensure that he did not inadvertently take himself out of the running for the flight, he gave up water-skiing and even calmed down some of his raucous exploits in his General Motors-provided Corvette. As souvenirs for the flight, he took two rolls of Mercury dimes – a hundred in all – which he stuffed into the pocket of his pressure suit. He would regret this decision later.

The Liberty Bell 7 mission would, in many ways, be substantially different from Freedom 7. Al Shepard’s flight had been literally overloaded with activities during barely five minutes of weightlessness. Grissom’s plan would ‘weed out’ a number of communications obstacles and allow him more time to use the new trapezoid window to learn about an astronaut’s visual abilities in space. Shepard had controlled his spacecraft by one axis at a time; Grissom would assume full manual control, taking over all three axes simultaneously. ‘‘I also planned to fire the retrorockets manually,’’ he said, ‘‘instead of automatically, as they had been fired on Freedom 7.’’

Grissom’s selection as the prime pilot for Liberty Bell 7, with John Glenn again serving as backup, was ratified by Bob Gilruth on 15 July 1961 and launch was scheduled for three days later. Part of what was becoming traditional was naming the capsule. Grissom’s choice honoured the famous Liberty Bell, today housed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and considered one of the most important symbols of the American War of Independence, epitomising freedom, nationhood and the abolition of slavery. Cast in 1751, its most famous ringing, supposedly, occurred a quarter of a century later to summon Philadelphia’s citizenry for a reading of the Declaration of Independence. When questioned about the name, Grissom explained that the bell’s message of freedom and, indeed, its similarity of shape with the spacecraft had influenced his decision. To further honour the original bell – which had cracked during its first ringing, was repaired, cracked again in 1846 and was eventually rendered unusable – it was decided to paint a large white fracture along the side of the spacegoing Liberty Bell. ‘‘No one seemed quite sure what the crack looked like,’’ said Grissom, ‘‘so we copied it from the tails side of a 50-cent piece.’’

On 17 July, the day before the planned launch, Grissom and Glenn relaxed in the crew quarters at Hangar S. During this time, they set to work on their urine – collection device. They took a pair of condoms, snipped off the ends and secured some rubber tubing which ran to a plastic bag taped to Grissom’s leg. Flight surgeon Bill Douglas even asked the astronauts’ nurse, Dee O’Hara, to buy a panty girdle for Grissom to wear in order to hold the hastily-made contraption in place.

Late that same night, the launch was scrubbed by low cloud cover. Fortunately, the decision was taken before the lengthy procedure of loading the Redstone with liquid oxygen had begun. This meant that only a 24-hour delay, as opposed to a 48- hour stand-down, would be necessary. Bill Douglas duly woke Grissom at 1:10 am on 19 July and informed him that the scheduled launch time had been moved up by an hour, to 7:00 am, in the hope that the mission could be underway before an anticipated spell of bad weather settled over the Cape. The plan was for Grissom to eat breakfast and undergo his pre-flight physical examination. Unfortunately, the astronaut recalled later, “someone forgot to pass the word about the earlier launch time, because breakfast was not ready at 1:45 as it was supposed to be”. As a result, Douglas and psychologist George Ruff checked Grissom and, for breakfast, he was joined by Glenn, Scott Carpenter and Walt Williams.

After the now-customary procedure of gluing sensors to his body, Grissom was helped into his pressure suit and, at 4:15 am, clambered into the white transfer van. Inside, technicians had helpfully stencilled a sign which read ‘Shepard and Grissom Express’. Despite the presence of cloudy skies along the entire Atlantic coast, ‘‘from Canaveral on north’’, the astronaut was given the go-ahead at 5:00 am to board his spacecraft. To alleviate any boredom, should a lengthy, Shepard-like situation materialise, Douglas handed Grissom a crossword book. The countdown, though, proceeded normally, albeit with a keen eye on the weather, until T-10 minutes and 30 seconds, when the clock was stopped in the hope that conditions might improve. They didn’t. The launch was scrubbed and, since the Redstone had been fully loaded with liquid oxygen, a 48-hour turnaround was now unavoidable.

