“Roger. Will do. Think they’ll pay it?”
“I don’t know. Gonna find out.”
“Roger. Is this flying time or rocket time?”
“Lighter than air, buddy.” Gordo would appreciate that. He and Deke had led the charge for getting us some flying time while we were training.
I turned the capsule around again so I could face the sunrise. The light revealed a new cloud of the bright partides, and I was still convinced they weren’t coming from the capsule. The flight surgeon at Woomera suggested that I eat again. But I had been paying too much attention to the attitude control, and now I was concerned about lining up the spacecraft for reentry. This was the next set of hurdles, another crucial change in flight conditions that would require every ounce of my attention. I was over Hawaii when the capcom there said, “Friendship Seven, we have been reading an indication on the ground of segment fifty-one, which is landing bag deploy. We suggest this is as an erroneous signal. However, Cape would like you to check this by putting the landing bag switch in auto position and see if you get a light Do you concur with this? Over.”
Now, for the first time, I knew why they had been asking about the landing bag. They did think it might have been activated, meaning that the heat shield that would protect the capsule from the searing heat of reentry was unlatched. Nothing was flapping around. The package of retro-rockets that would slow the capsule for reentry was strapped over the heat shield. But it would jettison, and what then? If the heat shield dropped out of place, I could be incinerated on reentry, and this was the first confirmation of that possibility. I thought it over for a few seconds. If the green light came on, we’d know that the bag had accidentally deployed. But if it hadn’t, and there was something wrong with the circuits, flipping the switch to automatic might create the disaster we had feared. “Okay,” I reluctantly concurred, “if that’s what they recommend, we’ll go ahead and try it.”
I reached up and flipped the switch to auto. No light. I quickly switched it back to off. They hadn’t been trying to relate the particles to the landing bag at all.
“Roger, that’s fine,” the Hawaii capcom said. “In this case, we’ll go ahead, and the reentry sequence will be normal.”
The seconds ticked down toward the retro-firing sequence. I passed out of contact with Hawaii and into Wally Shirra’s range at Point Arguello. I was flying backward again, the blunt end of the capsule facing forward, manually backing up the erratic automatic system. The retro warning light came on. A few seconds before the rockets fired, Wally said, “John, leave your retro pack on through your pass over Texas. Do you read?”
“Roger.”
I moved the hand controller and brought the capsule to the proper attitude. The first retro-rocket fired on time at 4:33:07. Every second off would make a five-mile difference in the landing spot. The braking effect on the capsule was dramatic. “It feels like I’m going back toward Hawaii,” I radioed.
“Don’t do that,” Wally joked. “You want to go to the East Coast.”
The second rocket fired five seconds later, the third five seconds after that. They each fired for about twelve seconds, combining to slow the capsule about five hundred feet per second, a little over 330 miles per hour, not much but enough to drop it below orbital speed. Normally the exhausted rocket package would be jettisoned to burn as it fell into the atmosphere, but Wally repeated, “Keep your retro pack on until you pass Texas.”
“That’s affirmative.”
“Pretty good-looking flight from what we’ve seen,” Wally said.
“Roger. Everything went pretty good except for this ASCS problem.”
“It looked like your attitude held pretty well. Did you have to back it up at all?”
“Oh, yes, quite a bit. Yeah, I had a lot of trouble with it.”
“Good enough for government work from down here.”
“Yes, sir, it looks good, Wally. We’ll see you back East.”
“Rog.”
I gave a fast readout of the gauges and asked Wally, “Do you have a time for going to jettison retro? Over.”
“Texas will give you that message. Over.”
Wally and I kept chatting like a couple of tourists ex changing travel notes. “This is Friendship Seven. Can see El Centro and the Imperial Valley, Salton Sea very clear.”
“It should be pretty green. We’ve had a lot of rain down here.”
The automatic yaw control kept banging the capsule back and forth, so I switched back to manual in all three axes. The capcom at Corpus Christi, Texas, came on and said, “We are recommending that you leave the retro package on through the entire reentry. This means you will have to override the point-zero-five-G switch [this sensed atmospheric resistance and started the capsule’s reentry program], which is expected to occur at oh four forty-three fifty-eight. This also means that you will have to manually retract the scope. Do you read?”
The mission clock read 4:38:47. My suspicions flamed back into life. There was only one reason to leave the retro pack on, and that was because they still thought the heat shield could be loose. But still, nobody would say so.
“This is Friendship Seven. What is the reason for this? Do you have any reason? Over.”
“Not at this time. This is the judgment of Cape flight.”
“Roger. Say again your instructions, please. Over.”
The capcom ran it through again.
“Roger, understand. I will have to make a manual zero-five-G entry when it occurs, and bring the scope in manually.”
Metal straps hugged the retro pack against the heat shield. Without jettisoning the pack, the straps and then the pack would burn up as the capsule plunged into the friction the atmosphere. I guessed they thought that by the time that happened, the force of the thickening air would hold the heat shield against the capsule. If it didn’t, Friendship and I would burn to nothing. I knew this without anybody’s telling me, but I was irritated by the cat-and-mouse game they were playing with the information. There was nothing to do but line up the capsule for reentry.
I picked up Al’s voice from the Cape. He said, “Recommend you go to reentry attitude and retract the scope manually at this time.”
“Roger.” I started winding in the periscope.
“While you’re doing that, we are not sure whether or not your landing bag has deployed. We feel it is possible to reenter with the retro package on. We see no difficulty this time in that type of reentry. Over.”
“Roger, understand.”
I was now at the upper limits of the atmosphere as I went to full manual control, in addition to the autopilot so I could use both sets of jets for attitude control. “This is Friendship Seven. Going to fly-by-wire. I’m down to about fifteen percent [fuel] on manual.”
“Roger. You’re going to use fly-by-wire for reentry and we recommend that you do the best you can to keep a zero angle during reentry. Over.”
I entered the last set of hurdles at an altitude of about fifty-five miles. All the attitude indicators were good. I moved the controller to roll the capsule into a slow spin of ten degrees a second that, like a rifle bullet, would hold it on its flight path. Heat began to build up at the leading edge of a shock wave created by the capsule’s rush into the thickening air. The heat shield would ablate, or melt, as it carried heat away, at temperatures of three thousand degrees Fahrenheit, but at the point of the shock wave, four feet from my back, the heat would reach ninety-five hundred degrees, a little less than the surface of the sun. And the ionized envelope of heat would black out communications as I passed into the atmosphere.
Al said, “We recommend that you…” That was the last I heard.