The Unbroken Chain

Chapter 1 - In the beginning...

Driving to work in the early days was usually a very unpleasant affair. Even though the distance was only about fifteen miles, it could sometimes take as long as two hours. I would leave my house on Merritt Island around 5 a.m. and work my way south toward State Road 520. When I got to that two-lane highway, 1 joined the eastbound traffic, heading toward the Banana River and the Atlantic Ocean. The ancient wooden bridge that spanned the river causeway creaked and groaned under the constant load. After the river, I continued on to the A1A intersection. The closer I got, the slower the traffic would get. Once the left turn was made toward Port Canaveral and the Cape, I was well past the point of no return.

The single line of cars heading into the morning sun seemed to move along by inches. There were no gas stations or side streets. Just blue sky and a packed two-lane road bordered by short oak trees, palmetto bushes, and rattlesnakes. My car had no air conditioning and the drive was hot and tedious.

Virtually everyone on that road was somehow involved in the space program. If they didn’t work on NASA projects, as I did, they worked for the Air Force. Between the two groups, nearly a dozen rockets lit up on the pads every week. It was an exciting time and, each morning, everyone was anxious to get to their jobs.

Parked along the side of the sandy roadway, a traffic reporter from WEZY radio observed the morning ritual and reported the progress on the air. “Mobile Mike” was his name and every car in that long shiny parade had him tuned in on the radio. Pity the poor man who tried to pass anyone on that narrow two-lane road.

“This is Mobile Mike with your WEZY traffic report. We just spotted a blue Ford Falcon passing cars on A1A. He’s rocketing towards the Cape so you drivers give him the hi sign.”

As the driver, a Martin Marietta vice president so it turned out, worked his way along the shoulder, a trail of blaring car horns and pointing fingers followed him. When the shoulder finally ran out, he stopped, but none of the cars passing him would let him back in line. They just blew their horns and pointed as they inched slowly by. I’m not sure what happened to him, but I heard that he sat baking on the side of the road for over an hour. And for the whole time, every car that passed him gave him a loud blast from the horn. That was our form of “traffic control”.

I worked for the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation under contract to NASA. It was a family owned company and though large, had a family feel to it. We usually just called it “MAC”. Its owner, James McDonnell, was simply “Mr. Mac” to all of us.

I started with the company in St. Louis in 1955, right after receiving my citizenship papers. Mr. Mac was a fatherly figure and made sure that his employees got all the coursework their jobs required. When I wasn’t busy with work, I was usually studying for some engineering course at one of the local colleges or universities. By 1957,1 was doing design engineering for the GAM-72 and Alpha Draco missile projects. It was in 1958 that I brought my wife and daughters with me to the Cape where we launched three Alpha Draco missiles. For me, it was a chance to see our rockets climb steeply into the sky. For the family, it was the beginning of a love affair with Florida’s coastal waters and sandy beaches.

Mr. Mac had already determined that MAC was going to get the contract that would put a man into space. As early as 1957, McDonnell Aircraft was already heavily involved in the Air Force’s Dyna-Soar project. Having placed a bid to develop a blunt-body manned reentry vehicle in January of 1958, MAC was actively designing a prototype by June. This type of ballistic cone was already favored by Max Faget, the NACA’s scrappy lead engineer at Langley, so Mr. Mac figured we would be a the front-runner for the contract. On my return from the Alpha Draco launches, I knew that was where I wanted to be, too.

In October, the NACA became NASA, and by December, the name was chosen for the manned launch program: Project Mercury. Mr. Mac got his wish, and the contract to produce twelve Mercury capsules was awarded to McDonnell in February of 1959. By spring, the family and I had moved to Merritt Island, just across the Banana River from Cape Canaveral. And from that house, I would make the hot drive out to the Cape almost everyday for the next thirty years.

The whole area out there was nothing like it is now. Crossing the 520 Causeway bridge today gives you a wide view filled with houses, gas stations, hotels and motels, and tourist stores of every kind. Off to the north, the VAB -the Vehicle Assembly Building - dominates the horizon. But in 1959, all you could see was an odd mix of coastal swamp bordered by miles of sandy forest land. Under the blazing sun, scattered pine trees and oaks populated the flat countryside. Beneath them, a thick blanket of palmetto bushes provided shelter to snakes, wild pigs, and armadillos.