Early on 21 July, Grissom again suited-up and headed out to Pad 5. Delay after delay hit the countdown: firstly, one of the 70 titanium bolts around the rim of the hatch became cross-threaded, then the pad’s searchlights had to be switched off to prevent them from affecting telemetry from the rocket and, all the while, cloud cover was given the opportunity to move away from the launch area. The astronaut, meanwhile, spoke briefly to his wife, did deep-breathing exercises and flexed his arms and legs so as not to become too stiff. At length, at 7:20:36 am, Liberty Bell 7 lifted- off. Again paying tribute to Bill Dana’s reluctant Mexican spaceman character, Jose Jimenez, Capcom Al Shepard radioed ‘‘Loud and clear, Jose. Don’t cry too much!’’ as Grissom headed for space. Passing through the sound barrier at an altitude of 11 km, he experienced none of the vibrations that had affected Freedom 7 and the Redstone’s engine shut down, as planned, 142 seconds after liftoff. The astronaut felt a ‘‘brief tumbling sensation’’ at this stage and would later describe the clear sound of the LES tower jettisoning. ‘‘Actually,’’ he wrote in his post-flight report, ‘‘I think I was still watching the tower at the time the posigrade rockets [which separated Liberty Bell 7 from the Redstone] fired… the tower was still definable as a long, slender object against the sky.’’

Two minutes after launch, at an altitude of 30 km, Grissom noticed the sky turn rapidly from dark blue to black. He also noticed what he believed to be a faint star, roughly equivalent in brightness to Polaris, but which actually turned out to be the planet Venus; this won him a steak dinner from John Glenn, who had bet him that he would not be able to see any stars or planets. Observing Earth proved somewhat more problematic. Cloud cover over the Gulf of Mexico coastline between Apalachiocola, Florida, and Mobile, Alabama, made it virtually impossible for him to discern any land masses. Still, unlike Shepard’s grey-tinted view, Grissom was granted a fascinating glimpse through the trapezoid window. “I could make out brilliant gradations of colour,’’ he remembered later, “the blue of the water, the white of the beaches and the brown of the land.’’

His attempts to manoeuvre Liberty Bell 7 through all three axes were hampered when the yaw and pitch controls overshot their marks; overall, he judged the system as “sticky and sluggish’’. These problems, together with Grissom’s observations through the window, put the mission behind schedule and the planned roll manoeuvres had to be abandoned. He did, however, successfully execute a manual retrofire five minutes into the flight and, as the retrorocket pack fell away, Cape Canaveral came clearly into view. “The Banana and Indian Rivers were easy to distinguish,” he said later, “and the white beach all along the coast was quite prominent. I could see the building area on Cape Canaveral. I do not recall being able to distinguish individual buildings, but it was obvious that it was an area where buildings and structures had been erected.’’

Re-entry posed no significant problems, with the exception that it gave Grissom the peculiar sensation that he had reversed his backward flight through space and was actually moving face-forward. Plummeting towards the Atlantic, he saw what appeared to be the spent retrorockets passing the periscope view. Nine minutes and 41 seconds after launch, the drogue chute deployed, slowing Liberty Bell 7, before the descent was arrested by the jolt of the main canopy. “The capsule started to rotate and swing slowly under the chute as it descended,’’ he said later. “I could feel a slight jar as the landing bag dropped down to take up some of the shock.’’ In spite of a small, L-shaped tear in the main canopy, it did its job and the spacecraft impacted the Atlantic at 7:35 am, completing a mission of 15 minutes and 37 seconds – barely nine seconds longer than Shepard’s flight – with what Grissom described as “a good bump’’. After splashdown, it nosed underwater, with the astronaut lying on his left side with his head down, but slowly righted itself as the landing bag filled with water and acted as a sea anchor.

Shortly thereafter, he disconnected his oxygen inlet hose, unfastened his helmet from his suit, released the chest strap, lap belt and shoulder harness and detached his biosensors. At first, he considered not bothering to unroll a rubber neck dam to keep air in and water out of his suit. “It’s a chore to secure the dam,’’ he said of the device, which had been designed by fellow astronaut Wally Schirra, “and I didn’t think I’d need it. Fortunately, I reconsidered.’’

