Flying aboard his Mercury capsule, christened “FREEDOM 7,”
Alan Shepard made a sub-orbital hop down the Atlantic Missile Range. Officially
the flight was designated Mercury Redstone Three or, more commonly, MR-3. His
flight lasted just 15 minutes and 22 seconds. On the ground the news media on
both radio and TV really did not quite know how to actually broadcast a
spaceflight. After all, they were used to broadcasting political conventions
and ball games and this was nothing like that. In fact, considering that the
Soviets did their launches in secret, it was like nothing that had ever been
broadcast before.
THE FLIGHT:
Shepard rode the Redstone for 142 seconds. At that point the
engine cut off exactly as planned and the escape tower jettisoned itself
simultaneously. Although Shepard heard the event, he did not see any part of it
other than the green light that indicated tower jettison. Next, he heard the
clamp-ring that held the capsule to the booster blow apart and saw the green
light that indicated the event. He also felt what he described as “a little
kick in the tail” when the posigrade separation motors fired and separated the
spacecraft from the booster.
Now Alan Shepard was flying in space.
Automatically the Mercury spacecraft rotated around to what
was known as the “blunt end forward” attitude needed for reentry. From that
position Shepard exercised FREEDOM 7’s manual controls in the pitch, roll, and
yaw attitudes and reported periscope observations for all of two minutes. Then,
at five minutes and 14 seconds into the flight it was time for the retro
sequence. The retros fired on time and one minute later the retro package was
jettisoned. Shepard heard what sounded like the pack letting go and saw some
small bits of debris out the porthole, as well as part of one of the
restraining straps, but he did not get an event light indicating the jettison.
Instinctively he hit the manual “JETT RETRO” override switch and the green
event light illuminated. After years of preparation to fly in space and months
of preparation for this specific flight, all of which involved countless
problems that could occur, this single little glitch with the retro package
jettison light was the only thing on Shepard’s flight that did not go as
planned.
FREEDOM 7’s reentry carried a high “G” load and Shepard
momentarily soaked up 11 G's – 11 times the force of what a person experiences
in normal gravity, or 1 G. The high G loading lasted only a few seconds, after that
Shepard simply sat there and dropped into the atmosphere. At nine minutes and
38 seconds into the flight, FREEDOM 7’s drogue parachute deployed and shortly
thereafter the main chute deployed normally. FREEDOM 7 splashed down so close
to the recovery helicopters that even before Shepard could get a good start at
reading his instruments and switch positions as required during the post flight
process, the recovery “helo” had already hooked onto the capsule. Concerned
that the capsule may be a bit too low in the water, Shepard radioed up and
asked the recovery helo to lift FREEDOM 7 a bit higher. As soon as that happened,
he took off his helmet, hung it on the hand-controller, reached over his right
shoulder and cranked the lever that opened the hatch. He then sat on the hatch
sill and grabbed the horse collar that was lowered from the helicopter. Alan
Shepard, the first American to fly in space was safely landed aboard the
carrier USS LAKE CHAMPLAIN, and thus brought the Free World to a standing
ovation.
MYTHS AND FACTS:
A number of myths and legends have grown around Shepard's
historic first flight. From a Hollywood movie that played VERY loosely with the
facts, to poorly produced documentaries, to sanitized accounts published by
NASA and “LIFE Magazine,” to personal accounts drafted from memories with
plenty of wear on them – it is often hard to drum out something close to the
actual events. Since my personal account of FREEDOM 7 ranges no farther than my
grandma’s TV set and watching the launch at age 4, I figured it would be fun to
denote a few of those odds and ends of the mission here.
One commonly held myth is that Shepard reported aspects of
his condition and those of his capsule as being “A-ok.”
In fact, Shepard never used the term “A-ok” during the
mission. The term “A-ok” was actually popularized by NASA Public Affairs
Officer (PAO) John “Shorty” Powers who announced the flight. Yet the term
“A-ok” was instantly integrated into the general public’s spaceflight
vocabulary. In the early 1960s my parents bought me a little blue jumpsuit with
astro-insignias all over it. The one on the right chest was a round white logo
that had a red “A-ok” on it.
