​

Catching Up

v1.1.1 / chapter 14 of 26 / 01 apr 13 / greg goebel / public domain

* Yuri Gagarin's pioneering flight around the Earth had been a great propaganda victory for the Soviet Union and a corresponding embarrassment for the United States. However, the Americans were pushing ahead on plans for a Moon landing over the long run, and were also working hard to get more American astronauts into orbit and close the gap with the USSR.

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[14.1] PLANNING FOR THE MOON: THE SATURN V
[14.2] PLANNING FOR THE MOON: LUNAR ORBIT RENDEZVOUS
[14.3] LIBERTY BELL 7 (GRISSOM) / VOSTOK 2 (TITOV)
[14.4] FRIENDSHIP 7 (GLENN)

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[14.1] PLANNING FOR THE MOON: THE SATURN V

* Kennedy's "green light" on the Moon shot led to another flurry of space planning activities, including an intense debate in NASA and other US organizations involved in space activities on the best way to get to the Moon and back again.

Up to that time, the basic assumption was the straightforward one that the huge Nova booster then under consideration would lift off on its eight big F-1 engines to send a space vehicle directly to land on the Moon. Once the lunar explorers were done with their work there, they would get back in the vehicle and blast off back to Earth. Most of the planners assumed the vehicle would go into lunar orbit first to prepare for landing, but JPL's William Pickering suggested it might be more economical to simply drop straight down to the Moon, using retrorockets to brake to a landing. Max Faget commented dryly on this idea: "I thought that would be a pretty unhappy day if, when you lit up the rockets, they didn't light."

Whatever the specifics, however, building the big Nova promised to be too expensive and time-consuming to allow America to reach the Moon before the end of the decade. There were two other concerns. First, destruction of such a huge booster on the pad might result in severe damage to the launch complex. Second, direct ascent meant landing a vehicle of the same order of size and complexity as, say, an Atlas on the Moon and getting it off again without any launch service crew. Seen from that point of view, it seemed impractical.

The prospects for direct ascent gradually dimmed. A smaller booster would have to be built, possibly with four F-1 engines instead of eight, with the Moon vehicle launched into orbit with two boosters and then assembled once in space. This scheme became known as "Earth orbit rendezvous (EOR)". It eliminated the need for the Nova super-booster, but assembling the Moonship in Earth orbit was going to be complicated, and it still left the problem of putting a big spacecraft down on the Moon's surface and getting it back up again.

* While the debate went on over how best to reach the Moon, von Braun let out requests for proposals for the Moon rocket's second stage, the "S-II". Even though nobody had decided on the configuration of the first stage yet, that was no reason not to get moving on the rest of the booster. A North American team won the bid in September 1961. The team was led by Harrison Storms, who had been responsible for the X-15.

North American's design for the S-II second stage used five LOX-LH2 J-2 engines, the same engine that was to be used on the second stage of the Saturn booster then under development, to deliver a total of 4,455 kgp (454,000 kgp / 1 million lbf) thrust. The North American S-II design managed to reduce weight by the clever approach of relying on the fact that the propellant tanks would become stronger when filled with their supercold fluids.

That same September, von Braun set up a meeting of industry officials at Huntsville to consider the complete Moon rocket, which he called "Advanced Saturn". He believed that the Advanced Saturn would not only be useful for putting men on the Moon, but would be employed as a "space truck", able to put a payload the size of a loaded railroad freight car into orbit. A Boeing official named George Stoner went back home to consider what sort of first stage would be required.

* Then events began to move very rapidly, echoing the flurry of activity that had led to the creation of America's long-range missiles a few years earlier. The first launch of the Saturn booster, now referred to as "Saturn I" to distinguish it from the Advanced Saturn, was on 27 October 1961, with the vehicle fitted with dummy upper stages. The test was a success, the booster flying almost 400 kilometers (250 miles) downrange from Cape Canaveral. A month later, in late November 1961, North American won the contract for the Apollo Moon vehicle itself. North American was now the leading contractor for the Apollo program.

