- Forty years ago today, on the afternoon of February 20,
1962, a brilliant meteor streaked over the southeastern United States,
heading for the Atlantic Ocean. This was no ordinary "shooting
star," but a spacecraft called Friendship 7, carrying America's first
man in orbit, John Glenn, back to Earth if he survived. Mission
control had learned that Friendship 7's heat shield, Glenn's only protection
against the fiery passage into the atmosphere might be loose. No
one, including Glenn, knew if he would make it home alive.
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- It was a tension-packed finale to a triumphant day for
the United States. Just five hours earlier, Glenn had soared into
space atop an Atlas booster, achieving the goal of Project Mercury to put
a man in orbit, a feat the Soviet Union had achieved 10 months earlier.
Everyone knew that Atlas rockets had a nasty habit of blowing up, and Glenn's
successful arrival in space brought jubilation to NASA's mission control
in Cape Canaveral, and to an estimated 100 million Americans watching on
television. From Friendship 7 Glenn reported, "Zero-g and I
feel fine," as he began his orbital journey.
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- Circling the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour, Glenn flew
a path that varied 110 miles and a high point of 162 miles. Inside
Friendship 7, Glenn took in the view, which included a spectacular orbital
sunrise and sunset during each ninety-minute orbit. On the Earth
below he spotted dust storms in Africa and, as he flew through an orbital
night, the lights of Perth, Australia. And he spotted mysterious
glowing particles that he nicknamed "fireflies" hovering near
the spacecraft as he emerged from darkness into sunlight.
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- Then the trouble came. In mission control, at the
launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida, controllers noticed an indication
in the telemetry from Friendship 7 that the craft's landing bag, a device
designed to cushion the impact of splashdown, had deployed. If so,
it meant Friendship 7's heat shield was no longer firmly attached.
Controllers argued whether the signal might be erroneous; no one could
be certain.
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- But if it wasn't an error, what could be done to save
Glenn from incineration? Mercury's designer, engineer Max Faget,
suggested leaving the craft's retrorocket package attached during re-entry.
Normally the package, which was attached by three straps to the base of
the spacecraft, was to be cast loose just before the fiery plunge.
By leaving it on, controllers hoped, the straps would hold the heat shield
in place.
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- Over California on his third orbit, some four and a half
hours after lift-off, Glenn fired the retrorockets, which slowed the craft
with a series of firm jolts. Over Texas, Glenn got the word
that he was to leave the retropackage attached. And then he
waited.
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- As Friendship 7 slammed into the upper atmosphere Glenn
saw the black sky outside his window turn fiery orange. A glowing
sheath of ionized gas surrounded the plummeting craft, blocking communications
with Earth. Every so often chunks of glowing debris sped past; Glenn
wondered if he was witnessing the destruction of his heatshield.
He waited for a feeling of intense heat to build up at his back, but it
never came: The heatshield had worked; the signal had turned out
to be an error after all. The flaming chunks, he realized, must have
been pieces of the retropack. When communications resumed, Glenn
reported, "My condition is good, but that was a real fireball, boy."
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- And as Glenn splashed down safely in the Atlantic, it
was a resounding triumph for NASA. The mission had been a literal
baptism of fire, but now the space agency knew that humans could survive
and even enjoy spaceflight. And the flight left a lasting impression
with those who witnessed it on television, including a number of future
astronauts. Some of the men who walked on the moon say Glenn's flight
helped motivate them to become astronauts. And decades after Glenn
flew, astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle were still thinking back to that
historic mission.
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- "I can't tell you how many times the thought occurred
to me while we were sitting up there on orbit," says five-time shuttle
veteran Hoot Gibson. "I'd be sitting over in the commander's
seat on the left side of the cockpit. And I'd be looking across this
gigantic flight deck and looking out the forward windows at the Earth down
there 200 miles below, and thinking to myself, 'Wow, we have really got
it easy in this great big comfortable vehicle that we fly in space with.
Look at how much room we've got, look how we can move around, look how
capable it is. And think back to when they rode up here in those
little tiny Mercury capsules.' I always said, 'Boy, we have really
got it easy compared those guys that flew those little capsules up there.'"
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- Of course, flying the shuttle is hardly a piece of cake,
but it's easy to understand what Gibson is talking about. Mercury
was so tiny that Glenn's fellow astronaut Wally Schirra once quipped, "You
don't get into Mercury; you put it on." Friendship 7 had no
ability to change its orbit, and was designed to be flown automatically,
so its pilots had little in the way of real flying to do. And in
four decades, even as spacecraft have become more complex, getting into
orbit has become safer.
According to John Young, a six-time space flier and moonwalker who has
overseen safety aspects of space activities at NASA's Houston space center,
the odds of a shuttle blowing up and killing its crew are now down to 1
in 248 launches, thanks to safety modifications made in the wake of the
1986 Challenger disaster. That's compared with about 1 in 75
for Glenn's Atlas launcher, and 1 in 80 for the Saturn V moon rocket.
But as Young points out, space travel is still far riskier than, say, commercial
air travel: "The 777 [airliner] is 1 in a couple million," Young
says. "So that just tells you that the space shuttle is still
a developmental vehicle."
Young also cautions that the reliability estimates don't take into account
the aging of the shuttle fleet, which is expected to remain in service
for at least another 10 years, and possibly longer. Even now, post-flight
inspections of the shuttle orbiter have revealed corrosion, wiring problems,
and other signs of wear and tear, requiring painstaking inspections and
repairs. "Every time we fly, we discover something that, sometimes,
we wish we didn't know it," Young says. "But that's just
the way the business is."
And despite the continuing risks of their profession, astronauts still
say the experience of flying into space is worth it. "You're
on your way to the best ride in Disneyland," says Hoot Gibson.
As soon as he reached orbit on his first space mission in 1984, says Gibson,
"I remember thinking to myself two things, one of them being, 'Oh,
man, we made it! We made it all the way to cut-off!' And the
second one was, 'Wow! I wanna go do that again!' I hadn't been
there ten seconds, and I'm saying to myself, 'I wanna go do that again.'"
And unlike Glenn, who had to wait 36 years for his return to space, most
shuttle astronauts have racked up several trips into orbit. "Back
in the old days," says Hoot Gibson, "if you had an astronaut
that had flown three times, man, he was the incredible tsar of space.
That was really incredible to actually get to fly that many times, three
times. And you know I'll bet half of our astronaut corps has three
flights. And I got to go five times."
And unlike Glenn, who had no one to share his experience with but himself,
shuttle flights carry up to seven astronauts a fact that former astronaut
Jay Apt says was a distinct improvement. His first mission, Apt says,
"was tremendously enhanced by the fact that we were all close friends.
And we increased greatly each other's enjoyment of the experience of spaceflight.
So actually, I think it's much better than a solo flight. Being able
to share the experience just gets [everything] to a new level."
That's something Glenn found out for himself when he made a second spaceflight,
at age 77, aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1998. By that time,
NASA was poised to begin assembling the International Space Station, which
represents the immediate future of Americans in orbit. Right now,
with billions of dollars in budget overruns hanging over the station program,
that future is uncertain. But it's a sure bet that forty years from
now, whatever happens in space, Americans will still be looking back at
the historic flight of Friendship 7 as the moment when it all began.
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