Many people think that during Shepard’s flight, the public heard
his voice calling out readings and making observations as it happened.
In fact, not a single word that Shepard spoke during the
mission was allowed to be heard live by the public. Only those who were inside
NASA working the mission and had a “need-to-know” were allowed to hear the live
air-to-ground transmissions. This may seem amazing today when nearly every word
of a spaceflight is broadcast live. Yet, although NASA was far less risk averse
in the Mercury days, they were far more image aware. All of the air-to-ground
transmissions that the Mercury astronauts broadcast were filtered through PAO
Shorty Powers, who then repeated to the public a “NASA-correct” version of what
was being said. Later, shortly after the flight, films of the mission had the edited
recorded voice track of the astronaut dubbed in and from there on that became
the “official version” of the mission. As the Gemini program came into being,
the voices of the crew on orbit were allowed to be broadcast- but were normally
done so by NASA on a time delay. Reentry and launch air-to-ground was not
allowed to be heard live by the public until, believe it or not, Apollo 10.
Prior to that, since the live broadcasts were quickly forgotten by the general
public, those official films and clips that were later fed to the public soon
developed the illusion that everything was always heard live. This became
especially engrained in the public after Apollo 10, when all future launches
and reentries carried live air-to-ground voice.
The Soviets plotted to liquidate the first American
astronaut
Fact- Exactly who would be the astronaut to fly aboard the
first Mercury spacecraft was kept a close secret within NASA.
All that was released to the public were the names of the
top three choices: Glenn, Grissom and Shepard. It was not until after the scrub
of Shepard’s original launch date on May 2 that NASA decided to actually make
public his identity as the first United States astronaut to fly. There were
very elevated concerns that if the Soviets found out which of the seven Mercury
astronauts were actually slated to make the first flight, the Soviets might
assign agents to do harm to that individual. This, however was a myth. Historians
digging into the KGB archives years later found no such inclination at all by
the Soviets.
Fact- Shepard’s FREEDOM 7 spacecraft was unique because it
had a manually opened hatch.
The hatch itself was closed with 70 bolts, but was released
from the inside by way of a mechanical handle located over Shepard's right
shoulder. Spacecraft 7 was the only manned Mercury capsule equipped with this
hatch, which weighed 82.23 pounds. The other manned Mercury spacecraft all
saved weight by having a pyrotechnically removed hatch, which weighed just 22.9
pounds.
Myth- “What a beautiful view”
His spacecraft also differed from the other manned Mercury
vehicles because it was equipped with two portholes rather than a forward
forward-facing window. That forward facing window, however, ate up a large part
of the weight saved in the use of the light weight pyrotechnically opened
hatch.
Shepard can be heard during the flight describing the
“Beautiful view” seen through his periscope. That was a myth concocted by
Shepard himself. Remember, FREEDOM 7 was the only manned Mercury spacecraft
that did not have a “pilot’s” window. Instead, the spacecraft had two portholes
located approximately where the astronaut’s elbows would be. It was nearly
impossible for a pressure-suited astronaut with a helmet on to see much of
anything through those portholes. Like most of the manned Mercury spacecraft,
however, Shepard’s had a periscope. The periscope was a handy tool, and the
Mercury crews liked it. As Shepard waited through a series of pre-launch holds,
he had nothing to do other than look out through the periscope. At sunrise, as
the vehicle sat on the pad, the sun shined directly into the periscope, so
Shepard put in a dark gray filter to cut down the glare. Unfortunately, when he
remembered to remove the filter prior to launch, as he reached out for it the
pressure gage on his wrist contacted the “Abort” button. Shepard immediately decided
that he was not going to monkey with those filters anymore because initiating a
pad abort, with the escape tower pulling the capsule away from a perfectly good
booster because you were messing with periscope filters, would be hard to
explain in the debriefing. During his flight, there was a specified point where
he was supposed to look through the periscope and make a report. Dutifully, he
deployed the periscope and discovered that the dark filter heavily obscured
what he could see.
