Loading Poll...Friendship 7
William J. Richards is the Director of New Media for the Hall Institute of Public Policy. His research interests include aerospace policy, science education, information technology in the democratic process, and civil rights.
Beginning in the 1950s, with the rise of the Soviet Union as the second nuclear power in the world, the United States and the USSR began arming for war. Nuclear weapons, massive bombers, and a new method of delivery – the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) – were constructed as fast as engineers and workers could design and build them. Two juggernauts were staring each other down for a terrible war that both sides hoped would never come.
Fifty years ago today, the United States was set to launch one of these ICBMs from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in central Florida. But there would be no nuclear bomb on this missile, and it would only be aimed at the Soviet Union metaphorically.
This would be one of the first shots fired in a new kind of conflict – the Space Race. Atop this repurposed weapon of war sat one of America’s first Astronauts, Lieutenant Colonel John Herschel Glenn Jr. His mission that day would not be one of destruction, but to prove to the world that America would not be bested by the Soviet Union in the new frontier of space. America was playing catch-up in this race. The Soviets had already launched not one but two cosmonauts into space. Both Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov had not only been to space and back, but they had orbited the Earth in doing so. America had launched two prior missions, but not only did they occur after Soviet missions, but they were sub-orbital, launching straight up and simply falling back to the Atlantic Ocean. These American missions lasted about 15 minutes each.
NASA’s mission for Glenn would be to prove that what the Soviets could do, so could we. Glenn was a Marine Corps fighter pilot who served in both World War II and the Korean Conflict. An accomplished aviator, he also served as a test pilot, pushing the envelope with experimental designs and risking his life to do so. He was in every way an American role model – brave, smart, accomplished, patriotic. Although NASA’s plan for him would make him only the third man to orbit the earth, he would be the first free man to do so.
No, this was a conflict of a different kind. A proxy war of competing ideologies fought not with bullets and bombs, but with a race of technological one–upmanship. Space would be the brass ring for which America and the Soviets competed for global recognition as superpowers. Both nations would send their best and brightest to the edge of space in a showcase of competing ideologies. The American space program was acutely aware of this reality from the beginning, and even the names that were chosen for early space capsules reflected this. Glenn’s craft Friendship 7 was named by his children Dave and Lyn. In his words:
“I said, ‘There’s only one ground rule. The world is going to be watching, so the name should represent our country and the way we feel about the rest of the world.’ They pored over a thesaurus and wrote dozens of names in a notebook. Then they worked them down to several possibilities, names and words including; Columbia, Endeavour, America, Magellan, we, hope, harmony, and kindness. At the top of the list was their first choice: Friendship. I was so proud of them. They had chosen perfectly.”
Not only did the name fit the ideal that the U.S. Government wished to convey to the rest of the world, but the narrative of Glenn’s children choosing the name was made it perfect. The media loved it.
After several false starts, on February 20, 1962, Glenn climbed into the cramped capsule atop a repurposed Atlas missile. After the final checks were made, and a few technical glitches were taken care of, the bolts sealing him in the capsule were tightened, sealing him inside. The ground staff would now retreat from the launch pad to a safe distance. Nobody would be allowed within two miles of the launch pad except for a few individuals in a bunker with concrete walls 10.5 inches thick. Glenn sat and waited strapped to this rocket while launch control went over their final checklists.
When the countdown reached zero at 9:47 a.m. Eastern, Glenn felt the jolt as the rocket ignited beneath him. “We’re underway” he calmly reported as his pulse spiked to 110 beats per minute. As he continued to accelerate Glenn would continue to feel the g-forces build, reaching a peak of nearly 8 times that on earth. The simple act of moving his arm to flip a switch would become a Herculean effort.
Five minutes later, the g-forces would dissipate. The engines would cut out and Glenn would go from eight times his own weight to weightlessness. Traveling over 17,500 miles per hour, Glenn was the first American in orbit. He would orbit the Earth three times in a little under five hours. In that time he would experience three sunsets and three sunrises. The world was watching.
Glenn’s mission would not be without problems. Early on, he reported the automated system that controlled the attitude control thrusters of his craft was malfunctioning. He took manual control and became a true pilot in space, not just a passenger on an automated craft.
