Mercury-Atlas 6

• 1. Introduction

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  Mercury-Atlas 6 lifted off from Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on the 20th of February 1962, carrying John Glenn into orbit. It was the first time an American had circled the Earth, and it came at a moment when the United States had watched the Soviet Union send two cosmonauts around the planet first. The race was not just about technology. It was about who the world would see leading the way into space.

  The mission lasted 4 hours, 55 minutes, and 23 seconds. Glenn named his capsule Friendship 7, a word he chose because he was flying over every country on Earth and wanted that name to be his message. Before the flight was over, an instrument warned that his heat shield might be coming loose during reentry. Controllers debated in real time whether the spacecraft would survive. Glenn did not know the full extent of the alarm, but he knew something was wrong.

  How a single sensor reading nearly changed the outcome, why Glenn had to fly the spacecraft by hand for most of the mission, and what he saw outside his window that no one could explain until later: those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Getting Glenn to the Pad

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  Mercury spacecraft number 13 began taking shape on McDonnell's assembly line in St. Louis, Missouri, in May 1960. NASA chose it for the MA-6 mission in October of that year, and it arrived at Cape Canaveral on the 27th of August 1961. The Atlas rocket, designated number 109-D, reached the Cape on the evening of the 30th of November 1961.

  NASA had hoped to put an American in orbit before 1962, wanting to match the Soviet achievement within the same calendar year. By early December it was clear that would not happen. The hardware was not ready. At a press conference in early December, NASA's Robert Gilruth announced the crew selections. John H. Glenn would fly MA-6 as prime pilot. M. Scott Carpenter would serve as his backup. Donald K. Slayton and Walter M. Schirra were named for the following mission, Mercury-Atlas 7.

  Because no one outside the Soviet program knew what extended weightlessness actually did to the human body, Glenn flew with an onboard medical kit carrying morphine, a drug called mephentermine sulfate for shock symptoms, benzylamine hydrochloride for motion sickness, and racemic amphetamine sulfate as a stimulant. A survival kit rounded out the preparations, including shark chaser, signal mirrors, a PK-2 raft, a radio transceiver, and desalter kits for use after splashdown. MA-6 was also the first American spaceflight to include a dedicated urine collection device, a lesson drawn from the two previous crewed Mercury flights.

  Glenn also fought a quieter battle to bring a camera. NASA had resisted allowing cameras on flights, fearing they would distract astronauts. Glenn persuaded the agency to relent, and he bought a Minolta Hi-Matic 35mm film camera himself at a local drug store. The camera was modified to work with pressure suit gloves. During the flight, Glenn accidentally knocked a film canister and it floated away, ending up behind the instrument panel.

• 3. Naming Friendship 7

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  The name Friendship 7 came from a family conversation. Glenn sat down with his wife Annie and their children, and together they went through dictionaries and a thesaurus looking for possibilities. Glenn later recalled the process: "We played around with Liberty, Independence, a lot of them. The more I thought about it, the more I leaned toward the name Friendship. Flying around the world, over all those countries, that was the message I wanted to convey. In the end, that was the name the kids liked best, too. I was real proud of them."

  The number seven was not Glenn's invention. Alan Shepard had named his capsule Freedom 7 because it happened to be factory model number 7. The other astronauts found meaning in the symbol, and each one added a seven to their own spacecraft name afterward. Glenn's seven honored the original seven Mercury astronauts selected by NASA.

• 4. Nineteen Delays

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  The path to launch was not smooth. The first announced launch date was the 16th of January 1962, then pushed to the 20th when problems appeared in the Atlas rocket's fuel tanks. A faulty yaw gyro was found and replaced on the 13th of January. Weather then slipped the date day by day until the 27th of January.

  On that day, Glenn was already inside Friendship 7 when, at T-minus 29 minutes, flight director Walter Williams called off the launch. Thick clouds would have made it impossible to photograph the rocket after the first 20 seconds of flight. The inability to film a failed Mercury-Atlas launch some 16 months earlier had demonstrated exactly why clear skies mattered. Williams admitted he also felt a private sense of relief. There was still unease about whether the spacecraft and booster were truly ready.

  NASA set a new date of the 1st of February. On the 30th of January, technicians began fueling the Atlas and found a fuel leak that had soaked an internal insulation blanket between the RP-1 and LOX tanks. That caused a two-week delay for repairs. Weather scrubbed another attempt on the 14th of February. Conditions finally cleared by the 18th, and the 20th of February looked favorable.

  Before the Flight Safety Review Board cleared the mission, it reviewed twelve Atlas flights since Mercury-Atlas 5. Four had failed. Atlas 5F and Ranger 3 had guidance failures, but Mercury used a different guidance model. Atlas 6F and Samos 5 had random quality defects unlikely to recur on a more closely supervised program. The board gave its approval.

  On launch day itself, Glenn boarded Friendship 7 at 11:03 UTC, then waited while crews replaced a faulty component in the Atlas guidance system. Bolting the hatch caused a 42-minute delay when one of the 70 hatch bolts was found to be broken. A liquid oxygen valve repair added another 25-minute hold. Engineer T. J. O'Malley finally pressed the launch button at 14:47 UTC, saying "the good Lord ride all the way." Capsule communicator Scott Carpenter then said "Godspeed, John Glenn." Due to a glitch in Glenn's radio, he did not hear those words at liftoff.

