Just after the count of “Zero”, Deke said “Lift-off”.
I think I braced myself a bit too much while Deke was giving me the final count. Nobody knew, of course, how much shock and vibration I would really feel when the Redstone took off.
There was no one around who had tried it and could tell me; and we had not heard from Moscow how it felt. I was probably a little too tense. But I was really exhilarated and pleasantly surprised when I answered, “Lift-off and the clock is started”.
There was a lot less vibration and noise rumble than I had expected. It was extremely smooth – a subtle, gentle, gradual rise off the ground. There was nothing rough or abrupt about it. But there was no question that I was going, either. I could see it on the instruments, hear it on the headphones, feel it, all around me.
It was a strange and exciting sensation. And yet it was so mild and easy – much like the rides we had experienced in our trainers – that it somehow seemed very familiar. I felt as if I had experienced the whole thing before. But nothing could possibly simulate in every detail the real thing that I was going through at that moment, so I tried very hard to figure out all the sensations and to pin them down in my mind in words which I could use later. I knew that the people back on the ground – the engineers, doctors and psychiatrists – would be very curious about how I was affected by each sensation and that they would ask me quite a lot of questions when I got back. I tried to anticipate these questions and have some answers ready.
For the first minute, the ride continued to be very smooth. My main job just then was to keep the people on the ground as relaxed and informed as possible. It was no good for them to have a test pilot up there unless they knew fairly precisely what he was doing, what he saw and how he felt every thirty seconds or so along the way. So I did quite a bit of reporting over the radio about oxygen pressure and fuel consumption and cabin temperature and how the Gs were mounting slowly, just as we had predicted they would. I do not imagine that future spacemen will have to bother quite so much about some of these items. This was the first time, so we were being cautious.
I was scheduled to communicate about something or other for a total of seventy-eight times during the fifteen minutes that I was up. And I had to manage or at least monitor a total of twenty-seven major events in the capsule. This kept me rather busy. But we wanted to get our money’s worth when we planned this flight, and we filled the flight plan and the schedule with all the things we wanted to do and learn. We rigged two movie cameras inside the capsule, for example, one of which was focused on the instrument panel to keep a running record of how the system behaved. The other one was aimed at me to see how I reacted. The scientists used the film to compile a chart of all my eye movements, which they related to the position of the instruments I had to watch as each moment and event transpired. On the basis of this data they later moved a couple of the instruments closer together on the panel so that future pilots would not have to move their eyes so often to keep up with things.
One minute after lift-off the ride did get a little rough. This was where the booster and the capsule passed from sonic to supersonic speed and then immediately went slicing through a zone of maximum dynamic pressure as the forces of speed and air density combined at their peak. The spacecraft started vibrating here. Although my vision was blurred for a few seconds, I had no trouble seeing the instrument panel. I decided not to report this sensation just then. We had known that something like this was going to happen, and if I had sent down a garbled message that it was worse than we had expected and that I was really getting buffeted, I think I might have put everybody on the ground into a state of shock. I did not want to panic anyone into ordering me to leave. And I did not want to leave. So I waited until the vibration stopped and let the Control Centre know indirectly by reporting to Deke that it was “a lot smoother now, a lot smoother”.
The pressure in the cabin held at 5.5 psi, just as it was designed to do. And at two minutes after launch, at an altitude of about 22 miles, the Gs were building up and I was climbing at a speed of 3,200 mph. The ride was fine now, and I made my last transmission before the booster engine cut off: “All Systems are Go.”
The engine cut-off occurred right on schedule, at 2 minutes 22 seconds after lift-off. Nothing abrupt happened, just a delicate and gradual dropping off of the thrust as the fuel flow decreased. I heard a roaring noise as the escape tower blew off. I was glad I would not be needing it any longer. I reported all of these events to Deke, and then I heard a noise as the little rockets fired to separate the capsule from the booster. This was a critical point of the flight, both technically and psychologically. I knew that if the capsule got hung up on the booster, I would have quite a different flight, and I had thought about this possibility quite a lot before lift-off. There is good medical evidence to the effect that I was worried about it again when it was time for the event to take place, for my pulse rate reached its peak here – 138. It started down again right away, however. (About one minute before lift-off my pulse was 90, and Gus told me later that when he and John Glenn saw this on the medical panel in the Control Centre, they figured that my pulse was a good six points lower than Gus thought his was and eight points lower than John’s.) Right after leaving the booster, the capsule and I went weightless together and I could feel the capsule begin its slow, lazy turnaround to get into position for the rest of the flight. It turned 180°, with the bottom end swinging forward now to take up the heat. It had been facing down and backwards. The periscope went back out again at this point, and I was supposed to do three things in order: (1) take over manual control of the capsule, (2) tell the people downstairs how the controls were working, and (3) take a look outside to see what the view was like.
The capsule was travelling at about 5,000 mph, and up to this point it had been on automatic pilot. I switched over to the manual control stick, and tried out the pitch, yaw and roll axes in that order. Each time I moved the stick, the little jets of hydrogen peroxide rushed through the nozzles on the outside of the capsule and pushed it or twisted it the way I wanted it to go. When the nozzles were on at full blast, I could hear them spurting away over the background noise in my headset. I found out that I could easily use the pitch axis to raise or lower the blunt end of the capsule. This movement was very smooth and precise, just as it had been on our ALFA trainer. I fed the yaw axis, and this manoeuvre worked, too. I could make the capsule twist slightly from left to right and back again, just as I wanted it to. Finally I took over control of the roll motion and I was flying Freedom 7 on my own. This was a big moment for me, for it proved that our control system was sound and that it worked under real space-flight conditions.
It was now time to go to the periscope. I had been well briefed on what to expect, and I had some idea of the huge variety of colour and land masses and cloud cover which I would see from a hundred miles up. But no one could be briefed well enough to be completely prepared for the astonishing view that I got. My exclamation back to Deke about the “beautiful sight” was completely spontaneous. It was breathtaking. To the south I could see where the cloud cover stopped at about Fort Lauderdale, and that the weather was clear all the way down past the Florida Keys. To the north I could see up the coast of the Carolinas to where the clouds just obscured Cape Hatteras. Across Florida to the west I could spot Lake Okeechobee and Tampa Bay. Because there were some scattered clouds far beneath me I was not able to see some of the Bahamas that I had been briefed to look for. So I shifted to an open area and identified Andros Island and Bimini. The colours around these ocean islands were brilliantly clear, and I could see sharp variations between the blue of deep water and the light green of the shoal areas near the reefs. It was really stunning.