I was in the advanced echelon from McDonnell. Initially, there were only live of us in the little group set up in Hangar S, at the Cape Canaveral Eastern Test Range. H. H. “Luge” Luetgen was our manager.

I was very deliberate in finding out the exact responsibilities of my job. I was never a fan of the ambiguous. Surprisingly, the first problem was to come up with a job title. I had no idea it would be such a complicated decision.

Even though there was not yet a formal description of my duties - we weren’t even sure what the exact job requirements were - I knew that I would oversee all activity on the pad, in and around the spacecraft. The name chosen for this job position didn’t seem that critical to me. It turned out, however, to be my first introduction to inter-agency bureaucracy.

It seemed like every name suggested was unacceptable to someone. We had our own company guidelines, but also had to work closely with Convair, NASA, and the Air Force. The first suggestion was “Pad Director”. No, NASA said. Dr. Debus was a “director” and my job was certainly way down the ladder from his. How about “Pad Chief” someone else suggested. No, the Air Force said a “chief’ had very specific meanings to them and they didn’t want their hierarchy confused with ours. It went back and forth.

Finally someone came up with “Pad Leader”. No one seemed to object to that, so it was done. I was the Pad Leader.

Next, we needed a formal job description. John Yardley, McDonnell’s top engineer on the project, was being groomed for the Base Manager’s slot at the Cape. He came up with the verbiage: “The Pad Leader is responsible for any and all activity in and around the spacecraft and its attending GSE (ground support equipment). He will work through established channels of authority, and will report to the Test Conductor.” It was simple and concise, exactly how I wanted it. If you came up to the spacecraft, you didn’t touch it without my permission. During emergencies, I wouldn’t have time to form a committee. I needed to make sure that 1 had the authority to make the decision whenever anything became critical. Simply put, in an emergency the buck stopped with me.

Our first job was to get the facility prepared to receive the Mercury capsules from St. Louis. A clean room was built on the hangar floor, and we got our control room established and set up power, cabling, and instrumentation. At that time, all missiles being launched from the Cape - the Thor, Matador, Snark, Navaho, Redstone, and Atlas - were prepared for their flights in hangars surrounding ours. It was a very busy place.

Hangar S, located a couple of miles from the Redstone launch complex, was a fairly large structure. Pretty conventional for a big Air Force hangar. Concrete block, three-stories tall, and huge sliding doors filled with glass windows. As a mechanical engineer, I was anxious to oversee the operation every minute of the day. We constructed our offices inside the hangar at the south end of the building so that we could be close to the activity.

All over the area, a maze of cable trenches tied together our instrumentation and communications. Having encroached on the homeland of a wide variety of snakes, we quickly developed a rule: if you were pulling on a cable in a trench and it pulled back, let go!

Workdays were typically twelve to fourteen hours long. Tests involving series of sequential operations frequently overran lunch or dinner times. When we were lucky, an Air Force van that sold sandwiches and cold drinks would swing by. Someone on the PA would blare out, “Roach coach on the approach!” Roach coach food was not the best in the world, but it was all we had and certainly better than nothing. Greasy hamburgers and dry ham and cheese sandwiches were the standard fare. One of the technicians decided to have some fun one day and freeze dried a couple of palmetto bugs in CO2. If you’ve never seen a Florida palmetto bug, you have missed the king of the roach world. Now I’m not sure if they really are cockroaches, but these three and four-inch giants sure look like them.

“Ma’am, could you put a little more ketchup on this burger for me?” the technician asked as he presented the opened sandwich to the lady behind the counter.

“Sure, hon”, she replied as she leaned toward him with a plastic squirt bottle. Just as she got close, she noticed them. Two huge cockroach beasts silently positioned on the tomato slice. It was as if her whole nervous system suddenly shorted out. Her arm retracted upwards and away in a series of spasmodic jerks. As the ketchup bottle flipped into the sand, she staggered back from the counter. I’m not sure if the sound she made would be described as a shriek or a gasp. She seemed to be exhaling and inhaling at the same time. Pan American, the company that was contracted to operate the roach coaches, didn’t see the humor in the little gag. One more prank like that, we were told, and the van would stop at Hangar S no more!