Meanwhile, industry design teams were working on the Advanced Saturn concept. Stoner's team at Boeing came up with a first stage that used five F-1 engines and submitted it. This design actually dovetailed closely with the thinking of Milt Rosen, who had built Viking for the NRL and was now the NASA director of launch systems. In March 1961, even before JFK's "Moon speech" in May, Rosen had suggested a super-booster with five F-1 engines instead of four, and had converted a senior Huntsville engineer named William Mrasek to the cause. The two then made their case to von Braun, Rosen pointing out that the fifth engine could be mounted on the centerpoint of the crossbeams needed to support a four-engine configuration.

Von Braun informed Boeing on 14 December 1961 that the company had been selected to build 24 Advanced Saturn boosters, with the vehicle now referred to as the "Saturn V", with the "five" indicating the number of engines instead of a sequence. No Saturn II, III, or IV would ever fly, though there were a bewildering range of proposals for Saturn variants that would never be built.

During that same timeframe, another contract was issued to Douglas for the third stage for the Saturn V, the "S-IVB", which would be an updated version of the S-IV second stage that Douglas was building for the Saturn I. The S-IVB would use a single, powerful J-2 engine instead of the six RL-10 Centaur engines of the S-IV.

BACK_TO_TOP

[14.2] PLANNING FOR THE MOON: LUNAR ORBIT RENDEZVOUS

* Now almost all the major pieces for the Moon shot had taken shape. Boeing would build the first stage for the Saturn V, while North American provided the S-II second stage and Douglas provided the S-IVB third stage. Implementation was proceeding, with the pieces for the F-1 "super engine" coming together, and an initial static test firing of the J-2 in January 1962.

There was one last big hurdle to overcome. Even though North American had the contract for the Apollo lunar vehicle, there was still an ongoing debate on what it would look like. So far, the plans for the Moon shot had implied EOR. There was a competing alternative, however, known as "lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR)", whose most active proponent was a NASA-Langley official named John Houbolt -- though it apparently had been originally proposed by a Vought engineer named Thomas Dolan.

Houbolt had been infected with the idea in May 1960 during a discussion with a colleague. In LOR, the entire lunar spacecraft would be shot into orbit on a single large booster, but this lunar spacecraft would consist of a "mother ship" and a "landing craft". The landing craft would be used to drop part of the crew to the Moon while the mother ship stayed in lunar orbit. When the lunar explorers were done with the mission, they would use the landing craft to return to the mother ship and then head for Earth. This partition of functions cut the amount of mass that would actually land on the Moon to a minimum, and so reduced the mass of the entire lunar spacecraft so that, as it turned out, it could be launched by a single super-booster along the lines of what would take shape in the near future as the Saturn V.

LOR was elegant from an engineering standpoint. The major drawback was that it presented a major risk to the Moon travelers. With EOR, if something went wrong and the rendezvous couldn't be completed, the astronauts could probably be recovered safely. With LOR, if something went wrong and the rendezvous couldn't be completed, the Moon explorers were doomed.

Houbolt still felt that LOR was the way to go. He was pushy and aggressive in lobbying the idea to other senior NASA officials. He went to work on Bob Gilruth of the STG. Gilruth didn't like it at first, since he was holding out for direct ascent, but once Gilruth accepted the fact that direct ascent simply wasn't going to happen, he found LOR much more attractive than EOR. Max Faget became a convert to LOR as well.

Robert Seamans, an associate administrator at NASA headquarters, was very interested in the development of space rendezvous technology for a wide range of applications, and was keeping an open mind on the relative merits of EOR and LOR for the Moon mission. Seamans reasonably formed a committee, under his assistant Nicholas Golovin, to choose between the two. Golovin's committee released their recommendations in November 1961. The recommendations pointed out that LOR definitely had advantages, but concluded that EOR was the way to go.

Houbolt didn't take this lying down and kept pushing the case for LOR on Seamans. Seamans was irritated at first at Houbolt bypassing the chain of command, but then decided that Houbolt had a point; Seamans didn't become a convert, but he offered to give both rendezvous schemes a serious hearing in mission studies. Von Braun, in keeping with his technological conservatism, was initially firmly in the EOR camp, but the LOR faction kept at him and made him a true believer. Von Braun publicly endorsed LOR in June 1962, and NASA announced the decision to use LOR on 11 July.

