The Flight

This was the moment. He had worked toward it for three years. He had suffered agonies of frustration. Now he was alone, flat on his back on a form-fit couch inside the instrument-packed capsule named Friendship 7. In an incredibly matter-of-fact voice, John Glenn began to count: "Ten, nine, eight, seven, six . . ." A great yellow-white gush of flame spewed out from the Atlas-D missile. For nearly four seconds, it seemed rooted to its pad in the space-age wasteland of Cape Canaveral, a flat, sandy scrubland dotted by palmetto trees and looming, ungainly missile gantries. Then the rocket took off, heading into the brilliant blue sky. "Lift-off," said Glenn. "The clock is operating. We're under way."

In the next four hours and 56 minutes, John Glenn lived through and shared with millions a day of miracles. There was beauty. "I don't know what you can say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets," Glenn said later, "three in orbit, and one on the surface after I was back on board the ship." There was the wonder of weightlessness. "This," said Glenn, "is something you could get addicted to." And there was danger: "This could have been a bad day all the way around."

Eerie World. After liftoff, the next crucial stage of the flight was the separation of the rocket and capsule at the proper angle to put Glenn into the programmed orbit. When his orbit was confirmed at the Cape, Glenn jubilantly radioed back: "Capsule is turning around. Oh, that view is tremendous! I can see the booster doing turnarounds just a couple of hundred yards behind. Cape is go and I am go."

As he left the Atlantic behind and began to cross Africa, Glenn set out to test his reactions to the eerie world of weightlessness. He gobbled some malt tablets and carefully squeezed a tube of applesauce into his mouth. He felt fine. Swallowing was no problem. "It's all positive action. Your tongue forces it back in the throat and you swallow normally. It's all a positive displacement machine all the way through." He shook his head violently to see if the motion would induce space sickness. Nothing happened. "I have had no ill effects at all from zero G," he reported. "It's very pleasant, as a matter of fact. Visual acuity is still excellent. No astigmatic effects. No nausea or discomfort whatsoever."

Floating Camera. Indeed, weightlessness became a sort of sport. Glenn had with him a small hand camera to take pictures with through his window. "It just seemed perfectly natural, rather than put the camera away, I just put it out in mid-air and let go of it." With the camera suspended as though on an invisible shelf, Glenn went on with other work, then reached back and plucked the camera out of the air. Only once was there any difficulty. Preparing to change film, Glenn let the roll slip out of his fingers. He grabbed for it, but "instead of clamping onto it, I batted it and it went sailing off around behind the instrument panel, and that was the last I saw of it."

Soaring over the Indian Ocean, Glenn experienced his first nightfall in space. It was spectacular. "As the sun goes down, it's very white, brilliant light, and as it goes below the horizon you get a very bright orange color. Down close to the surface it pales out into sort of a blue, a darker blue, and then off into black." The stars were bright diamonds on black velvet. "If you've been out in the desert on a very clear, brilliant night when there's no moon and the stars just seem to jump out at you, that's just about the way they look."

As he approached Australia. Glenn radioed Astronaut Gordon Cooper in the tracking station at Muchea: "That was about the shortest day I've ever run into. Just to my right, I can see a big pattern of light, apparently right on the coast." The glow was the city of Perth, which had prepared-- a welcome for Glenn that was also a test of his night vision. Street lights were ablaze. Families turned on their porch lights, spread sheets out in the yard as reflectors. Taxi drivers flicked their lights on and off. When the lights were explained to him, Glenn radioed Cooper a grateful message: "Thank everybody for turning them on, will you?"

Then, in the first moments of dawn, Glenn saw a fantastic sight. At first he thought "that the capsule had gone up while I wasn't looking and that I was looking into nothing but a new star field. But this wasn't the case. There were thousands of little particles outside the cabin. They were a bright yellowish-green, about the size and intensity of a firefly on a real dark night. As far as I could look off to each side, I could see them."

Glenn speculated that the particles might be the cloud of needles the Air Force had tried to orbit last October* or that they might be snowflakes formed by the cooling of water vapor from his jet nozzles. But Glenn quickly rejected both theories. Best explanation of the phenomenon: the capsule was giving off electrically charged particles of water or gas vapor that were attracted to each other, built up the specks that Glenn saw. When Glenn later described the particles to George Rapp, a Project Mercury psychiatrist, he got the deadpan response: "What did they say. John?"

More Than a Sightseer. Throughout his thrilling day, John Glenn recorded the emotions and impressions of being the U.S.'s first tourist in orbital space. He had little sensation of speed. It was, he said, "about the same as flying in an airliner at, say, 30,000 feet, and looking down at clouds at 10,000 feet." During the daylight hours, he peered out his cabin window at the earth far below. Over California, he spotted part of the Imperial Valley to his left, and the Salton Sea; he could even pick out the irrigated acres around El Centro, where he once lived. Looking down on the Atlantic, he saw the Gulf Stream as a river of blue. Cabin temperature at one point went up to 108DEG, but Glenn was comfortable inside his separately cooled space suit.

