Mercury Rising by Jeff Shesol

Author:Jeff Shesol [Shesol, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

In Glenn’s view, the flight plan left him no room to test the most essential human capacity of all—judgment, decision-making—in a hostile environment. Back in May, Shepard had been given the latitude to switch the control system briefly to manual, allowing him to roll the capsule and adjust it up and down and left to right. But the suborbital flights of 1961 were too short to have raised, in any serious way, the question of what an astronaut was capable of doing. Glenn would spend nearly five hours in space, and the idea of having every move predetermined was unacceptable to him; it was a waste of his abilities, a squandering of what he and his flight could achieve. He let this be known.

When Glenn had entered the program in 1959, he’d looked like a man who could not be denied a thing. This had not proved true. In an argument, Glenn was more formidable than any of his peers—but no more likely, in the end, to get what he sought. On December 6, one week after the flight plan review, Helmut A. Kuehnel, head of the Flight Activities Section, noted in a memo that “as a result of this presentation, the flight plan has been modified to be … extremely conservative.” It called for the ASCS to remain in control for most of the mission, while the astronaut acted in a “backup capacity to the automatic systems.” Glenn was finally the prime pilot. Yet he remained, all the same, a backup.

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