“I really couldn’t see a damned thing through it,” he
confided to Gus Grissom after the flight, “so I just gave the same weather
report that I’d been given in the preflight briefing and called out some known
landmarks.”
In fact, if you read the actual weather briefing given to
Shepard before the launch and compare it to what he broadcast back to the
ground it is almost word-for-word the same – with a few well-known landmarks
thrown in. In the transcript of his recorded debriefing, Shepard is evasive
about this part of the flight and finally resorts to answering questions about
his ability to see landmarks by simply saying “I don’t remember” repeatedly. In
that same debriefing he does, however, remember every other tiny detail about
the flight. Hummmmm.
Myth: The pre-launch thumbs up
In that near-fictional movie titled “The Right Stuff,” Shepard
is shown stepping from the transfer van at the launch pad, stopping and looking
up at the booster then giving a big “Thumbs Up.” He did stop and look the
booster over, but he never did the thumbs-up. Additionally, the movie shows him
stepping from the recovery helicopter onto the carrier deck and having his
first footprints on the deck outlined in yellow paint. That never happened
either. Of course, those are just two of a large number of errors in that
movie.
Facts- Oil derrick and Surfside 5
The service gantry used on Shepard’s Mercury Redstone was a
former oil derrick that was disassembled and trucked to Cape Canaveral during
the early 1950s. It was set up at the newly established Launch Complex 3 &
4 to service the Army’s first Redstone tests. The gantry was moved on common
railroad rails in order to clear the rocket. Sometime between March of 1955 and
April 1955 the tower was lowered, and the gantry was moved to the Army’s new
Vertical Launch Facility. It was there that the gantry serviced FREEDOM 7’s
launch vehicle.
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| Early image of Redstone IRBM and the service tower used for Freedom 7 several years later. |
Shepard’s launch gantry also had a special enclosure
constructed on it that would surround the Mercury spacecraft and keep out the
rain and the sun plus most of the sand and dust. The enclosure was air
conditioned by a 10-ton machine and today would be called a “White Room.” In
1961, however, there was a TV show that ran on ABC every Monday night starring
Troy Donahue, Van Williams, Lee Patterson, Diane McBain and Margarita Sierra.
The private eye type plots were set in Miami and the show was called “Surfside
6,” so the folks at the pad decided to call their white room “Surfside 5.”
It is also true that Shepard peed in his spacesuit while on
the launch pad. The flight had been planned for just 15 minutes, so there would
be just over four hours between the time Shepard was zipped into his space suit
and zipped out of his space suit; and a good pilot can hold his water for that
long. Unfortunately, assorted launch delays lengthened that time and the
astronaut’s bladder began to send signals insisting on being de-tanked. After
some discussion, it was decided to cut the power to his bio-medical equipment
and allow Shepard to wet his pants. On the next flight a sort of diaper
arrangement was improvised.
So, although the flight of FREEDOM 7 was a historic event
that was planned to the smallest detail, there were still some odd aspects to
it. The legends and myths about the flight grew on their own, unfortunately
aided by TV and movie producers who knew and cared nothing about spaceflight.
Although Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev called the flight
of FREEDOM 7 “a flea’s jump,” Shepard’s flight was 100% successful. To many
Americans it was a grand-slam home run scored in a game of spaceflight with the
Soviets where we had previously been hitting foul balls and striking out. The
flight helped influence President Kennedy to set the nation’s course toward a
landing on the moon. Additionally, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs political
disaster the previous month, the FREEDOM 7 mission was the first major positive
political event in the Kennedy administration. Overall, May 5, 1961, was a very
good day in the free world… oddities, myths and legends aside.
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| For detailed accounts of all of the Mercury flights, check out Wes' book HERE |
Or get an autographed copy
HERE
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