COUNTDOWN HOLDS

At 5:45 a. m. the expected liftoff was just 45 minutes away. As the sun rose over the flat, scrub-covered Cape it revealed a pale blue sky with some high, thin, scattered clouds. The weather, it seemed, was also ‘go’ at this time.

At 5:50 the enclosing launch tower slowly rumbled away from the slender, 83-foot Redstone and everyone’s excitement levels began to rise. At the same time the yellow steel “cherry picker” crane moved close to the capsule high atop the rocket. This ungainly-looking device had a cube-like cab at the end of an extended arm to provide a possible emergency evacuation route for Grissom if a serious situation developed before the rocket left the pad.

As the countdown moved beyond 6:00 a. m. – the planned launch time – a brief hold was called at T-30 minutes to allow technicians to turn off the pad searchlights. As it was now daylight and the lights could possibly cause interference with launch-vehicle telemetry, they were no longer needed. By this point, Grissom had been in the capsule for a few minutes beyond two hours.

COUNTDOWN HOLDS

The “cherry-picker” emergency evacuation device stands ready after the gantry has rolled back. (Photo: NASA)

At 6:25 a. m. there was another hold in the countdown. The reason this time was to allow some clouds to drift out of the way of the tracking cameras. As this might take some time, Scott Carpenter thoughtfully patched a call through to Betty so that she and the boys could enjoy several quiet minutes of conversation with Gus as he waited for the hold to end. Inside their Virginia home, and just like two days earlier, Betty had the astronaut wife’s support team of Jo Schirra, Marge Slayton and Rene Carpenter to keep her company, and everyone was crowded around their television set.

“Are you feeling all right?” Betty asked Gus, finding it a little surreal that she was talk­ing to him and watching images of his rocket on the pad a thousand miles away.

“Sure, I’m fine,” he responded. “In fact, if they’d stop yacking at me over that darned radio I just might take a nap!”5

After a brief conversation with her husband Betty handed the phone over to Scott and Mark, and then he had to sign off.

The sun finally broke through and shortly after 7:00 a. m., with the threatening clouds mostly dissipated, the countdown was resumed with the launch now set for 7:20 a. m. This latest hold had lasted 41 minutes. Grissom, who had been tightly strapped inside the capsule for more than three hours, had spent some of the delay time relaxing with deep breathing exercises and tensing his arms and legs to keep them from getting too stiff.

At 7:10 a. m. the Redstone rocket and the capsule switched over to internal power, meaning that it was now self-sustaining. On the nearby beaches and by the side of roads hordes of undaunted, excited spectators who had endured frustrating days of delay were crowded together with their eyes and binoculars facing the launch pad, but casting an occasional worried glance skyward. With the clouds almost gone, the peo­ple began to sense that this might finally be the day the white bird ripped into the sky. Hundreds of weary reporters and cameramen had also taken up their positions ready to finally record and report on the spectacular event.