AN AMERICAN IN ORBIT

‘‘Liftoff was slow,’’ Glenn recounted in his 1999 memoir. ‘‘The Atlas’ thrust was barely enough to overcome its weight. I wasn’t really off until the umbilical cord that took electrical communications to the base of the rocket pulled loose. That was my last connection with Earth. It took the two boosters and the sustainer engine three seconds of fire and thunder to lift the thing that far. From where I sat, the rise seemed ponderous and stately, as if the rocket were an elephant trying to become a ballerina.’’ For the first few seconds, the Atlas climbed straight up, before its automatic guidance system placed it carefully onto a north-easterly heading; a transition which Glenn found noticeably ‘‘bumpy’’. However, his checklist took priority, requiring him to tick off cabin pressure levels, oxygen and fuel limits and ampere readings on Friendship 7’s batteries. Forty-five seconds into the climb, the rocket entered ‘Max Q’, the highly dynamic phase of the flight in which MA-1 had faltered two years earlier.

‘‘It lasted about 30 seconds,’’ said Glenn. ‘‘The vibrations were more pronounced at this point. I did not expect any trouble, but we knew there were certain limits beyond which the Atlas and capsule should not be allowed to go. . . Since it is difficult for the human body to judge the exact frequency and amplitude of vibrations like this, I was not sure whether we were approaching the limits or not. I saw what looked like a contrail float by the window and I went on reporting fuel and oxygen and amperes. The G forces were building up now. I strained against them, just to make sure I was in good shape.’’ A successful liftoff and passage through Max Q completed two of the four major hurdles needed to achieve his mission: the third, shutting down the Atlas’ outboard boosters, followed perfectly, leaving only the

AN AMERICAN IN ORBIT

Demonstrating the cramped nature of the Mercury spacecraft, this interior view shows

John Glenn hard at work during his five-hour mission.

central sustainer engine to continue the push into orbit. “There was no sensation of speed,” recalled Glenn, “because there was nothing outside to look at as a reference point.”

Shortly before 9:50 am, two and a half minutes into the ascent, and by now outside the ‘sensible’ atmosphere, the Atlas’ LES was released, “accelerating [away] at a tremendous clip’’. The fourth hurdle – insertion into orbit – followed with the sustainer engine’s cutoff, separation of the Atlas from the capsule and the firing of Friendship 7’s posigrade rockets to push it clear. By 9:52 am, according to the operations team in their flight logs, the mission was ‘‘through the gates’’ and Glenn was in orbit.

Although he was able to describe the magnificent views he was seeing, it was on this mission that the rest of the world was also able to capture something of the grandeur of Earth – thanks to a camera. Glenn had discussed this idea with Bob Gilruth some months earlier and the two men had begun searching for an appropriate device: small enough to operate with one hand, yet adaptable, so that he could advance the film with his thumb and snap the shutter with his forefinger whilst encased in a pressure suit. Their search achieved little success. Then, one day, whilst getting a haircut in Cocoa Beach, Glenn saw ‘‘a little Minolta camera in a display case. It was called a Hi-Matic.’’ The camera, he noted, had automatic exposure; he would have no need to fiddle with light meters and f-stops. He bought it on the spot for $45. NASA technicians adapted it for the spacecraft and, in tests, Glenn found that it was the easiest camera to use, even wearing his pressure suit gloves. ft would yield some of the most amazing images of the entire mission.

Five minutes after launch, as planned, Glenn achieved orbital speed of 28,200 km/ h, an altitude of some 160 km and – for the first time – experienced the strange state of weightlessness. “Zero-G and f feel fine,” he exulted; words that he would repeat more than three decades later after reaching orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. “Capsule is turning around,” he added as Friendship 7 slowly swung around into the re-entry attitude. “Oh, that view is tremendous!” he exclaimed as the horizon appeared in the window and he caught his first sight of the curvature of the Earth and the fragile atmosphere.

At length, Friendship 7 oriented itself into its ‘normal’ operating position, with its blunt end facing into the direction of travel, flying eastwards. Looking back, Glenn could clearly see the spent Atlas making slow pirouettes as it tumbled away. At first, the parameters of his trajectory were so good that he was given a go-ahead by Capcom Al Shepard for ‘‘at least seven orbits’’. With all systems running as expected, Friendship 7 crossed the Atlantic and passed over the Canary fslands.

