CALLING FREEDOM 7

At long last the 1MC on the USS Lake Champlain announced that Freedom 7 had been launched successfully, and the sailors were told that if they looked to the west in several minutes they should be able to witness the spacecraft’s return.

At about the nine-minute point in the flight, Capt. Weymouth called Pri-Fly, and Ed Killian’s personal involvement in the MR-3 mission started. Weymouth said the NASA people on board the ship had not been able to reach the astronaut by radio. As Killian recalled, “The capsule carried both UHF and VHF radio units, but the VHF did not seem to be working. It was suspected that reentry ionization had screwed up radio communications such that NASA was unable to contact Shepard, but there was a scary possibility that something had gone seriously wrong. The Captain asked the Air Boss to see if Pri-Fly could raise the capsule on their UHF radio. We hadn’t been informed as to the capsule’s call sign, since we weren’t expected to be involved in communicat­ing with Shepard, so we didn’t know that his call sign was ‘Freedom 7.’ The Air Boss called ‘Mercury’ several times on the VHF radio without success, and then asked me to try the AR-15. This UHF aircraft radio was not standard equipment for Pri-Fly; it had been added several months earlier as a backup to the VHS system routinely used to contact the aircraft under control of Pri-Fly. As senior controller on my shift, I gen­erally wore the mike and headset, and operated the AR-15. It was not connected to any loudspeaker in Pri-Fly, so those communications were more or less private. Having failed to reach Shepard on VHF, the Air Boss turned and told me to call Shepard.”

Killian then began his attempt to reach the spacecraft. “Mercury, Mercury, this is Nighthawk. Do you read? Over.” There was no response. He repeated the entire call several times without success, and then told Air Boss Howard Skidmore he’d had no luck. Told to keep trying, he repeated the call several times more. He could see the concern on Skidmore’s face, and when he glanced up at the bridge he could also see Capt. Weymouth looking down at him with an equally worried expression.

Seconds later, an urgent call came over the intercom. “Pri-Fly, this is the Captain. Have you been able to raise Mercury?” Replying in the negative, Skidmore motioned for Killian to keep trying. As he repeated the call, the AR-15 sputtered and crackled, then cleared up and an exuberant voice responded with, “Roger, Nighthawk, this is Mercury. Boy, what a f.. .ing ride! Ho-lee s…! Goddam, that was something!” It was Alan Shepard himself.

“His excited reply startled me,” Killian says, “and such language wasn’t common in the radio traffic monitored in Pri-Fly. I was a little embarrassed, but pretty sure no one else had heard his outburst.” Happily for newspaper editors the following day, Shepard repeated his excited catch-cry of “Boy, what a ride!” to Capt. Weymouth on arriving on the ship – minus the profanity – which became the headline tag on many a global newspaper that day.

As Killian continued, “Shepard’s voice was at a high pitch in his excitement and it was obvious that he was glad to have made contact with someone on Earth after his short, but explosive, sojourn into space. We all knew that several previous launch attempts had exploded on the pad or shortly thereafter; he must have felt exhilarated just to be alive. His excited and happy response told me all we had wanted to know. I turned to my right and looked up to Capt. Weymouth on the bridge, and with a big smile on my face I gave him the thumb-and-forefinger ‘OK’ sign. Alan Shepard, America’s first astronaut, was A-OK. I made contact with him again, confirming that we’d received his transmission. ‘Roger, ride, Mercury,’ I said, ‘Nighthawk has a visual on you now, four miles off our port bow. We are making for your location and the choppers are airborne for your recovery. Do you read? Over.’

“I could tell from the tone of his voice when he responded that he was relieved to know that we were so close by. He regained some composure and acknowledged my trans­mission, thanking me for the information. I was watching the capsule swinging gently below the parachute just a few points off our port bow as I spoke to Shepard on the AR-15. Finally, NASA’s VHF radio finally broke in and I dropped out of the communications loop.”

These days Ed Killian is still amused at the blue language used by Shepard after his fiery reentry, and coyly wonders whether it ought perhaps to have been reported cor­rectly. “It was truly memorable,” he notes, “but the language was not scripted and it was just not acceptable for public audiences. Later, the astronauts would become more adept with ‘politically correct’ language. For now, Shepard had been honest in his reaction to the historic, and patently dangerous, personal experience.”

Whereas nowadays nearly every word of an American space mission is generally broadcast live, back then NASA was far less inclined to allow members of the public to listen to uncensored recordings of the Mercury astronauts under stress or even in danger. Only those who were fully involved in the missions had a “need to know” insight into the actual spacecraft-to-ground transmissions. Every word between the astronauts and the ground was filtered through Lt. Col. John (‘Shorty’) Powers, the space agency’s Public Affairs Officer, who then released a sanitized version of what had been said to the public. Even post-flight films had an edited voice track of the astronaut involved in that mission, which became the “official” NASA version of the flight. It is therefore hardly surprising that Shepard’s excited expletives, normally quite unremarkable for test pilots, were censored and never made public.