That might have seemed to clinched the matter, but one powerful opponent of LOR still remained standing: JFK's science adviser, Jerome Weisner. Weisner tended to butt heads with NASA, having made no friends in the agency when Mercury was coming together by lobbying for an extensive set of chimp flights before sending up a man. In fact, Weisner wasn't enthusiastic about manned spaceflight, or for that matter all that excited about spaceflight in general. He felt that pumping money into spaceflight would rob other scientific research of funds, but he had failed to promote serious opposition to NASA in the scientific community because Jim Webb had made sure that agency generosity extended over a wide range of scientific organizations.

In any case, Weisner had persuaded Golovin to work for him, and the two men launched a strong challenge to LOR. Kennedy visited the Marshall Space Flight Center in September 1962 and got a pitch from von Braun on the merits of LOR. JFK heard him out, and then said: "I understand Dr. Weisner doesn't agree with this. Where is Jerry?" The president had the two men argue their views in front of reporters until Kennedy politely ended the debate, saying that the decision was really Jim Webb's. Since Webb had already become a believer in LOR, that decision had already been made. Weisner must have felt he'd been had.

NASA issued a contract to Grumman for the Moon landing craft, which would be named the "lunar excursion module (LEM)", in November 1962. The general blueprint for Apollo was now in place, though it would be some time before anyone would give Houbolt much credit for it. He had made himself unpopular with his confrontational style and it would be some time before the realization set in that Houbolt was right, even if had been obnoxious about it.

* That blueprint had a faintly preposterous feel to it. This was illustrated by a story that was published much later, in the form of a fictitious rejection letter from the publisher of a 1930s pulp science-fiction magazine to a would-be science fiction writer. The publisher criticized the story submission as much too outlandish, since it envisioned a Moon mission performed by a huge rocket built in big pieces that would simply be discarded, one by one, as the rocket climbed into space, with the ultimate payload being only a small spaceship. And that spaceship didn't even land on the Moon itself, but sent down a smaller landing craft, which would be discarded after bringing back the landing team. Even the little spaceship would be thrown away after returning to Earth.

The publisher concluded that no reader of his magazine could possibly believe such a ridiculous scheme. In reality, under the circumstances, not even the best and the brightest could think up anything better. The story demonstrated how much more difficult space flight was proving to be compared to the technically glib fantasies of 1930s and 1940s science fiction writers. In 1950, Robert Heinlein might have imagined a businessman selling a Moon shot, but in 1962 the reality was that no business had the capability, or for that matter the reason, to take on such a project.

To be sure, given enough time and effort, a "space infrastructure" could be built that would greatly lower the cost of sending an individual to the Moon. That was understood then, and in fact highly precise details of such an infrastructure were depicted in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, which was carefully based on space technology concepts in vogue at the time, and which was based on a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, who collaborated with Kubrick on the screenplay. Kubrick's Moon traveler in the year 2001, Dr. Heywood Floyd, rode a Pan-American Orion spaceplane to orbit, where it docked with a huge space station in the form of a double rotating wheel. From there, Dr. Floyd took a ball-shaped lunar shuttle to the Moon, where it set down a landing pad to be lowered into a huge underground lunar base.

There was absolutely no possibility of building such an infrastructure given either the budget or, more particularly, the schedule granted to the Moon landing. Von Braun wanted to build a space infrastructure, in fact had envisioned one in detail in the 1950s COLLIER'S space program that was an ancestor of that portrayed in the movie 2001, but he knew that under the circumstances if he wanted to get men on the Moon, he would have to do it quick and comparatively dirty. In any case, the tools being developed for the job, such as the Saturn V, could be expected to be useful over the longer term as well.

* EOR and LOR weren't the only schemes being floated for the Moon mission. JPL's Pickering had lobbied for an idea known as "lunar surface rendezvous (LSR)", in which a series of relatively small robot cargo-carriers would be soft-landed on the Moon with fuel and supplies. A Moon-return vehicle would then soft-land and be loaded up with the fuel and supplies by teleoperated robots. Once all that was done, astronauts would fly to the Moon using a one-way vehicle, and then take the waiting Moon-return vehicle back home.

The advantage of this approach, as Pickering saw it, was that it would allow the mission to be performed with relatively small boosters. Although LSR seemed superficially intriguing, the problem with it was obvious: it was much too complicated given the technology available. In fact, it reflected the excessive technological optimism then fashionable at JPL, which would soon be deflated by harsh realities.

