THE END

Gus Grissom had two reasons to be grateful to Wally Schirra. The first came immediately after his ill-fated splashdown on 21 July 1961, when he owed his life to the neck dam designed by his Mercury colleague. The second, however, came only minutes after Schirra’s splashdown in the Pacific at the close of Sigma 7. Grissom’s misfortune had prompted both John Glenn and Schirra to refrain from opening their capsules’ hatches in the water and choosing instead to explosively blow them when on the deck of the recovery ship.

‘‘I blew the hatch on purpose,’’ Schirra wrote in his autobiography, ‘‘and the recall of the plunger injured my hand – it actually caused a cut through a glove that was reinforced by metal. Gus was one of those who flew out to the ship and I showed him my hand. ‘How did you cut it?’ he asked. ‘I blew the hatch,’ I replied. Gus smiled, vindicated. It proved he hadn’t blown the hatch with a hand, foot, knee or whatever, for he hadn’t suffered even a minor bruise.’’ Already close from their three years training together, the two men were also neighbours in Houston and Schirra had agreed to act as the executor of Grissom’s will. Little did he know that he would be called upon to do just that a little over four years’ time.

The euphoria which surrounded Schirra’s return from one of the most productive Mercury missions to date was evident. After a greeting at Pearl Harbour and a day­long stay in VIP quarters in Hawaii, the nation’s latest astronaut hero found himself surrounded by the state’s governor, a senator and military top brass. He was also pleased to be able to verify that he had, in fact, responded correctly to Deke Slayton’s ‘turtle’ question, uttered during the launch. Whilst still aboard the Kearsarge, he asked the communications officer for a copy of the transcript of the first few minutes of his flight – and there it was, on his microphone’s voice recorder, the correct answer: ‘‘You bet your sweet ass I am!’’

Some voices within NASA opted to end Project Mercury immediately, its brief of placing a man into orbit for a lengthy period having been met. The next step on the road to the Moon, the two-piloted Gemini series, was just around the corner, with an inaugural unmanned venture scheduled for sometime in 1964. However, another of Mercury’s original goals had been to fly a mission lasting at least one full day and, although erased in October 1959 due to the growth of the capsule’s weight and power requirements and the limitations of the tracking network, this option returned to the fore shortly after Gus Grissom’s flight. Among officials at the burgeoning Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston, Texas, the decision was easy, particularly since long-duration experience prior to Gemini was highly desirable. Early in January 1962, Project Gemini was publicly named as the nation’s interim stepping stone to Apollo and both NASA and McDonnell were hard at work planning a ‘Manned One-Day Mission’ (MODM) to round out Project Mercury in style.

By this time, MSC had effectively replaced the Langley Space Task Group and NASA Headquarters had reorganised Abe Silverstein’s Office of Space Flight Programs into an Office of Manned Space Flight, directed by D. Brainerd Holmes. Silverstein himself had been made director of the Lewis Research Center. By September 1962, days before Schirra’s launch, negotiations with McDonnell settled on a number of configuration changes needed for the MODM flight, which Bob Gilruth hoped to launch as early as April of the following year, using Spacecraft No. 20. The success of Sigma 7 prompted an emboldened NASA, in November 1962, to extend the MODM from 18 to 22 orbits, which would require a stay in orbit of around 34 hours. Such an ambitious venture – surpassing Vostok 2, though little more than a quarter as long as Andrian Nikolayev’s Vostok 3 – was anticipated to cost in the region of $17.8 million and require truly enormous tracking support, since its orbital path would carry it over virtually all of Earth’s surface between latitudes 33 degrees north and south of the equator.

Twenty-eight ships, 171 aircraft and around 18,000 military personnel would be needed to support the mission. Its duration also meant that, for the first time, round – the-clock control operations were required, with a Red Shift flight director (Chris Kraft) and a Blue Shift counterpart (a Canadian engineer named John Hodge). On 14 November 1962, Schirra’s backup, Gordo Cooper, was assigned as the MODM pilot, with Freedom 7 veteran Al Shepard backing him up.