Gus Grissom had two reasons to be grateful to Wally Schirra. The first came immediately after his ill-fated splashdown on 21 July 1961, when he owed his life to the neck dam designed by his Mercury colleague. The second, however, came only minutes after Schirra’s splashdown in the Pacific at the close of Sigma 7. Grissom’s misfortune had prompted both John Glenn and Schirra to refrain from opening their capsules’ hatches in the water and choosing instead to explosively blow them when on the deck of the recovery ship.

‘‘I blew the hatch on purpose,’’ Schirra wrote in his autobiography, ‘‘and the recall of the plunger injured my hand – it actually caused a cut through a glove that was reinforced by metal. Gus was one of those who flew out to the ship and I showed him my hand. ‘How did you cut it?’ he asked. ‘I blew the hatch,’ I replied. Gus smiled, vindicated. It proved he hadn’t blown the hatch with a hand, foot, knee or whatever, for he hadn’t suffered even a minor bruise.’’ Already close from their three years training together, the two men were also neighbours in Houston and Schirra had agreed to act as the executor of Grissom’s will. Little did he know that he would be called upon to do just that a little over four years’ time.

The euphoria which surrounded Schirra’s return from one of the most productive Mercury missions to date was evident. After a greeting at Pearl Harbour and a day­long stay in VIP quarters in Hawaii, the nation’s latest astronaut hero found himself surrounded by the state’s governor, a senator and military top brass. He was also pleased to be able to verify that he had, in fact, responded correctly to Deke Slayton’s ‘turtle’ question, uttered during the launch. Whilst still aboard the Kearsarge, he asked the communications officer for a copy of the transcript of the first few minutes of his flight – and there it was, on his microphone’s voice recorder, the correct answer: ‘‘You bet your sweet ass I am!’’

Some voices within NASA opted to end Project Mercury immediately, its brief of placing a man into orbit for a lengthy period having been met. The next step on the road to the Moon, the two-piloted Gemini series, was just around the corner, with an inaugural unmanned venture scheduled for sometime in 1964. However, another of Mercury’s original goals had been to fly a mission lasting at least one full day and, although erased in October 1959 due to the growth of the capsule’s weight and power requirements and the limitations of the tracking network, this option returned to the fore shortly after Gus Grissom’s flight. Among officials at the burgeoning Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston, Texas, the decision was easy, particularly since long-duration experience prior to Gemini was highly desirable. Early in January 1962, Project Gemini was publicly named as the nation’s interim stepping stone to Apollo and both NASA and McDonnell were hard at work planning a ‘Manned One-Day Mission’ (MODM) to round out Project Mercury in style.

By this time, MSC had effectively replaced the Langley Space Task Group and NASA Headquarters had reorganised Abe Silverstein’s Office of Space Flight Programs into an Office of Manned Space Flight, directed by D. Brainerd Holmes. Silverstein himself had been made director of the Lewis Research Center. By September 1962, days before Schirra’s launch, negotiations with McDonnell settled on a number of configuration changes needed for the MODM flight, which Bob Gilruth hoped to launch as early as April of the following year, using Spacecraft No. 20. The success of Sigma 7 prompted an emboldened NASA, in November 1962, to extend the MODM from 18 to 22 orbits, which would require a stay in orbit of around 34 hours. Such an ambitious venture – surpassing Vostok 2, though little more than a quarter as long as Andrian Nikolayev’s Vostok 3 – was anticipated to cost in the region of $17.8 million and require truly enormous tracking support, since its orbital path would carry it over virtually all of Earth’s surface between latitudes 33 degrees north and south of the equator.

Twenty-eight ships, 171 aircraft and around 18,000 military personnel would be needed to support the mission. Its duration also meant that, for the first time, round – the-clock control operations were required, with a Red Shift flight director (Chris Kraft) and a Blue Shift counterpart (a Canadian engineer named John Hodge). On 14 November 1962, Schirra’s backup, Gordo Cooper, was assigned as the MODM pilot, with Freedom 7 veteran Al Shepard backing him up.