Pickering's LSR concept was at least plausible, but a number of industry engineers, including E.J. Daniels of Lockheed, and John Cord and Leonard Seale of Bell Aerosystems, went off the deep end when they proposed a variation on LSR that reversed the sequence: instead of setting up a return vehicle on the Moon to wait for astronauts to arrive, the astronauts would be sent to the Moon and kept supplied by cargo vessels until a return vehicle could be built and sent. This would get astronauts to the Moon as quickly as possible, but it was the sort of scheme that most Americans of the time would have credited to the evil ruthless Soviets. There was no way the US would do such a thing, and the proposal was never taken seriously.

BACK_TO_TOP

[14.3] LIBERTY BELL 7 (GRISSOM) / VOSTOK 2 (TITOV)

* While NASA and the aerospace industry put their heads together on going to the Moon, manned spaceflight launches continued. At 7:20 AM Eastern US time on the morning of 21 July 1961, "Gruff Gus" Grissom lifted off from Cape Canaveral in "Liberty Bell 7", on top of a Redstone booster.

Liberty Bell 7 featured some improvements over Shepard's Freedom 7, including a large window along with the periscope, and an escape hatch that could be blown off in an emergency with a detonating plunger to give the occupant a better chance of survival. Both were features added at the insistence of the astronaut corps. In addition, NASA had learned from Shepard's sanitation problems in Freedom 7, and Grissom was fitted with a urine collector system. Grissom would later report that it "worked as advertised".

The Mercury capsule performed its arc into the sky and then splashed down into the Atlantic. The mission had gone perfectly to this time, but when the recovery helicopter arrived to pick up Grissom and the capsule, the escape hatch blew off and water started flooding into the spacecraft. Grissom floundered out of the hatch into the ocean while the recovery team tried to grab the capsule.

The capsule took on too much water and sank in deep ocean. The same almost happened to Grissom; the recovery team had focused on the capsule since Grissom seemed to be waving to them that he was fine, but in reality his space suit was slowly flooding, dragging him down, and he was frantic to get their attention so they'd pull him out of the drink. He was finally thrown a rescue collar and winched into the helicopter, sputtering angry remarks at the recovery crew. Procedures would be changed so that recovery of the astronaut would be first priority on following missions; inflatable flotation gear would also be added to the suit kit.

Grissom swore that he hadn't hit the detonating plunger. There was some public skepticism at this claim, though since the Mercury capsule was far from a well-proven system the idea that some spontaneous system fault might have blown off the hatch was not out of the question. In addition, the plunger had to be hit hard to blow the hatch, hard enough to leave a bruise. Not only could no one see how it could be done by accident, but Grissom had no bruise on his hands, and such a blunder was out of character for a professional like him. In any case, with the capsule at the bottom of the ocean -- it wasn't recovered until 1999 -- there was no way to check for bugs. The flight itself had gone very well, and so the next manned Mercury flight would be around the Earth.

* The Soviets were not standing still while the Americans prepared for their manned orbital shot. On 6 August 1961, they launched Gherman Titov into orbit in "Vostok 2" from Baikonur.

Although the cosmonauts' "mother hen", General Kamanin, and physicians associated with the manned spaceflight program wanted to limit the mission to three orbits -- the physiological effects of long-duration spaceflight were entirely unknown at the time -- Korolyev insisted on a day-long mission, with Titov performing a total of 16 orbits. Such a flight would allow a full evaluation of such functions as eating, dealing with body wastes, and sleeping. Some Soviet doctors were wondering if it would even be possible to wake someone up if they fell asleep in zero gravity. Kamanin protested that a long-duration mission would be rash, but Korolyev was confident and wanted to move ahead quickly.

Titov reached orbit without troubles, and checked in with the ground controllers with his callsign: "This is Oryel (Eagle)!". He found the view as spectacular as had Gagarin, taking pictures of the Earth with handheld Zritel cameras, with the pictures being useful both for general publicity and to provide a "teaser" for military officers anxiously waiting for the Zenit spy satellites. He ate meals, consisting mostly of purees in tubes, along with candies and chunks of bread and sausage, washed down with fruit juice or cold coffee with milk. He had been living on the same for the previous few days back on the ground but he hadn't learned to like it, calling the food "joyless".