It wasn’t unusual for tests to run into the evening. Considering the hour long drive each way and the need to be back on station by 7:00 a.m., the solution was obvious. Out at Pad 5, Dr. Debus had a half dozen folding cots installed in a cable room next to the blockhouse. They were attached to the wall and you quickly learned that if you rolled over too close to the side, they would fold up with you. Not ideal conditions, but we did what we had to do to keep the project going.

In May of 1959, the Mercury Seven astronauts came down to the Cape to see their first Atlas launch. It was an Air Force test and I was watching from the fallback area, a spectator just like everyone else. I took a quick look around the crowd. Next to me, John Glenn and Alan Shepard stood transfixed with the view. It was a beautiful, sunny morning.

As the count worked its way down, a hundred hard hats were aimed at the pad. Every eye glued to the vehicle a quarter mile away. The countdown reverberated from the loudspeakers and finally the metallic voice announced, “Ignition!” A quick blast of smoke spewed out in all directions. The little vernier motors on the sides of the booster shot out jets of flame like oversized blowtorches. Bits of ice began to rain down from the upper parts of the Atlas as the vehicle lifted smoothly into the air. I had to cup my hands around the visor of my hard-hat to follow the rocket against the bright, scattered clouds.

The sight was glorious. The silvered rocket seemed balanced on its brilliant plume of fire, now stretching out as long as the vehicle itself. A thin column of white smoke marked its path and made it look as if the whole thing was somehow still attached to the ground.

The Atlas was scarcely a mile high when I sensed something was going wrong. The rocket was still clearly visible and it looked like it was starting to tip. It all happened very quickly. Once the centerline of the booster veered away from the rocket’s actual trajectory, the thin skin began to buckle. Aerodynamic pressure and off-center thrust started the process. The Range Safety Officer did the rest. We saw the bright fireball a few seconds before the thunderclap of the explosion hit us.

Everyone watched in stunned silence. The fireball seemed quickly engulfed in a thick cloud of smoke while large chunks of metal began to rain down in half parabolas. Some trailed smoke. Others just dropped silently toward the Atlantic Ocean below.

Disgust was visible on the faces of many of the viewers. Shepard leaned over toward Glenn, his own expression characteristically blank. He spoke out of the side of his mouth.

“I sure hope they fix that.”

In September, we prepared for our first Mercury-Atlas test launch. The spacecraft itself was a boilerplate capsule, designed only for the test of the new ablative heatshield. Returning spacecraft would reenter the atmosphere at great speed. Simple friction with the air would generate a huge amount of heat. So much, in fact, that the spacecraft would burn up if not protected. The heatshield was a rounded disc, shaped to fit over the blunt end of the spacecraft. This is the end that would plow into the atmosphere at over 15,000 miles per hour. As it was designed, the heatshield would absorb the growing heat until layers of it burned away. As these layers were vaporized and blown off, they would carry the heat away with them.

An Atlas rocket was programmed to carry the capsule to a height of about 100 miles. Then, it was to pitch over and accelerate the spacecraft to reentry speeds prior to jettisoning it. Next, attitude controllers were scheduled to pitch the capsule into a blunt-end-first position so that the heatshield could do its job. Inside the spacecraft, dozens of temperature sensors were in place to record the internal environment during the flight.

On the morning of the pre-dawn event, all the NASA and contractor big shots were there: Mr. Mac, John Yardley, George Low, Dr. Gilruth, Paul Haney. Even Abe Silverstein, the man who came up with the name “Mercury”. Max Faget, testy as ever, nervously followed the preflight preparations, then retired to the blockhouse for the launch. At 3:19 a.m., the vehicle, dubbed Big Joe, thundered to life and lit off in a fiery arc across the Atlantic.

As Big Joe reached its apogee, the highest point in its flight, sequencing began falling apart. Instead of being jettisoned as planned, the two outboard booster engines remained connected to the Atlas. Then, the spacecraft failed to separate from the rocket. The hydrogen peroxide thrusters fired off, but used up their fuel vainly trying to rotate the still-attached spacecraft. Finally, the capsule was jettisoned, but was essentially in ballistic free-fall with no attitude controllers left to turn it.