Other problems surrounded the Atlas rocket, whose ‘F-series’ military variant had

suffered two inexplicable failures. When Cooper’s Atlas-D was rolled out of its Convair factory in San Diego in late January 1963, it failed to pass its initial inspections and was returned for rewiring of its flight control system. This led NASA, on 12 February, to officially postpone the originally scheduled mid-April launch until mid-May. Meanwhile, the MODM capsule itself – at the centre of the mission designated ‘Mercury-Atlas 9’ – was being outfitted with more than 180 engineering changes: heavier and larger-capacity batteries for more electrical power, an additional oxygen bottle, extra cooling and drinking water, more hydrogen peroxide manoeuvring fuel, a full load of consumables for the life-support system, various other modified components and, of course, an expanded scientific payload. Providing partial compensation for the added weight, the periscope, which Schirra had considered virtually useless on Sigma 7, was deleted, together with UHF and telemetry transmitters and a rate stabilisation control system. Other plans included removing Cooper’s fibreglass couch and replacing it with a lighter hammock, but fears that its material might stretch and the astronaut might ‘bounce’ meant that this proposal never materialised.

Still, the increasing weight of the later Mercury missions prompted an extensive requalification of the spacecraft’s parachute and landing systems. Other changes included the installation of a slow-scan television unit to monitor both the astronaut and his instruments. In fact, at a press conference on 8 February, Cooper had referred to his mission as ‘‘practically. . . a flying camera’’, in recognition not only of the television unit, but of a 70 mm Hasselblad, a special zodiacal-light 35 mm camera and a 16 mm all-purpose moving-picture camera. Cooper himself would wear a pressure suit which sported a mechanical seal for its helmet, new gloves with an improved inner liner and link netting between the fabrics at the wrist and a torso which afforded greater mobility. His lightweight boots were integrated, providing better comfort and reducing the time it took to put them on. All in all, the suit was much less bulky than its predecessors.

The mission appeared to be back on track by mid-March 1963, when the Atlas passed its acceptance inspection, this time without even a single minor discrepancy. In fact, having defined an offset of the engines to counteract the threatening roll rate experienced by Schirra during his liftoff, the rocket’s contractor confidently believed that they had produced their best bird to date. The delays had, however, pushed the MODM into mid-May and on 22 April the Atlas and its Mercury capsule were mated. As launch drew nearer, Cooper and NASA had their hands full with other problems. Four years after the selection of the Mercury Seven, attitudes towards manned spaceflight had already begun to change, with Philip Abelson, editor of the journal Science, Warren Weaver of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Senator J. W. Fulbright of Arkansas arguing that the high cost of President Kennedy’s Moon project neglected urgent social and political problems at home.

Therefore, in spite of Schirra’s success, Project Mercury and the manned space effort still had much to prove as the days ticked down towards Cooper’s launch. After much consideration, he had named his ‘spacecraft’ – no longer called a ‘capsule’ – as ‘Faith 7’, to symbolise, he said, ‘‘my trust in God, my country and my teammates’’. Within the higher echelons of the space agency, concerns were

expressed over the name: a mission failure, the Washington Post told its readers, could produce unfortunate headlines, such as ‘The United States today lost Faith’. Much consideration was also given to a ‘Mercury-Atlas 10’ mission, flown by Al Shepard for up to three days, thereby further closing the space-endurance gap with the Soviets. Tests had already shown, as part of NASA’s Project Orbit in February 1963, that a Mercury spacecraft could theoretically endure a four-day mission, although the effects of freezing or sluggishness in its hydrogen peroxide thrusters remained a lingering worry. Shepard himself, naturally, was in favour of a three-day flight, whose allocated spacecraft he had already nicknamed ‘Freedom 7-II’.

Had it gone ahead, it would have been launched sometime in October 1963. Shepard, for his part, even went so far as to lobby John Kennedy to support the extended-duration flight, although the president deferred the final decision, rightly, to NASA Administrator Jim Webb. ‘‘After Cooper finished his day-and-a-half orbital mission,’’ Shepard reflected in a February 1998 interview, ‘‘there was another spacecraft ready to go. My thought was to put me up there and just let me stay until something ran out – until the batteries ran down, until the oxygen ran out or until we lost a control or something; just an open-ended kind of a mission.’’