As if to confirm the worries of Kamanin and the others, Titov also became spacesick on his fifth orbit, though he didn't vomit and struggled on with his mission. While it was announced that the cosmonaut felt "excellent", he later admitted that "maybe I shouldn't have called my mood exactly excellent." He did keep up with the scheduled tasks, including exercise, and used the toilet facilities with no great difficulty. After the seventh orbit, he took a nap, finding sleep in zero gee very comfortable. Ground controllers called to wake him up after the 13th orbit but he didn't respond immediately, making them worry that the worse fears had come true. He finally roused and said that he was feeling much better.

When he began the reentry procedure after the 16th orbit, the instrument module tagged along for a bit and then separated. He watched the fireball around him through the viewport, and then ejected, landing in a field in the same region where Gagarin had come down in April. A peasant asked him if he was the Titov that the radio had been talking about, and Titov told the fellow that he was.

The Soviets had achieved another space spectacular, one that helped overshadow one of the high-water marks of the Cold War, the construction of the Berlin Wall. Krushchev had ordered the East German government to begin work on 6 August, the same day Titov was blasted into orbit. However, although Titov's flight had trumped the US once again, the Americans got a bit of satisfaction out of it as well. Titov had lost communications with ground control during part of his flight, and so Soviet long-range search radars were turned on to make sure the Vostok capsule was still on track. The GRAB 1 SIGINT satellite was over the USSR at the time, and the intelligence haul was substantial.

The mission had gone well, except for Titov's spacesickness. The authorities were very worried, and intensive biomedical tests were performed to ensure that the program was not up against a roadblock. They weren't; both sides would learn that "space adaptation syndrome (SAS)", as spacesickness became known, was common and that it would almost always pass after about 48 hours in orbit.

As it turned out, Titov would not fly in space again, but at least he had achieved his moment of glory. As for future missions, cosmonauts were instructed to report they were "observing thunderstorms" if they were spacesick, lest the world get the idea that they didn't quite have the "right stuff".

That was the end of Vostok shots for the time being, however. Although Korolyev was pushing for a "group flight" of several Vostoks to follow Titov's flight, for the moment the priority was to get the Zenit spy satellite operational. A Zenit was much like a Vostok and was of course launched by the Vostok-type booster; since there was only one launch facility available at the time to launch such a booster, that meant that manned flights had to be suspended. Korolyev had managed to sell his manned space program as a complement to a space reconnaissance program, but the linkage between the two efforts worked both ways.

There wouldn't be another Vostok flight for about a year. The American FISHBOWL high-altitude nuclear tests during the period provided a convenient cover story for the lapse, with the Soviets announcing after the shots in July 1962 that they would suspend manned flights until the radiation died down.

BACK_TO_TOP

[14.4] FRIENDSHIP 7 (GLENN)

* The Soviets could well afford to take a year off, since they were clearly ahead of the Americans in manned space launches. They had sent Titov into orbit for a full day, while the US hadn't done more than pop two astronauts up into the sky and down into the Atlantic. NASA had originally wanted to send all of the Mercury 7 on Redstone shots as training, but after Titov's flight any further rinky-dink suborbital flights were simply out of the question. Shepard and Grissom insisted that there was no particular reason to take a suborbital shot before riding an Atlas.

NASA was moving fast to catch up. The agency was putting the finishing touches on the worldwide tracking and communications network for the orbital mission. Work on what would become the "Manned Spaceflight Network (MSN)" had begun in mid-1959, with the complete MSN nominally in full operation by early 1961. Network stations included:

• Muchea & Woomera, Australia
• Canton Island
• Kauai, Hawaii
• Vandenberg AFB, California
• Guaymas, Mexico
• White Sands, New Mexico
• Corpus Christi, Texas
• Eglin AFB & Cape Canaveral, Florida
• Bermuda
• Grand Canary Island
• Kano, Nigeria
• Zanzibar

Some of the stations were extremely isolated, and in some cases located in harsh environments. The staffs tended to be young, independent, resourceful, and not always tactful. When the Nigeria station described the rough conditions -- impoverished people, ineffective government, dust storms, suffocating heat -- in a teletype report, the Nigerians read it and were outraged. They demanded and got an apology.