Falling far off course, the recovery fleet hurried to rescue the wayward spacecraft. They didn’t find it until mid morning. It was evening before it was delivered back to Hangar S for examination.

The capsule seemed remarkably unhurt; its paint was barely singed. Obviously, it had turned on its own center of gravity into a blunt-end first configuration, and in that attitude the heatshield performed flawlessly. Faget was elated.

Over the next several months, several more Little Joe launches continued the test series, more or less successfully. By the summer of 1960, we felt ready to try a full unmanned mission.

To witness the first real trial of a production Mercury spacecraft, all the astronauts were again down from Langley. The capsule, rigged for the sub-orbital test, sat atop its shiny Atlas booster. Rain showers moved through the area, halting the countdown several times. Finally, shortly after 9:00 a.m., Walt Williams and his crew in the blockhouse got the all clear and the PA speakers around the fallback area rang out, “T minus 10, 9, 8...”.

Right on cue, the numbers worked their way down to zero and the smoke belched out from underneath the booster. A familiar rushing sound quickly escalated to a roar. Everyone watched as the majestic, silver rocket climbed up into the overcast layer which blanketed the Cape. We could still hear the rocket engines for a few seconds after it had disappeared into the clouds.

Listening on my headset, I could hear that everything seemed normal for about the first minute. Then a rash of messages crowded the communications loop. All telemetry from the vehicle had been lost. Moments later I heard them say that it had been lost from radar, too. Soon, a few people claimed that they heard an explosion. I never heard it, but did not need to. It was obvious that the booster and capsule had been lost.

I think I felt disappointment more than shock. About half of the launches those days suffered some kind of failure. 1 just didn’t want this to be one of them. I was pretty sure we had scared the hell out of the astronauts by then.

I have often said that our work out at die pad was like being in a pressure cooker. Engineering glitches, dangerous fuel spills, time schedules that we were barely able to keep. And launch failures didn’t help any, either. It did not matter if you were a technician or an astronaut. The stress of tire job was considerable. Everyone seemed to handle it differently, but little gags, “gotchas” we called them, were a common relief valve.

Shepard was an odd mix. Some days he had the personality of an iceberg and other days he was all jokes. But even when playing a prank, he had a streak of nastiness in him.

One day while running a test at Pad 5, Walt Williams got a phone call. He was needed immediately at a press conference in Cocoa Beach. He didn’t have any wheels that day and was trying to figure out how he could get there in time. Shepard tossed him the keys to his gray Corvette and said, “No problem, Walt. Just take my ‘vette. I’ll ride to lunch with Gus.” Williams thanked him and shoved off. Shepard went straight to the phone and got security on the line. “Hey, this is A1 Shepard. Some son of a bitch just stole my Corvette and is heading for the South Gate.”

When Williams arrived at the gate, four guards stopped him and jerked him out of the convertible. They had him slammed against the wall when Williams convinced them to call Shepard back at the pad.

“Oh, is that who it was? Well, yeah, sure. He’s okay,” Shepard replied with an evil grin.

On another occasion, a press crew was scheduled to come out to the astronaut quarters and do some filming. Shepard rounded up a handful of cardboard washers and inserted them behind the screw-in fuses at the box where they would be plugging in their equipment. He got a lot of pleasure watching those poor guys trying to figure out why none of their equipment would work.

Glenn, on the other hand, was a straight arrow. Always good with the public and generally good-natured with all of us.

I belonged to the Presbyterian church in Cocoa Beach. During the summer, groups of kids would stay there in a sort of camp. I remember asking John if he would come out and talk to the kids one time. As I had expected, he said he would be happy to.

On the day of the visit, John was running a little late. I went ahead and started the meeting by telling them what the objects and goals of the Mercury program were. Then we went over the general issues of spaceflight. The rockets, the training the astronauts went through, things like that. When John arrived, I introduced him as a friend of mine from NASA. 1 said his name was “John” but I didn’t tell them he was an astronaut.

