John Glenn by Andrew Chaikin

Author:Andrew Chaikin [Chaikin, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58834-486-1
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2014-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

THE MULTICOLORED BRILLIANCE of another space sunset faded from view as Friendship 7 coasted into its third orbital night. Below, in the light of the full moon, Glenn could see a huge storm sprawled across the Pacific, with flashes of lightning going off like firecrackers all the way to the horizon. The automatic control system was still acting up, but he was staying on top of it. And he was getting as many observations and tests accomplished as he could, including eye checks that showed his vision was unaffected by weightlessness. The only strange thing was the questions he kept getting from the ground stations about his landing bag. Could he verify that his landing bag switch was in the “off” position? (It was.) Was he hearing any banging or flapping sounds when he turned the capsule? (He wasn’t.) Maybe controllers at the Cape were trying to figure out if the strange glowing particles he’d been seeing were coming from his landing bag. Or maybe there was some problem they weren’t telling him about.

As he flew over Hawaii for the third time, he got the word about the telemetry signal indicating his landing bag had prematurely deployed. They asked him to test the landing bag deployment switch to see if it lit any status lights on his panel—a risky move, Glenn thought, but he did as they asked, and when no lights went on they seemed satisfied, and told him he’d make a normal reentry. But as far as Glenn was concerned, the mistake had been made. If the ground thought his spacecraft was having a problem they should have told him, whether or not they had an answer yet. The pilot of a spacecraft had to be in the loop; it was just that simple.

“John, leave your retropack on through Texas. Do you read?” It was Wally Schirra’s voice, from the ground station in Point Arguello, California. Glenn realized there were deliberations about his capsule still going on in Mercury Control. But there wasn’t time to dwell on that right now; retrofire was less than a minute away. He’d lined up the capsule to the proper attitude, with the retrorockets aimed 34 degrees above the horizontal, pointing into his flight path. With half a minute to go, the capsule’s auto-sequencer began its own countdown for retrofire. Friendship 7 was crossing the coast of California when Schirra read the final seconds: “Five, four, three, two, one, fire.”

Glenn felt a solid push as the first of three solid-fuel retrorockets began firing. His mission clock showed that 4 hours, 33 minutes, and 7 seconds had elapsed since liftoff. Seconds later, he felt the second one go off, then the third. He felt as if he were suddenly flying back toward Hawaii, but it was just an illusion caused by the sudden acceleration after almost four and a half hours of weightlessness. In reality, the retros had only slowed Friendship 7 by about 340 miles per hour, enough to cause it to fall out of orbit.

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