The network also included a number of unmanned relay stations, and two tracking ships used by the Air Force Atlantic Missile Range, the ROSE KNOT VICTOR and COASTAL SENTRY QUEBEC, were updated to add their weight to the network. They could be relocated to any ocean location to plug gaps in the coverage.

Flight telemetry with the Mercury was encrypted. The Soviets always had a converted trawler bristling with antennas idling about in the ocean in international waters near Cape Canaveral during launches, and in the paranoid Cold War environment nobody was too sure just how far the "other side" would go to trip up a rival. It was only too easy to imagine the Soviets breaking in on the command telemetry and sending an abort command to the Atlas or raising other kinds of hell.

Chris Kraft was building up his Mission Control staff to handle the orbital flights. All of Kraft's people were scrambling to get things working. One of the relatively recent hires was Gene Kranz, a buzzcut ex-Air Force fighter pilot and military-minded to the core, who would play a high-profile role in the future. Kranz found the environment a bit outside of his experience. On his initial arrival, he was given a lift from nearby Patrick AFB by a laid-back fellow in highly casual clothes who people were saluting. He drove like a maniac, identifying himself to the terrorized Kranz as "Gordo Cooper". The astronauts would nickname Kranz "General Savage", and to his annoyance the word would go around that he had been a Marine.

* While astronauts were riding Redstones, work went forward on an orbital launch with the Atlas booster. The first attempt to launch a boilerplate Mercury capsule on an Atlas, designated "Mercury Atlas 1 (MA-1)", on 29 July 1960 had been lost, with the after-action analysis suggesting it had been because the thin-walled Atlas had ruptured due to vibrations set up by a mechanical resonance with the "payload adapter" that was used to fit the capsule to the booster. NASA implemented a band that was strapped around the upper part of the booster to provide the necessary reinforcement.

That took some time, and so "MA-2" wasn't launched until 21 February 1961. It was a suborbital shot, with the unmanned Mercury capsule splashing down in the South Atlantic and being recovered. The next step was to put one into orbit, and the following shot, "MA-3", was performed on 13 April 1961, only to go straight up instead of curving out over the Atlantic. Whatever went straight up was likely to come straight down, so the booster was ordered to self-destruct less than a minute into flight.

Such failures raised the pressure on NASA staff, since the Soviets seemed to be all but unbeatable for the moment. However, "MA-4" was launched on 13 September 1961, orbited the Earth, and was successfully recovered. On 29 November, a chimp named "Enos" rode "MA-5" into orbit. At a press conference, JFK drew laughs from the reporters, and no doubt pained groans from the Mercury 7 astronauts, when the president announced that Enos "reports that everything is perfect and working well."

Enos was supposed to complete three orbits, but there were problems with the capsule's attitude control system and so he was brought down after two. Although Enos had some problems in orbit, with the electric system giving him constant shocks and driving him to such a frenzy that he bloodied himself, he was recovered safely. Although Enos didn't have a reputation for being very affectionate, noted for his unwillingness to suffer fools gladly, he was glad to be back -- even jumping up into his handler's arms when he got out of the capsule -- and posed as casually as a movie star for photographs.

A small satellite designed to test the Mercury communications and tracking network was launched on 1 November 1961, but the Scout booster went out of control less than a minute after launch and was destroyed by range safety. There was no time to launch a second one.

* On being asked who would follow Enos into orbit, Robert Gilruth named John Glenn and Scott Carpenter, with Deke Slayton and Wally Schirra as their corresponding backups. That put the spotlight on Glenn, taking on the Soviet lead in manned spaceflight by riding one of the rockets that the papers reported were always blowing up. Von Braun chimed in to the theatrics, expressing his disdain for the Atlas by half-joking: "John Glenn is going to ride on that contraption? He should be getting a medal just for sitting on top of it before he takes off!"

NASA had hoped to perform the launch of "MA-6" before the end of December, but to the public's frustration delays cropped up. Bob Gilruth had a near fanatical concern with the well-being of the astronauts, getting physically sick with worry on occasions, and would not compromise with their safety. JFK, under interrogation by reporters, sensibly replied that he would not second-guess the judgements of the people who were responsible for the flight.