Even before Cooper’s flight, however, on 11 May, NASA’s newly-appointed deputy assistant administrator for public affairs, Julian Scheer, had emphatically declared that MA-10 would not fly. Webb himself killed off the plan a few weeks later, arguing that Gemini was already planned for long-duration missions – why prove something, only once, with an obsolete system, he asked – and that an accident on MA-10 could postpone subsequent ventures. In mid-June, the mission was officially removed from consideration, its spacecraft placed into storage and the shift to Project Gemini began in-earnest.

For Gordo Cooper, therefore, his own launch, set for 14 May, would be the end of the beginning.

In some ways, Grissom and his younger pilot, John Watts Young Jr, were perfectly matched. ‘‘They were both good engineers who understood their machines,’’ wrote fellow astronaut Mike Collins, ‘‘and liked fooling with them. They were

uncomfortable with the invasion of privacy the space programme had brought into their lives and tried as hard as they could to deflect questions from themselves to their beloved machines. They were generally taciturn but both had strong opinions that could flash unexpectedly… Neither was interested in small talk and they would endure uncomfortable silences rather than fill the void with what they considered ancillary trivia.” Collins, who would fly as Young’s pilot on Gemini X a year later, admitted that the “aw-shucks” demeanour and country-boy drawl cleverly concealed a sharp, talented and analytical mind that would carry him to the Moon twice, to its surface and ultimately to command of the first Space Shuttle mission.

Born in San Francisco on 24 September 1930, Young and his family moved to Cartersville, Georgia, when he was three years old and eventually settled permanently in Orlando, Florida. At around this time, he related in an interview, Young began building model aircraft. It was a hobby that would remain with him throughout high school, together, it seemed, with rockets, which he chose for a speech to his classmates in the 11th grade. Young earned his degree in aeronautical engineering, with highest honours, from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1952, receiving coveted membership of the institute’s prestigious Anak Society. He joined the Navy in June of that year and, among his earliest assignments, served as fire control officer aboard the destroyer Laws. During this time, he completed a tour in Korea and a former shipmate would remember his coolness under duress.

“Though only an ensign at the time,’’ wrote Joseph LaMantia, quoted on the website www. johnwyoung. com, “he was the most respected officer on the ship. When we sustained counter-battery fire and enemy rounds were striking the ship, it was John Young’s leadership which kept us all cool and focused on returning that enemy fire… which won the day.’’ After Korea, Young entered flight school at Naval Basic Air Training Command in Pensacola, Florida, learning to fly props, jets and helicopters and later undertook a six-month course at the Navy’s Advanced Training School in Corpus Christi, Texas. With receipt of his wings came four years’ service as a pilot in Fighter Squadron 103, flying F-9 Cougars from the Coral Sea aircraft carrier and F-8 Crusaders from the Forrestal supercarrier. During these years, colleagues would describe him as “the epitome of swashbuckling aviators… he exuded confidence coupled with uncommon ability’’.

This ability, indeed, would ultimately guide him into the hallowed ranks of NASA’s spacefaring corps. But not yet. The selection process to pick the Mercury Seven began early in 1959, at which time Young was just starting Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland; test-flying credentials were a prerequisite for astronaut training. After graduation, he worked as a project test pilot and programme manager for the F-4H weapons system at the Naval Air Test Center in Maryland, evaluating armaments, radar and bombing fire controls for both the Crusader and the F-4B Phantom fighters. During one air-to-air missile test, he and another pilot approached each other’s aircraft at closing speeds of more than three times the speed of sound. “I got a telegram from the chief of naval operations,” Young later quipped, “asking me not to do this anymore!’’ In early 1962, he would also set two time-to-climb world records.