• 5. Fireflies and a Yaw Thruster

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  Thirty seconds after liftoff, the General Electric-Burroughs guidance system locked onto a radio transponder in the booster. At two minutes and 14 seconds, the booster engines cut off and fell away. At two minutes and 24 seconds, the escape tower was jettisoned on schedule. After the Atlas pitched over, Glenn described the view: "a beautiful sight, looking eastward across the Atlantic."

  Friendship 7 reached orbit at 14:52 UTC with a velocity of 17,544 mph. Computers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland calculated that the orbital parameters were good enough for almost 100 orbits, though the plan called for three.

  Over Kano, Nigeria, Glenn spotted a dust storm below. The tracking team confirmed that winds had been heavy for the past week. As he crossed the Indian Ocean, Glenn watched his first orbital sunset. He described the light as taking five or six minutes to fade, with brilliant orange and blue layers spreading 45 to 60 degrees on either side of the sun. Crossing toward Australia, he looked for the zodiacal light but could not see it. His eyes had not had enough time to adapt to the darkness.

  At the Muchea Tracking Station in Australia, capsule communicator Gordon Cooper told Glenn that the bright lights he could see below were probably Perth and its satellite town of Rockingham. People in Perth had turned on their lights so Glenn could see them from orbit. Glenn excitedly told Cooper: "That sure was a short day. That was about the shortest day I've ever run into."

  As Glenn prepared for his first orbital sunrise over Canton Island, he saw thousands of small luminescent particles streaming past the spacecraft. He called them "fireflies." He radioed: "I am in a big mass of some very small particles, they're brilliantly lit up like they're luminescent. I never saw anything like it. They round a little: they're coming by the capsule and they look like little stars. A whole shower of them coming by. They swirl around the capsule and go in front of the window and they're all brilliantly lighted." He banged on the capsule wall and watched more of them appear, just as Alan Shepard had done before him. They were later identified as small ice crystals venting from the spacecraft's own systems.

  Near the Guaymas, Mexico tracking station, controllers flagged a yaw thruster problem. Glenn switched to manual-proportional control to correct the drift. The thruster started working again after about 20 minutes, then quit again. He switched to manual fly-by-wire and flew in that mode for the rest of the flight. He later called the problem one that "was to stick with me for the rest of the flight."

• 6. The Heat Shield Warning

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  As Friendship 7 crossed Cape Canaveral at the start of its second orbit, a flight systems controller named Don Arabian noticed that a sensor labeled Segment 51 was giving an unusual reading. That sensor monitored the spacecraft's heat shield and landing bag. The reading suggested that both might no longer be locked in position, held against the capsule only by the straps of the retro package.

  Mercury Control ordered all tracking stations to monitor Segment 51 and asked Glenn to leave his landing-bag deploy switch in the off position. Glenn grew suspicious when station after station asked him to confirm the switch position but offered no explanation. He guessed that something was wrong with the heat shield but was not told the full picture.

  The question before Mission Director Walter C. Williams was whether to jettison the retrorocket pack after retrofire as planned, or to keep it in place against the heat shield as insurance. Williams decided to retain the retro pack, overruling Flight Director Chris Kraft. Walter Schirra, communicating from Point Arguello in California, relayed the instruction: retain the retro pack until the spacecraft was over the Texas tracking station.

  Glenn's reentry was violent. Chunks that looked like pieces of the heat shield flew past his window. They were actually pieces of the retro package burning up in the plasma stream. A strap from the retro package broke loose and draped over the window as it was consumed. Glenn radiated to Mercury Control: "This is Friendship 7 - a real fireball outside." After passing peak deceleration, the spacecraft began oscillating past 10 degrees in both directions. Glenn said he felt "like a falling leaf." He activated the auxiliary damping system to regain control.

  Fuel in the automatic tanks ran out 1 minute and 51 seconds before drogue chute deployment. Manual fuel ran out at 51 seconds before deployment. The drogue opened automatically at 28,000 feet rather than the programmed 21,000 feet. The spacecraft stabilized, and Glenn reported that everything was in good shape. After the mission, engineers determined that Segment 51 had been a faulty sensor. The heat shield had been secure the entire time.

• 7. Splashdown and After

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  Friendship 7 splashed down in the North Atlantic about 220 miles northwest of Puerto Rico, roughly 40 miles short of the planned landing zone. The retrofire calculations had not accounted for the mass the spacecraft lost by burning through consumables during the mission. A destroyer code-named Steelhead had spotted the capsule descending on its parachute from about 6 miles away and came alongside Friendship 7 seventeen minutes after splashdown. Her name was Noa.

  Once the capsule was on deck, Glenn intended to exit through the upper hatch but found it too hot inside. He chose to blow the side hatch instead. He warned the crew to stand clear, then struck the detonator plunger with the back of his hand. The detonator recoiled and cut his knuckles through his glove. The hatch blew off with a loud bang. Harry Beal, identified in the record as the first U.S. Navy Seal, pulled Glenn out of Friendship 7. Glenn's first words on deck were: "It was hot in there."

  CBS broadcast the flight with Walter Cronkite describing it to most Americans, while those not watching CBS followed on ABC or NBC. On the 19th of April 1962, NASA announced that Friendship 7 would be lent to the United States Information Agency for a world tour that included more than 20 stops, a journey that became known as the Fourth Orbit of Friendship 7.

  On the 50th anniversary of the flight in 2012, Glenn was speaking at Ohio State University with NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden when he was surprised with the chance to talk live with the crew of the International Space Station. Mercury spacecraft number 13 - Friendship 7 - is on permanent display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the National Air and Space Museum's annex in Chantilly, Virginia.