There was a launch attempt on 27 January, with Glenn sitting in the capsule for over five hours before it was scrubbed because the clouds refused to break. It was a disappointment, and it also led to some friction. Glenn's family lived in Arlington, Virginia, in the Washington DC metropolitan area, which left them too close to politicians. LIFE writer Loudon Wainright was there with Annie Glenn when Vice President Johnson, a politician to the core, called Annie to tell her he was going to visit, adding that he was going to bring in a TV crew and other reporters, and that Wainright should leave. John Glenn had just got out of his spacesuit when Annie phoned him and asked for guidance; he told her that he would back up anything she decided. She decided that Wainright was welcome and that LBJ wasn't, leading to a general round of bad humor.

Henri Landwirth was also inconvenienced by the delays, since he had created a cake that was in the shape of a full-sized Mercury capsule to honor the flight. He had to keep it in an air-conditioned truck that idled day and night to keep it from spoiling.

* On 20 February 1962, Glenn was packed into the Mercury capsule "Friendship 7", and this time the countdown went to zero. Glenn rode the Mercury capsule "Friendship 7" on an Atlas into orbit with a near-perfect launch from Cape Canaveral, in front of 50,000 spectators on nearby beaches and a hundred million television viewers watching live around the world. Although the Atlas wobbled a bit as it climbed into space as its guidance system shifted back and forth to keep it on track, the capsule made it into orbit without trouble. CAPCOM Al Shepard told him: "You are GO for seven orbits."

Glenn felt fine, admiring the tremendous view of the Earth and the slowly spinning spent Atlas stage through the capsule's window. He noticed sparkling "fireflies" that seemed to circulate around the capsule, their quantity spurting if he banged on the hull. The fireflies would be seen on other missions, and were eventually found to be crystals of frozen fluids from the launch system that had stuck to the capsule. He kept up a running commentary with the CAPCOMs who had been distributed around the world to act as his ground contacts.

The Mercury capsule's automatic attitude control system malfunctioned and Glenn had to take manual control, no doubt relieved that the astronauts had insisted on this capability. Then, to make matters much, much worse, telemetry indicated that the heat shield was loose and that only thing that was keeping it in place were the straps that held the retrorocket pack on. That meant that Friendship 7 might well burn up on re-entry.

Glenn was ordered to check the status of the heatshield; everything looked fine to him as far as the capsule's indicators were concerned, and he had not noticed any shifting of the space capsule that would indicate something heavy was loose and moving around. At first, he thought Mission Control linked the fireflies to some shifting of the heatshield and was just running checks, but soon it became obvious that something else was on their minds. He was ordered to bring the capsule down after three orbits.

The mission team suggested that the retrorocket pack not be jettisoned after being used to perform the "deorbit burn". The pack and the straps would quickly burn away, but as long as the spacecraft kept the proper orientation, re-entry pressures would keep the shield in place. Max Faget, the father of the Mercury capsule, agreed with the plan, but pointed out that it involved another risk. If all the retrorockets in the pack did not fire, the unexpended fuel would explode once the reentry temperatures reached a high enough level, destroying the capsule.

Chris Kraft was against leaving the retrorocket pack on: after all, Glenn had reported there was nothing wrong. Not only did Kraft fear the pack might explode, despite Faget's assurances that it should burn completely, but he worried that the pack might cause the capsule to tumble during reentry, incinerating it and Glenn. Simply put, the cure was worse than the disease, all the more so because it went against all of Kraft's training and experience to select an option that hadn't been evaluated beforehand. Although Kraft's work as Flight Controller was final, Walt Williams and Max Faget managed to persuade him to go along and leave the retropack on.

Glenn was instructed to complete his third orbit and then come down. He fired the retrorockets, all of them igniting, and then fell back towards Earth. He placed the capsule in a 10 RPM spin to stabilize it and watched chunks of the depleted retrorocket pack stream past his window, making him worry that they were actually part of the heatshield and he would be dead in instants. He reported to Mission Control: "That's a real fireball outside."

Finally the parachute deployed, and Glenn splashed down into the sea. The bug later turned out to be with the flight telemetry and not the heatshield, leading Chris Kraft to resolve that he would never agree to an unplanned, dodgy procedure during a mission again. Glenn and the capsule were recovered without further trouble, and came back home to a hero's welcome. He had public praise for the entire mission team, though he had private criticisms for Mission Control's reluctance to explain the heatshield problem to him. He was a test pilot, after all, trained to cope with emergencies, and it made no sense to withhold vital information from him.