Glenn’s first tasks involved checking the spacecraft’s roll, pitch and yaw attitude controls in case an emergency re-entry became necessary. At 9:59 am, he crossed the coast of western Africa – ‘‘a fast transatlantic flight,’’ he later wrote – and felt one of his earliest sensations of weightlessness: a grey-felt toy mouse, pink-eared, with a long tail, drifted from an equipment pouch. ft was one of Shepard’s jokes, a reference to Bill Dana’s astronaut character, who had always felt sorry for the experimental mice sent aloft in rocket nosecones. ft also offered a subtle ‘gotcha’, following Glenn’s own placement of a girlie pin-up in Shepard’s Freedom 7 nine months earlier. Next, out came the Minolta, which floated comically before Glenn’s eyes. ‘‘f found that f had adapted to weightlessness immediately,’’ he recalled in his memoir. ‘‘When f needed both hands, f just let go of the camera and it floated there in front of me. f didn’t have to think about it. ft felt natural.’’

After quickly checking his blood pressure for the Canaries ground station, Glenn turned his attention to photographing selected spots on Earth’s surface. One of the first was a patch of cloud covering the Canaries, followed, at 10:08 am, by shots of enormous dust storms brewing over the Sahara Desert. Next came further checks of his capsule’s attitude controls, which he reported were ‘‘well within limits’’, followed by exertion tests with a bungee cord attached beneath the instrument panel and then reading the vision chart at eye-level. Glenn’s vision, it seemed, was not changing. Head movements, too, did not cause him any disorientation, ‘‘indicating,’’ he wrote later, ‘‘that zero-G didn’t attack the balance mechanism of the inner ear’’.

Forty minutes into the mission, Friendship 7 drifted into darkness as Glenn approached his 240 km apogee. A sunset from space was one of the features of the flight about which he was most excited. He was already a lover of the beauty of terrestrial sunsets, but seeing one from orbit, ‘‘was even more spectacular than f imagined and different in that sunlight coming through the prism of Earth’s atmosphere seemed to break out the whole spectrum, not just the colours at the red end, but the greens, blues, indigos and violets at the other. It made ‘spectacular’ an understatement for the few seconds’ view. From my orbital front porch, the setting Sun that would have lingered during a long earthly twilight sank 18 times as fast. The Sun was fully round and as white as a brilliant arc light and then it swiftly disappeared and seemed to melt into a long thin line of rainbow-brilliant radiance along the curve of the horizon. I added my first sunset from space to my collection”.

As he hurtled onwards, Glenn was also able to describe the absolute blackness of the sky above him, although he admitted that he could see stars, successfully identifying the Pleiades cluster. When astronaut Gordo Cooper, the capcom at the Muchea tracking station, just north of Perth in Australia, came within communica­tions range, Glenn related the shortness of the passage from orbital daytime into darkness and proceeded through the humdrum blood pressure readings. Then, almost 55 minutes after launch, as Friendship 7 passed directly over Perth and Rockingham, Cooper asked him if he could see lights. ‘‘I can see the outline of a town,’’ he replied, ‘‘and a very bright light just to the south of it.’’ Glenn thanked the residents of Perth for turning on their lights to greet him.

Travelling over the South Pacific, close to the tiny coral atoll of Canton Island, midway between Fiji and Hawaii, the astronaut lifted his visor and ate: squeezing some apple sauce from a toothpaste-like tube into his mouth, gobbling some small malt tablets and confirming that weightlessness posed no obstacles. As he approached orbital sunrise, Glenn was surprised to see around the capsule a huge field of particles, like thousands of swirling fireflies. ‘‘They were greenish-yellow in colour,’’ he said later, ‘‘and they appeared to be about six to ten feet apart. I seemed to be passing through them at a speed of three to five miles an hour. They were all around me and those nearest the capsule would occasionally move across the window, as if I had slightly interrupted their flow. On the next pass, I turned the capsule around so that I was looking right into the flow and though I could see far fewer of them in the light of the rising Sun, they were still there.’’

The particles diminished in number as he flew eastwards into brighter sunlight. Scott Carpenter, who duplicated Glenn’s mission in May 1962, would also see them and they would be attributed to little more than ice crystals venting from Friendship 7’s heat exchanger.