By now a lieutenant-commander, Young’s experience with the ‘Phabulous’

Phantom had made him the obvious choice to set the records as part of Project High Jump. The first, on 21 February, saw him climb to 3,000 m above Naval Air Station Brunswick in Maine in 34.5 seconds; followed, six weeks later, by another attempt from Point Mugu in California, which achieved 25,000 m in 230.4 seconds. In September of that year, after leaving active naval duties as a maintenance officer in Phantom Fighter Squadron 143, he received a phone call from Deke Slayton which marked the start of an astronaut career that would span four decades. Training, though, would be arduous. “You had to learn a lot of stuff,” he said later. “You probably only needed to know one per cent of all the stuff you had to learn. . . but you didn’t know which one per cent it was!”

As pilot of Gemini 3, Young became the first of the 1962 astronauts to fly into space. He was originally assigned to accompany Wally Schirra on backup duties for the mission, but Al Shepard’s grounding turned such plans on their heads. However, Young and Grissom would work well together, providing a good basis for some famous – or infamous – banter whilst in orbit. In fact, when asked by a journalist a few days before launch if he had any qualms about flying with Gruff Gus, Young had deadpanned: “Are you kidding? I’d have gone with my mother-in-law!”

When he was shortlisted as a candidate for the first man in space in January 1961, Andrian Grigoryevich Nikolayev was described by his examiners as ‘‘the quietest’’ of the six finalists. By the time he launched into orbit on 11 August 1962 to begin the longest manned space mission to date, he had earned another nickname: ‘Iron Man’, due to his astonishing stamina and ability to sit alone in an isolation chamber, without stimulus or awareness of the passage of time, for no less than four whole days. Born on 5 September 1929 on a collective farm in the village of Sorseli in the forested Chuvash region of the Volga River valley, he was one of four children and discovered a love of aviation when, aged eight, he visited a nearby airfield. One story from his early years tells how he clambered into the branches of a tree and

announced that he intended to fly from it; fortunately, local villagers changed his mind and persuaded him to come down.

Following his father’s death in 1944, his intention was to support his family, although this was opposed by his mother, who wanted him to gain a full education. Nikolayev entered medical school, then tried his hand at forestry, serving as a lumberjack and timber camp foreman for a time, before joining the Soviet Army. He initially trained as a radio operator and machine gunner, demonstrating “composure under stress’’ when he crashed a flamed-out jet in a field rather than bailing out. Undoubtedly, this was a contributory factor in his selection as a cosmonaut trainee, along with Yuri Gagarin, Gherman Titov and 17 others in March I960. A bachelor at the time of Vostok 3, he is famously said to have kissed his girlfriend goodbye at the foot of the launch pad. That ‘girlfriend’ – 25-year-old Valentina Tereshkova – would not only become his wife a little over a year later, but would also become the first woman to venture into space.

In stark contrast to the quiet, reserved nature of Nikolayev, that of Vostok 4 cosmonaut Pavel Romanovich Popovich has been described as considerably more extroverted. He was also the only member of the 1960 cosmonaut group to have flown a ‘high-performance’ aircraft, having piloted the MiG-19. Interestingly, although he was shortlisted among the final six candidates for the first Vostok mission, his examiners labelled him ‘‘a puzzle’’ and mysteriously attributed his behaviour to ‘‘secret family problems’’. A lieutenant-colonel at the time of the flight, he became the most senior-ranking cosmonaut yet to reach orbit. Born on 5 October 1930 in Uzyn, within the Kiev Oblast in the north of the then-Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Popovich is today revered as the first ethnic Ukrainian spacefarer.

During his early teens, Popovich apparently so loathed the Nazi occupation that he refused to learn German at school, instead stuffing cotton into his ears and being expelled as a result. He was, it is said, even dressed in old frocks and passed off as a girl by his mother to avoid being sent away to Nazi labour camps. After the Second World War, Popovich worked as a herdsman, before achieving a diploma from a technical school in the Urals and entering the Soviet Air Force. Whilst assigned as a fighter pilot in Siberia, he met his future wife, Marina, a woodcutter’s daughter who became a high-ranking officer and engineer. She was also an accomplished stunt pilot and outspoken UFO researcher, which her husband, too, later embraced. In fact, in 1984, after his retirement from the cosmonaut corps, Popovich headed the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ UFO Commission. Like Titov, he was a voracious reader, an admirer of Hemingway and Stendhal and often quoted the works of the Soviet poets Sergei Yesenin and Vladimir Mayakovsky. In the isolation chamber, he proved very much the opposite of steely Nikolayev: he was more light-hearted and jocular, often relieving the tedium by dancing and singing operatic arias with such gusto that scientists and engineers gathered to listen.