John took over and started to describe the phases of a launch and the orbital insertion and tried to explain how the spacecraft remained in orbit.

“When we bring the spacecraft back, we have to be very careful,” he told them. “If we bring it in at the wrong angle, it could skip back out into space and the astronaut would never make it home.”

I interjected the question to the group: “What should we do if we lose an astronaut like this? Should we cancel the program?” One of the kids quickly spoke up. “That shouldn’t be any problem. You still have six more don’t you?” Design and status meetings rotated around the country so I was frequently flying over to Huntsville, or back to the McDonnell factory in St. Louis. I preferred the trips to St. Louis since it was there that I could actually look in on the spacecraft development and testing.

Normally, the hangar where the Mercury capsules were being built was clean and orderly. On one trip, however, I noticed a distinct farm smell when I walked in.

“It smells like a pig pen in here,” I remember telling one of the engineers. He referred me over to a corner of the building. In it was exactly that. A pig pen. A dozen grunting pigs lounged in the thick straw. Feed troughs and water tubs lined the side.

Although the plan was for water landings of the Mercury capsules under parachute, we had to be prepared for other contingencies. The spacecraft, and the astronaut’s couches in particular, had to be stressed to absorb significant energy in the event of a hard landing, or an impact with terra firma. The structure of internal organs in pigs and their weight to bone mass ratio was roughly the same as that of humans. Because of this, they became the test subjects in a series of drop tests.

Couches were designed for the animals and were built on shock absorbing structures of honeycombed aluminum. From up to forty feet in height, the brave pigs tested the energy absorbing qualities of different honeycomb configurations. A nearby youth center appreciated the resulting windfall of hams and pork chops.

Back at the Cape, the Air Force was responsible for the training of our animal subjects. Two chimpanzees, Ham and Enos, were selected as our first Mercury passengers.

Ham was a fairly good natured fellow, but Enos was known to have his days. We typically tried to keep the public away from him. VIPs of all sorts were frequent visitors, however, and they always wanted to see everything. I usually got the job of conducting a tour.

Some Congressman, I can’t remember his name, was down on a fact finding mission. As was normal, I was given escort duties.

“I want to see the monkeys,” demanded the fat little politician.

“Well, actually they are chimpanzees,” I answered.

“They’re all monkeys to me and I want to see them.”

I knew he wouldn’t appreciate the difference in the primates, so I checked in with the Air Force trainers to see if Ham was available.

“Ham is in training right now, but Enos has just finished a session,” I was told.

I knew Enos would be a poor spokesman for the program so I returned to tell the congressman that none of the chimps were available. Our guest wouldn’t take no for an answer and insisted that he see one of the “monkeys.” Alright. He asked for it. I had some idea of what to expect.

The two of us walked from Hangar S into the sheet metal building next door where the chimps were housed. Inside, several Air Force technicians were busy with paperwork and Enos was standing in his cage. When he saw the congressman, a stranger, he grabbed the bars and began making growling sounds.

“So that’s the astronaut, eh?” the congressman chuckled and walked over to the cage. “What are you doing in there, little spaceman?” Enos backed away from the bars and squatted on his hands.

“Want to go for a ride on a rocket?” the congressman teased.

Enos brought out his hands from under him, gripping a steamy load of freshly laid feces. With a snarl, he flung it straight onto the congressman. I had seen it coming and had already backed well away.

“God damn it!” our fat visitor shouted, flinging foul debris off his tie and shirt with the backs of his hands.

In short order, the congressman was on his way back to Orlando and I don’t think we ever had him as a guest again.

A few weeks after the failed flight of Mercury-Atlas 1, our Redstone group was ready with Mercury-Redstone 1. We had been having such bad luck getting the Mercury spacecraft successfully launched that we were all very nervous. We simply could not afford another failure.

Mercury-Redstone 1, or MR-1 for short, was programmed to boost the spacecraft into a sub-orbital trajectory, up to an altitude of about 115 miles over the Atlantic. It was a full test of the flight we had planned for the first astronaut. This was an important trial and, once again, nearly everyone in the program was down at the Cape to watch.