During periods of darkness, he flicked on the tiny flashlights that were attached to the fingers of his gloves, directed the beams on his maps. He found he could urinate easily into the "motorman's pal," which was attached to the lining of his space suit. On his second orbit, he again ran into the field of luminous particles; he turned his capsule around at a 180DEG angle to see them better, but most of them were eventually lost in the glare of the sun.

But Astronaut Glenn's adventure involved far more than mere sightseeing in space. He encountered difficulties that turned his journey into a nightmare of suspense. Passing within radio range of Guaymas, Mexico, on his first orbit, his attitude control system began to act up. A small jet, designed to release hydrogen peroxide steam to keep the capsule in a stable position, was not working properly. The capsule, reported Glenn, "drifts off in yaw to the right at about one degree per second. It will go to 20 degrees and hold at that."

Flying by Wire. To return the capsule to its normal position, Glenn took over the controls himself and activated other jets. For most of the rest of the flight, Glenn had to "fly" the capsule either by hand, or by using a semi-automatic "fly-by-wire" system roughly akin in its operation to the power steering on an automobile. Because of this, Glenn had no time to perform many of the planned exercises and drills to see if he would become space-sick.

As he crossed the Pacific a second time, Glenn discovered that his gyroscopes were wandering. The erratic jets were making the capsule "roll" (turn on its horizontal axis). A similar roll in November's flight of the chimp named Enos had forced the men at Cape Canaveral to bring the capsule down after two orbits. But again, John Glenn was able to overcome the trouble manually.

Worrisome as it was, the problem with the attitude control system was nothing as compared with another threat. Just as Glenn was beginning his second orbit, an instrument panel in the Project Mercury Control Center at Canaveral picked up a warning that the Fiberglas heat shield on Friendship 7 had come ajar. If the shield were to separate before or during the capsule's re-entry into the earth's atmosphere, John Glenn would perish in a flash of flame.

One by one, other tracking stations picked up the ominous signal. At the Cape, Project Mercury officials huddled tensely, trying to decide what to do. The answer might mean life or searing death to John Glenn. The final decision was made by Operations Director Walter Williams: an attempt would be made to hold the heat shield in place by changing the re-entry procedure. The retrorocket packet was supposed to be jettisoned after the rockets themselves had been fired. But the packet itself was bound to the capsule by three thin metal bands. Williams figured that the bands might be strong enough to hold the shield to the capsule during the descent. He knew that the heat would eventually burn away the straps, but he hoped that by that time the air resistance would be dense enough to hold the shield in place.

Not So Sure. The TV and radio audiences were told by Lieut. Colonel John ("Shorty") Powers, press chief of Project Mercury (see PRESS) that there had been "an indication of a problem with the heat shield deployment switch. The signal apparently was erroneous." But at the time, neither the men on the ground nor the astronaut in the sky were so sure that the signal was wrong.

Glenn took the news of the deadly threat with characteristic calmness. He made the adjustments necessary to keep the retrorocket packet in place, hand-flew his capsule into proper attitude for descent--and braced himself. Timed by a preset mechanism in the capsule, the braking rockets fired in sequence. Friendship 7 shuddered. "It feels like I'm going clear back to Hawaii," Glenn radioed. He could feel his body beginning to be squeezed by the buildup of G forces. Outside the window, he could see a fiery glow. It grew brighter and brighter. "It became apparent that something was tearing up the heat shield end of the capsule." Glenn said later. "There were large pieces anywhere from as big as the end of your finger to seven or eight inches in diameter that were coming past the window. You could see the fire and the glow from them --big flaming chunks."

On the ground. Astronaut Alan Shepard, the capsule communicator at Cape Canaveral, lost radio contact with Glenn. At the same time, other instruments tracking the capsule stopped registering. The blackout was predictable, caused by ionization from the heat of reentry. It lasted for seven minutes and 15 seconds. Then came John Glenn's exultant voice. "Boy!" he cried. "That was a real fireball!"

Glenn had made it. As it later turned out, Glenn's heat shield had been in place all along; a monitor in the capsule had been flashing a misleading signal to the ground. But John Glenn could not be certain that he was safe until he saw that the parachute which would lower his capsule gently into the Atlantic had opened. Said he the next day: "That's probably the prettiest of sight you ever saw in your life."

At 2:43 p.m., Friendship 7 splashed into the Atlantic with a sizzle as the red-hot shield turned the sea water to steam. Surging ahead at flank speed, the destroyer Noa* began to race helicopters from the carrier Randolph to the scene. The Noa won, plucked the capsule out of the ocean at 3:01. Across the U.S., the TV audience sagged weakly with relief.

Still trying to follow the flight plan, Glenn struggled for a moment to get out from the narrow upper exit of the capsule. But the capsule was stifling from the heat of reentry. "I'd been sweating for a long period of time," Glenn recalled, "and it seemed like the thing to do was to get on out of there at that time." He blew the side hatch, stepped out onto the deck of the Noa into the afternoon sun and was given a glass of iced tea. "It was hot in there," said John Glenn. His historic flight was over.

*Aim of the Air Force project was to encircle the globe with a band made up of 350 million tiny copper wires, which could be used as a reflector to relay radio messages. Nothing has since been seen of the wires. *Named for Loveman Noa, a 23-year-old midshipman, who was killed in 1901 near Leyte in the Philippines while fighting insurgents.

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