As Grissom moved smartly through his post-landing checks, a quartet of Sikovsky UH-34D helicopters, despatched from the recovery ship Randolph, were already on the scene. One of their crews, Jim Lewis and John Rinehard, had been tasked with raising Liberty Bell 7 from the water, after which the astronaut would explosively blow the hatch, exit the capsule and be winched aboard the chopper. Seconds after splashdown, Grissom radioed Lewis, callsigned ‘Hunt Club 1’, to ask for a few minutes to finish marking switch positions. Finally, after confirming that he was ready to be picked up, he lay back in his couch and waited. All at once, he recounted, ‘‘I heard the hatch blow – the noise was a dull thud – and looked up to see blue sky… and water start to spill over the doorsill’’. The ocean was calm, but Mercury capsules were not designed for their seaworthiness, particularly with an open hatch, and Liberty Bell 7 started to wobble and flood. Grissom, who later admitted that he had ‘‘never moved faster’’ in his life, dropped his helmet, grabbed the right side of the instrument panel, jumped into the water and swam furiously. ‘‘The next thing I knew,’’ he said, ‘‘I was floating high in my suit with the water up to my armpits.’’

Although both cap and safety pin were off the detonator, Grissom would later explain that he did not believe he had hit the button to manually blow the hatch. ‘‘The capsule was rocking around a little, but there weren’t any loose items… so I don’t know how I could have hit it, but possibly I did,’’ he told a debriefing that morning aboard the Randolph. Lewis, meanwhile, had to dip his helicopter’s three wheels into the water to allow Rinehard to hook a cable onto the now-sinking Liberty Bell 7. ‘‘Fortunately,’’ Lewis recounted, ‘‘the first time John tried, he managed to hook-up while the capsule was totally submerged.’’ Grissom, by now in the water, was puzzled, anxious and then angry when the helicopter did not lower a horse collar to hoist him aboard. Lewis, whose own training had shown him that Mercury pressure suits ‘‘floated very well’’ and had seen the astronauts apparently enjoying their time in the water, had no idea that Grissom was actually close to drowning. The astronaut had inadvertently left open an oxygen inlet connection, which allowed water to seep into his suit and air to leak out, thus reducing his buoyancy. Although he closed the inlet, some air also seeped from the neck dam, causing him to sink lower and regret the weight of souvenirs in his pockets.

Grissom did not know that Lewis was himself struggling with the spacecraft: in addition to the waterlogged capsule, the landing bag had filled with seawater and it now weighed in excess of 2,000 kg – some 500 kg more than the helicopter was designed to lift. Although Lewis felt he could generate sufficient lift to raise Liberty Bell 7 and take it back to the Randolph, every time he pulled it clear of the water and it drained, a swell would rise and fill the capsule again. Lewis’ instruments told him that the strain on the engine would allow him only five minutes in the air before it cut out. He therefore released the $2 million capsule to sink in 5,400 m of water and requested that another chopper fish Grissom from the water while he nursed his own aircraft back to the ship.

Unaware of the difficulties the astronaut was having – they assumed that his frantic waving was to assure them that he was fine – it was several more minutes before the second helicopter, with the familiar face of George Cox aboard, dropped him a horse collar, which he looped around his neck and arms (albeit backwards) and was lifted to safety. Grissom was so exhausted that he could not even remember the helicopter had dragged him across the water before he finally started ascending. He had been in the water for only four or five minutes, ‘‘although it seemed like an eternity to me,’’ he said later. His first request upon arrival on the Randolph’s deck

The unsuccessful attempt to hoist Liberty Bell 7 from the ocean.

was for something to blow his nose, as his head was full of seawater. A congratulatory call from President Kennedy fell on deaf ears as, for the first time, “my aircraft and I had not come back together. In my entire career as a pilot, Liberty Bell 7 was the first thing I had ever lost”. Worse was to come. At his first post­mission press conference, and in the years to follow, Grissom would be grilled by journalists, not over the success of his mission, but over the festering question of whether he had contributed to the loss of his spacecraft by blowing the hatch. It was an accusation that Grissom would refute until the day he died.