After getting the spacecraft ready and watching the rollback of the gantry, 1 left with my closeout crew to join the rest of the viewers at the fallback area. From a quarter mile away, we had an excellent vantage point. The Redstone stood tall on Pad 5.

The clock wound down from the T minus 30 minutes as we waited in the heat. It seemed so long in arriving, but finally the time was up.

“T minus 20 seconds,” called out the shrill voice in the headsets.

My stomach was filled with butterflies. The announcer sounded so matter-of-fact. Wasn’t he nervous, too?

“T minus 15 seconds.” No one said a word. All eyes were glued to the rocket.

“T minus 10..., 9..., 8...

The numbers sounded very familiar to me. They seemed to go by too fast and yet too slow. I was conscious of my own heartbeat. And then there were no more.

“3..., 2..., 1.”

A puff of smoke rolled out from under the Redstone, and the umbilical mast began to fall away.

“Ignition!” someone shouted in the crowd and the flood of smoke under the rocket intensified. I could feel the Redstone straining to fly. It began to move.

But then, without warning, the engine shut down and the flame stopped. For an instant, MR-1 sat inert on the pad. Then, suddenly, I saw the solid rocket of the escape tower fire off. The vehicle was shrouded in thick smoke as the red escape rocket sprinted off into the sky. The fiasco wasn’t over.

Next, like a cork from a champagne bottle, the capsule’s antenna housing popped straight up about fifty feet. Gently, it began swinging back to earth under its small parachute. As it floated down, a line attaching it to the main parachute dragged out that nylon canopy, which in turn, like a magician pulling out colored handkerchiefs, pulled out the reserve parachute. A theater of the absurd, playing out live before us. It was the ultimate in humiliation.

Adding insult to injury, we found ourselves in a potentially disastrous situation. Even though the parachutes had popped out, certain switches in the capsule made it think it was in space. But in reality, the Redstone, full of rocket fuel, still sat beneath it with a slight crease in its side. The wrong motion could convince the spacecraft that it was reentering the atmosphere and cause it to ignite the retro rockets. And their fiery blast would go straight into the Redstone’s fuel tanks. I hurried over to the blockhouse.

“We’ve got to get the pressure off the main tank,” someone was saying. Unfortunately, the hoses that could do that job were all disconnected.

Kurt Debus, the Launch Director, chimed in. “Let’s get one of the security guards to put some holes in it with a 30.06. That will relieve the overpressure.” John Yardley, backed up by Chris Kraft, objected loudly and a short argument ensued. The spacecraft was still in perfectly good shape. Shooting the Redstone full of holes would definitely do severe damage and quite possibly might set off the explosion we were trying to avoid. No, it was decided, someone had to get up to the spacecraft and disarm the damn thing and, somehow, we would have to safely depressurize the rocket’s oxygen tank first.

After negotiations, Debus agreed to send out a mechanic. He would have to crawl under the tail of the missile and hook up a quarter inch hose with gaseous nitrogen in it. When pressurized, it would cause the relief value in the booster’s oxygen tank to open.

The technician, all by himself, dragged the hose up to the launch stand and pulled it underneath. We held our breath, watching from the blockhouse. He hooked up the hose, opened the valve, then ran like hell. Just as he got back to the bunker, a loud gush of oxygen gas erupted from the booster, relieving the overpressure in the tank.

Next, John Yardley, Paul Donnelly, and I discussed what would be involved in disarming the retro rocket posigrade motors.

Yardley made the decision. “Okay, we’re going to need some volunteers for this. We need people without any dependents.”

It was quite clear what he meant. This could be a one-way mission. More discussion began and we decided that the volunteers needed to be management people. Bob Graham, Bob Jones, and I volunteered to go.

“Let’s get some cameras on this,” Dr. Debus ordered. “If that thing goes, we’re going to have to be able to find the pieces.” I was quite sure what “pieces” he was referring to.

With a strict radio silence in place, the gantry was moved back to the vehicle. With great trepidation, we rode the rickety elevator up to the platform which was adjacent to the capsule. First we had to open the umbilical door on the spacecraft without generating any unnecessary vibration. Very carefully, and I mean VERY carefully, we drilled out the umbilical door rivets. Once open, we had to short out four of the pins where the umbilical had been attached. There was no room for any mistakes. I felt like a brain surgeon. With great delicacy, we then opened the Mercury’s hatch and leaned in to turn the disarming switch. It wasn’t until then that I felt we could breath again.

