PUSHING THE ENVELOPE

The situation within Mission Control, Deke Slayton recounted, was far from fine. Slayton had been stationed throughout Aurora 7’s flight at the capcom’s mike at the Muchea tracking site in Australia, which he described as ‘‘a good place to be, all things considered’’. Flight Director Chris Kraft and many other mission controllers were furious, accusing Carpenter of having recklessly endangered himself during a botched re-entry. Their anger was exacerbated when, aboard the recovery ship, the astronaut off-handedly remarked that ‘‘I didn’t know where I was… and they didn’t know where I was, either’’. Retrofire controller John Llewelyn is said to have retorted: ‘‘Bullshit! That son-of-a-bitch is damned lucky to be alive!’’

Kraft, apparently, was considerably more caustic. In his autobiography, he wrote of Carpenter’s ‘‘cavalier dismissal of a life-threatening problem’’ – the failure of the spacecraft’s navigational instruments – and troublesome re-entry and swore that the astronaut would never fly again. Carpenter was never assigned another mission, not even in a backup role. After a month-long tour in the Navy’s Sealab-II underwater habitat, off the coast of La Jolla, California, he would resign from NASA early in 1967. Some have seen Carpenter’s mistakes and omissions and his forgetting to do certain critical tasks as evidence that the early Mercury flights were simply too overloaded with experiments and manoeuvres and, further, that Mission Control was at least partly to blame for failing to identify the pitch horizon scanner malfunction for what it was. Tom Wolfe, for his part, later wrote that any speculation that Carpenter had panicked made no sense “in light of the telemetred data concerning his heart rate and his respiratory rate”.

Psychologist Bob Voas weighed in with his own judgement: “The astronaut’s eye on the horizon was the only adequate check of the automated gyro system,’’ he told Carpenter and Kris Stoever. “With its malfunctioning gyros, the spacecraft could not have maintained adequate control during retrofire. Mercury Control may have viewed the manually controlled re-entry as sloppy, but the spacecraft came back in one piece and the world accepted the flight for what it was: another success.’’

Aurora 7, though harrowing, was certainly viewed as a success by Carpenter’s family and hundreds of thousands of residents of his home state, Colorado. In Denver, a 300,000-strong crowd cheered the nation’s newest astronaut son in their own ticker-tape parade. The city of Boulder declared 29 May as ‘Scott Carpenter Day’, sponsored its biggest-ever celebration and the University of Colorado named the astronaut its most accomplished graduate. Years earlier, Carpenter’s own father, a research chemist, had achieved the same accolade from the same institution. In the case of the younger Carpenter, however, it also came with the formal conferring of his engineering degree, which he completed in 1949, save for a final examination in thermodynamics. The university granted the degree on the grounds that his “subsequent training as an astronaut has more than made up for the deficiency in the subject of heat transfer’’.

Carpenter’s flight brought Project Mercury to another crossroads. In August 1961, the question had been whether to eliminate further Redstone missions in favour of moving towards the Atlas. Now, nine months later, discussion within NASA centred on whether enough had been learned from the three-orbit flights of Friendship 7 and Aurora 7 to justify a still-longer venture. Speaking before the Exchange Club in Hampton, Virginia, NASA engineer Joe Dodson pointed out that the lessons derived from Glenn and Carpenter were pleasing and speculation arose that a day-long mission, to rival that of Gherman Titov in Vostok 2, could be attempted as early as 1963. Indeed, many congressional observers supported a flight to surpass Titov. The debate ended on 27 June, barely five weeks after Carpenter’s re-entry, when NASA Headquarters announced that Wally Schirra would fly Mercury-Atlas 8, possibly as early as September, and attempt up to six circuits of the globe.

Perhaps in reference to the same engineering influence with which Slayton’s Delta 7 had been named, Schirra chose to call his capsule ‘Sigma 7’. ‘‘Sigma, a Greek symbol for the sum of the element of an equation,’’ wrote Schirra in his 1988 autobiography, ‘‘stands for engineering excellence. That was my goal – engineering excellence. I would not settle for less.’’ Nor, indeed, would the ground team, who prepared Sigma 7 for launch with such tenacity and engineering precision. . . and even humorously placed a car key on the capsule’s control stick and stowed a carefully-wrapped steak sandwich in Schirra’s ditty bag. The astronaut sought to honour them, too, during his mission. ‘‘All these little things do really help to make you realise that there are a lot of other people interested in what you’re doing,” he said later. “We know this inherently, but these visible examples of it do mean a lot.’’ The mission would double the number of orbits achieved by Glenn and Carpenter, lasting around nine hours, and as a consequence the Sigma 7 capsule required 20 modifications to provide more consumables. “I think probably the best part of my Mercury mission,’’ Schirra wrote later, “was naming it Sigma 7. Naming it the sum of engineering effort, I wanted to prove that it was a team of people working together to make this vehicle go. That’s why I talk so wildly about knowing the engineers, how they were brothers and buddies… and all of them were! That’s what I saw as the ultimate on that mission, was that [it was] an engineering test flight, where we weren’t going to look around for fireflies. We weren’t going to look for the lights of Perth. We weren’t going to give prayers to the peasants below. We were going to make this thing work like a vehicle!’’