REACTIONS ABROAD

In his first public comment on the space shot the day before, Shepard told newsmen, “The only complaint I have is that the flight wasn’t long enough.”

Grissom had a chance to relax with Shepard over a meal that day, and ask specific questions about the flight. He was next in line to fly, and his spacecraft was already under­going final checks and tests for the MR-4 mission, slated for July. Two major changes had been made to his spacecraft, which he had already named Liberty Bell 7. In addition to its periscope, Freedom 7had had two small portholes. Instead, Liberty Bell 7 had an enlarged, trapezoidal window to provide for better observations by the astronaut. And Freedom 7’s awkward, latch-operated hatch had been replaced by an explosive side hatch to enable the astronaut to make a rapid egress in the event that the capsule started to take on water. This was an innovative feature that all too soon would cause grievous and ongoing concerns for Grissom.

Meanwhile, reaction to Shepard’s flight in Communist capitals tended towards admiration for the man, tepid praise for the feat itself, and smug comments stressing that his flight could not compete historically or technically with that of Yuri Gagarin the previous month. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev indicated an awareness of the American space flight without mentioning it specifically. In lauding Gagarin and his orbital flight in a speech given at Erevan in Soviet Armenia, he noted Gagarin had flown “around the globe precisely – not just up and down.”

The official Soviet news agency, TASS, reported, “The launching carried out in the United States of America [on] Friday of a rocket with a man aboard cannot be com­pared with the flight of the Soviet spaceship Vostok which carried the world’s first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin. During Shepard’s training for the flight, the American press itself acknowledged that from the point of view of technical complexity and scientific value, this flight would be very inferior to the flight of Gagarin.

“For example, Time magazine emphasized that the American project of sending a man into space was designed only to put a man into a short trajectory which is consid­erably less than the complicated flight of the Vostok round the Earth. To begin with, the Soviet ship orbited around the Earth at a maximum height of [203 miles]. The cosmonaut made a full orbit around our planet and only then landed in the pre-set area of the territory of the U. S.S. R. The rocket with the man on board which was launched in the United States of America is in reality like an intercontinental missile, since it covered a limited distance of the Earth’s surface at a maximum height of 115 miles.

“The capsule which carried the American astronaut fell at a distance of only 302 miles from the site of the launching. The entire flight of the American rocket took only 15 minutes, while Yuri Gagarin spent 108 in his orbiting flight round the Earth.

“The following fact shows the principal difference between his flight and that of the American rocket: Yuri Gagarin was in a state of weightlessness during the entire time his spaceship was in orbit, but the American astronaut was in this state only several minutes.” [9]

Not surprisingly, no mention was made of the fact that Gagarin’s spacecraft was controlled from Earth throughout his flight, whereas Shepard had manipulated his spacecraft’s roll, pitch and yaw movements using manual controls.

Soviet-sponsored broadcasts in Czechoslovakia also dismissed Shepard’s shot as “primitive and outmoded,” although Czech and Hungarian broadcasters recognized the man himself as a heroic figure. Meanwhile, the Red Chinese press in Hong Kong was disparaging. The Communist Commercial Daily described the flight as nothing more than a publicity stunt [10].

On Grand Bahama Island, all the tests showed that Alan Shepard was in perfect physical and mental health. Chris Kraft was NASA’s first flight director, serving in Mission Control, and he later said that he was also pleased with Shepard’s physical condition throughout the flight. “The only medical data that raised eyebrows was Shepard’s heart rate, spiking at 220 and holding above 150 for several minutes. Both numbers were above anything seen before in Shepard’s medical condition – even dur­ing stress tests and centrifuge runs. But the surgeons weren’t that worried. They’d recently gotten a report on race car drivers showing heart rates even higher, and lasting for several hours. Even sucking in a bit of carbon monoxide didn’t affect their high­speed driving. Based on that, Shepard’s heart rate seemed well within the norm for a person whose adrenaline was flowing.” [11]