After spending three hours with rolls of schematics, Dr. Hans Gruene was sure he had found the reason for the dramatic shutdown. During dozens of other Redstone launches this had never happened. Apparently, the additional weight of a new fuel tank and the Mercury capsule caused some relays to close before the rocket lifted far enough from the launch stand. The sequencing was thrown off by a period of milliseconds, but that was all that was needed to instigate the bizarre spectacle. The official verbiage later stated: “Investigation revealed that a sneak circuit through the control plug and ground network gave premature booster cutoff.”

Although the booster had to be scrapped, our successful neutralization of the Mercury capsule allowed us to retry the mission a month later. The second attempt was a success and the way was cleared for our first astronaut to fly boldly into space. He was three and a half years old and weighed 37 pounds. His name was Ham.

Our chimpanzee test subject had been carefully trained by the Air Force. With little data to work on, we had to insure that a human would be able to function under the severe G-loads that would be imposed during the launch phase and again during reentry. Ham trained for over 200 hours to respond to colored lights of various shapes by pulling appropriate levers. His rewards were dried banana pellets. If he pulled the right levers during his flight, we would know that he was able to move his hands and function acceptably. If he failed to operate the levers correctly, instead of a banana pellet, he received an electric shock in his feet.

Like everyone else, Ham endured long periods of training and testing before his flight. Many times he held up better than our human subjects did during their tests. During one particularly long trial, I remember Shepard complaining and moaning. Finally, in exasperation, I told him, “If you don’t like it. I’ve got someone else who will do it for bananas.” He threw an ash tray at me.

Shepard had headed up a working group which defined our ground emergency procedures. It was decided that an armored personnel carrier, mistakenly identified at first as an M-119, would be based just west of the blockhouse. This tank, actually an M-113, would sit ready for action crewed by a small group of technicians clad in asbestos fireproof suits. In an emergency, it was responsible for bursting through a section of the perimeter fence and arriving at the booster in less than sixty seconds.

Specifically, seven types of emergencies were defined:

(1) Controllable booster fire or inadvertent retrorocket ignition,

(2) Uncontrollable booster fire or inadvertent retrorocket ignition,

(3) Inadvertent escape rocket ignition (we had already had this one),

(4) Internal capsule fire or peroxide leaks,

(5) External peroxide leaks from capsule or booster,

(6) Vehicle tilts,

(7) Vehicle topples.

Obviously, “Vehicle topples” was a worst case scenario. Only three steps were defined if that occurred: evacuate the pad, abort the test, and request that the Cape Canaveral commander take over.

On January 31, 1961, Ham’s spaceship dubbed MR-2 arced out over the ocean in what looked like a beautiful, flawless launch. This was a major test of a number of new components including the first environmental control system. In spite of the view to spectators, telemetry data soon was telling ground controllers that the test was not going well at all.

A faulty valve in the Redstone caused the fuel pumps to inject too much fuel into the engine. The vehicle over-accelerated and climbed too steeply, imposing substantially higher G-loads on Ham than anticipated. It only got worse from there.

Burning fuel at an increased rate, the booster’s tanks ran dry early. This caused an engine shut down sooner than was specified in the flight plan. The domino effect continued. The loss of the engine caused an abort sequence to begin and the red launch escape rocket blasted into action, pulling the capsule away from the booster. As Ham was subjected to a new pounding of G-forces, the capsule depressurized. Had it not been for a secondary oxygen supply feeding his sealed container, the chimp would have died.

The MR-2 capsule was boosted 42 miles higher and 124 miles further downrange than was planned. It was tossed about in choppy seas for over 30 minutes before a search aircraft even located it. When recovery choppers arrived nearly two hours later, the spacecraft was floating on its side, half-full of seawater, and sinking. Luckily for the exhausted Ham, the rest of the recovery went smoothly and quickly. After being beaten up, tossed around, dehydrated, and nearly drowned, he was lucky, indeed, to be alive.