Not surprisingly, his temperature and heart rate were both high when he arrived aboard the Randolph. Physicians described him as “tired and… breathing rapidly; his skin was warm and moist”. Years later, although it was known that Grissom had an abnormally high heart rate, Tom Wolfe, in his bestselling book ‘The Right Stuff5, would point to his physiological state as ‘evidence’ that he had panicked inside Liberty Bell 7 and possibly blown the hatch. Even Grissom, at his first post­flight press conference in Cocoa Beach’s Starlight Motel, admitted that he was ‘‘scared’’ during liftoff, an admission later jumped upon by the media as proof that America’s second spaceman had displayed a chink of weakness. Test pilots at Edwards Air Force Base in California scornfully mocked that Grissom had ‘‘screwed the pooch’’ – had made a terrible mistake – and even the astronaut’s two sons were lambasted by their schoolmates for the loss of the capsule. In his own summing-up for Life magazine, Grissom admitted that ‘‘if a guy isn’t a little frightened by a trip into space, he’s abnormal’’. Chris Kraft agreed, pointing out that ‘‘if you weren’t nervous, you didn’t know what the hell the story was all about’’.

A subsequent investigation from August to October 1961, which included Wally Schirra on its panel, would determine that the astronaut did not contribute in any way to the mysterious detonation of the hatch. Indeed, said Schirra, whose design of the neck dam had helped save Grissom’s life, ‘‘there was only a very remote possibility that the plunger could have been actuated inadvertently by the pilot’’. During the inquiry, Schirra, fully-suited, even wriggled into a Mercury simulator himself and, no matter how hard he tried, could not ‘accidentally’ trigger the hatch’s detonator. One of the conclusions reached by the Space Task Group was that a 76 cm-diameter balloon would be installed in future capsules to allow recovery ships to pick up the spacecraft if the helicopters were forced to drop them.

Many other engineers and managers shared the astronauts’ conviction that Grissom was blameless. However, even though confidence in him remained high and he went on to command the first two-man Gemini mission, the stigma refused to go away. Some engineers continued to mutter of ‘‘a transient malfunction’’, but had no ability to identify it because the evidence lay on the floor of the Atlantic. Not until 1999 would Liberty Bell 7 be salvaged and raised to the surface.

Grissom himself participated exhaustively in the investigation. ‘‘I even crawled into capsules and tried to duplicate all of my movements,’’ he said, ‘‘to see if I could make the whole thing happen again. It was impossible. The plunger that detonates the bolts is so far out of the way that I would have had to reach for it on purpose to hit it. . . and this I did not do. Even when I thrashed about with my elbows, I could not bump against it accidentally.” Moreover, to hit the plunger manually would have required sufficient force to produce a nasty bruise, which Grissom did not have. Possibilities explored over the years have included the omission of the ring seal on the detonator’s plunger, static electricity from the helicopter, a change of temperature of the exterior lanyard after splashdown or – a hypothesis that Grissom supported – the entanglement of the lanyard with the straps of the landing bag. Walt Williams, writing in Deke Slayton’s autobiography, considered the astronaut to be blameless, but thought it “very possible’’ that he had bumped the plunger accidentally with his helmet.

Launch pad leader Guenter Wendt, speaking in 2000, fiercely discounted all theories but one: the entanglement of the exterior lanyard. “It is the most logical explanation,” he said, but acquiesced “Can we prove it? No.’’ It is a pity that the mishap – however it happened – should have, in the eyes of the public, marred what had otherwise been a hugely successful mission and which cleared the way for John Glenn’s historic orbital flight in February 1962. Was the unfortunate, twice-cracked Liberty Bell to blame for its spacegoing namesake’s watery demise? All Grissom would say was that Liberty Bell 7 “was the last capsule we would ever launch with a crack in it!’’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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