Later ground control would receive a telemetry signal from the craft that the landing bag had deployed beneath his capsule. The bag was designed to deploy in the moments before landing, in order to cushion the impact. The idea is not dissimilar from the airbag in your car.
But the bag was not supposed to deploy in-flight. This was a major problem because under the landing bag was the heat shield which would protect the craft from the incredible heat as the craft reentered the atmosphere. If the signal was correct and the bag had deployed, Glenn likely would not survive – the bag would be torn away from the craft as it reentered the atmosphere and would take the protective heat shield with it. There would be nothing to protect Glenn and his craft from the 2900°F temperatures of reentry.
Mission Control agonized over what to do. Mission managers didn’t want to tell Glenn at all. From their point of view, there was nothing he could do, so why tell him? However one of the men in Mission Control that day dissented from that view and pushed to inform Glenn.
NASA had decided early on that to avoid confusion, all communication from the ground to an astronaut in space would go through a single person, who would be known as the Capsule Communicator or CAPCOM. CAPCOM would also be a fellow astronaut, as it was felt that an astronaut could best convey critical information to another astronaut. That day it was Glenn’s CAPCOM, Scott Carpenter who pushed Mission Control to tell him the condition of his craft. Ultimately his point of view won over mission managers and Glenn was informed of the landing bag telemetry.
The decision was made to have him deviate from the standard reentry procedure. He was told not to jettison the small rocket-pack behind the heat shield first. It was hoped that the straps for this rocket pack would help keep the heat shield in place for reentry. With no other options, Glenn began his reentry. As his capsule began to hit the thin air of the upper atmosphere and drag began to slow the craft down, he started seeing chunks of what he assumed to be his heat shield fly up past the capsule window. The cabin temperature began to rise. After all his hard work and preparation, was Glenn to become a martyr rather than a hero?
A few minutes after Glenn’s initial troubling reports, NASA lost contact with Friendship 7. This was expected. All spacecraft that reenter the atmosphere lose radio contact for a few minutes. The incredible temperatures of reentry ionize the air and make radio communications impossible. Now all NASA and the rest of the world could do was hold their breath and wait…
After a few agonizing minutes, Glenn’s voice finally crackled through on the radio, “My condition is good, but that was a real fireball, boy!” The telemetry data about the landing bag deployment had been wrong. It was nothing more than a sensor glitch. The remaining minutes of the mission, parachute deployment, splashdown, and recovery by the Navy destroyer USS Noe, went off without complications. From liftoff to splashdown, Glenn had been aloft for 4 hours and 55 minutes.
Over the next few days, Glenn would be heralded as an American Hero. He was given a ticker-tape parade through the Canyon of Heroes in the tradition of Albert Einstein, Commander Richard Byrd, Charles Lindbergh, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He would give an address before to a joint session of Congress and another at the United Nations headquarters in New York. He would still be forever immortalized in history books along with names like Columbus and Gagarin. The fact that he was not first seemed merely a technicality.
50 years ago this today, America set off on one of the first tentative steps toward the stars. The desire of politicians to compete with our nation’s rivals gave us the excuse to go. But it was pioneers like Glenn who helped to make it happen.
Project Gemini would follow, and we would learn how to actually work and live in space. Then Apollo would bring us to the moon. Years later, the Shuttle program would make space travel seem almost routine. In 1998, at the age of 77, John Glenn himself would return to space on the Space Shuttle Discovery after serving thirty years in the U.S. Senate, to participate in a study on the effects of microgravity on the elderly. Today, we are seriously considering if government should be involved in spaceflight at all, perhaps it’s routine enough that low earth orbit should be left to private enterprise much the same way that air travel is. None of it would be possible without the work of men like Glenn.
This day we should reflect on the pioneering spirit that brought us where we are today. What do we want from our future? Where shall we go? Is America still a nation that wants to challenge ourselves to do the things that seem impossible? In 1962, we saw our position of leadership threatened by the Soviets. Must we wait for Chinese Moon bases to return to space?
Ad astra per aspera. (A rough road leads to the stars).
# # #