Other problems surrounded the Atlas rocket, whose ‘F-series’ military variant had

suffered two inexplicable failures. When Cooper’s Atlas-D was rolled out of its Convair factory in San Diego in late January 1963, it failed to pass its initial inspections and was returned for rewiring of its flight control system. This led NASA, on 12 February, to officially postpone the originally scheduled mid-April launch until mid-May. Meanwhile, the MODM capsule itself – at the centre of the mission designated ‘Mercury-Atlas 9’ – was being outfitted with more than 180 engineering changes: heavier and larger-capacity batteries for more electrical power, an additional oxygen bottle, extra cooling and drinking water, more hydrogen peroxide manoeuvring fuel, a full load of consumables for the life-support system, various other modified components and, of course, an expanded scientific payload. Providing partial compensation for the added weight, the periscope, which Schirra had considered virtually useless on Sigma 7, was deleted, together with UHF and telemetry transmitters and a rate stabilisation control system. Other plans included removing Cooper’s fibreglass couch and replacing it with a lighter hammock, but fears that its material might stretch and the astronaut might ‘bounce’ meant that this proposal never materialised.

Still, the increasing weight of the later Mercury missions prompted an extensive requalification of the spacecraft’s parachute and landing systems. Other changes included the installation of a slow-scan television unit to monitor both the astronaut and his instruments. In fact, at a press conference on 8 February, Cooper had referred to his mission as ‘‘practically. . . a flying camera’’, in recognition not only of the television unit, but of a 70 mm Hasselblad, a special zodiacal-light 35 mm camera and a 16 mm all-purpose moving-picture camera. Cooper himself would wear a pressure suit which sported a mechanical seal for its helmet, new gloves with an improved inner liner and link netting between the fabrics at the wrist and a torso which afforded greater mobility. His lightweight boots were integrated, providing better comfort and reducing the time it took to put them on. All in all, the suit was much less bulky than its predecessors.

The mission appeared to be back on track by mid-March 1963, when the Atlas passed its acceptance inspection, this time without even a single minor discrepancy. In fact, having defined an offset of the engines to counteract the threatening roll rate experienced by Schirra during his liftoff, the rocket’s contractor confidently believed that they had produced their best bird to date. The delays had, however, pushed the MODM into mid-May and on 22 April the Atlas and its Mercury capsule were mated. As launch drew nearer, Cooper and NASA had their hands full with other problems. Four years after the selection of the Mercury Seven, attitudes towards manned spaceflight had already begun to change, with Philip Abelson, editor of the journal Science, Warren Weaver of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Senator J. W. Fulbright of Arkansas arguing that the high cost of President Kennedy’s Moon project neglected urgent social and political problems at home.

Therefore, in spite of Schirra’s success, Project Mercury and the manned space effort still had much to prove as the days ticked down towards Cooper’s launch. After much consideration, he had named his ‘spacecraft’ – no longer called a ‘capsule’ – as ‘Faith 7’, to symbolise, he said, ‘‘my trust in God, my country and my teammates’’. Within the higher echelons of the space agency, concerns were

expressed over the name: a mission failure, the Washington Post told its readers, could produce unfortunate headlines, such as ‘The United States today lost Faith’. Much consideration was also given to a ‘Mercury-Atlas 10’ mission, flown by Al Shepard for up to three days, thereby further closing the space-endurance gap with the Soviets. Tests had already shown, as part of NASA’s Project Orbit in February 1963, that a Mercury spacecraft could theoretically endure a four-day mission, although the effects of freezing or sluggishness in its hydrogen peroxide thrusters remained a lingering worry. Shepard himself, naturally, was in favour of a three-day flight, whose allocated spacecraft he had already nicknamed ‘Freedom 7-II’.

Had it gone ahead, it would have been launched sometime in October 1963. Shepard, for his part, even went so far as to lobby John Kennedy to support the extended-duration flight, although the president deferred the final decision, rightly, to NASA Administrator Jim Webb. ‘‘After Cooper finished his day-and-a-half orbital mission,’’ Shepard reflected in a February 1998 interview, ‘‘there was another spacecraft ready to go. My thought was to put me up there and just let me stay until something ran out – until the batteries ran down, until the oxygen ran out or until we lost a control or something; just an open-ended kind of a mission.’’

Even before Cooper’s flight, however, on 11 May, NASA’s newly-appointed deputy assistant administrator for public affairs, Julian Scheer, had emphatically declared that MA-10 would not fly. Webb himself killed off the plan a few weeks later, arguing that Gemini was already planned for long-duration missions – why prove something, only once, with an obsolete system, he asked – and that an accident on MA-10 could postpone subsequent ventures. In mid-June, the mission was officially removed from consideration, its spacecraft placed into storage and the shift to Project Gemini began in-earnest.

For Gordo Cooper, therefore, his own launch, set for 14 May, would be the end of the beginning.