Glenn had been frustrated by losing the first space shot and wasn't happy about being third, but it couldn't have turned out better for him. Shepard's flight was basically seen as a curtain-raiser, Grissom's flight was just a follow-up; orbiting the Earth was the main act.

* Since there had been no reasonable way for Glenn to get life insurance for his flight, Leo DeOrsey had written out a check for $100,000 payable to Annie Glenn should her husband not make it back safely. After the landing of Friendship 7, DeOrsey told Glenn: "Boy, am I glad to see you." DeOrsey kept his $100,000. President Kennedy showed up at Cape Canaveral to give Glenn and Bob Gilruth the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. Henri Landwirth then unveiled his huge cake, asking Glenn how it tasted. Glenn said: "It tasted fine, Henri."

He seemed relieved: "It's over a month old. I made it when everybody thought you were going up before. You wouldn't believe what I had to do to keep it fresh."

"I didn't say it tasted fresh."

Glenn and his family spent a little time in privacy at the US Navy base at Key West, and then they flew to Washington with President Kennedy and his family in Air Force One. JFK introduced his daughter Caroline to Glenn, but the little girl was disappointed, asking: "But where's the monkey?"

Glenn addressed a joint session of the US Congress, then went to New York to be given a ticker-tape parade. He met Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, the president's brother, and gave a barbecue for Gherman Titov, who was on a visit to the US. Through the whole media frenzy he stayed as cool as if he were taking an experimental aircraft to the edge of its envelope, remaining genial, modest, and articulate.

Not everybody bought Glenn's act. Chris Kraft of Mission Control had dealings with Glenn back his NACA days, when the two were getting the bugs out of the Vought Crusader naval fighter. After various confrontations between the two strong-willed men, Kraft concluded that Glenn's "head was up and locked", a reference to retraction of aircraft landing gear applied to human anatomy. The two eventually got on better terms, and Kraft, as head of Mission Control, had been genuinely concerned for Glenn's safety during the troublesome reentry. However, Kraft had noted with no great pleasure Glenn's organizational lobbying to be the first American in space, and when that failed to be the first American in orbit.

As it turned out, Glenn was a politician at heart. NASA was reluctant to fly him again; Glenn heard rumors that JFK didn't want to risk him, but for whatever reason nobody would promise him another flight. He resigned from NASA in early 1964 and, at the urging of Bobby Kennedy, went to his home state of Ohio to run for the US Senate. Glenn was forced to give up the race after he suffered a nasty fall in the bathroom, hitting his head and suffering from inner ear and balance problems that would linger for over two years. The political campaign left him almost penniless, but he had a name worth gold: he quickly got a job as an executive for Royal Crown Cola. He would be back on the campaign trail in 1974, running for the same seat, and this time he won. He remained one of the senators from Ohio for a quarter century.

Glenn tried to get the Democratic nomination for president in 1984 but lost to Walter Mondale, which was probably fortunate because Ronald Reagan, then at the height of his popularity, handed Mondale a humiliating thrashing in the polls. Failing in a presidential bid, a decade later Glenn did manage to achieve another one of his ambitions, a second space flight. He persistently lobbied NASA to perform a geriatric study in space and generously volunteered himself as a test subject. He returned to space on 29 October 1998, riding the NASA space shuttle Discovery to orbit.

* Glenn's flight of Friendship 7 had been conducted in the full glare of the media, and NASA was rewarded with enthusiastic publicity all around the world. Krushchev immediately ordered that Korolyev's "group flight" be conducted as quickly as possible. General Kamanin was disgusted, complaining about the haphazard planning of the Soviet space program in his diary: "This is the style of our leadership. They've been doing nothing for almost half a year and now they ask us to prepare an extremely complex mission in ten days' time, the program of which hasn't even been agreed upon."

Preparations went ahead, though of course the schedule was a fantasy. It was like trying to dictate terms to the laws of physics. On the surface, Glenn's flight hardly trumped Titov's, and the Vostok capsule was much more capable than the Mercury could ever be. However, in hindsight, from the organizational point of view the American civil space effort was far stronger, and it was only a matter of time before the US picked up speed and zoomed past the USSR.