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Aviation History
1962
1962 - 0448.PDF
448 FLIGHT International, 22 March 1962 Missiles and Spaceflight IN ORBIT BY JOHN H.GLENN Part Two "I could see so many sailors in white uniforms standing on the deck that I asked the captain if he had anybody down below running the ship..." I SAW a rare lighting effect as I crossed the Indian Ocean. There were large storms north of my course, and though I was nearly three-quarters of a million feet above the clouds, I could clearly see lightning in them. The cloud interiors lit up as if they held bulbs which pulsed on and off. As I came over Australia on the first pass, I saw my first signs of man-made light. Out the window I could see several great patches of brightness down below where the citizens of Perth and several other cities on the western coast had turned on their lights to send me a greeting in electricity. It was a warm and welcome sight. I asked astronaut Gordon Cooper, who was capsule communicator there, to express my thanks to the Australian people. The strangest sight of all came with the very first ray of sun as I was crossing the Pacific towards the US. I was checking the instrument panel and when I looked back out the window I thought for a minute that I must have tumbled upside down and was looking up at a new field of stars. I checked my instruments to make sure I was right side up. Then I looked again. There, spread out as far as I could see, were literally thousands of tiny luminous objects that glowed in the black sky like fireflies. I was riding slowly through them, and the sensation was like walking backwards through a pasture where someone had waved a wand and made all the fireflies stop right where they were and flow steadily. They were greenish-yellow in colour, and they appeared to be about six to ten feet apart. I seemed to be passing through them at a speed of from three to five miles an hour. They were The capsule righted itself and I could find no traces of any leaks . . .' all around me, and those nearest the capsule would occasionally move across the window as if I had slightly interrupted their flow. I turned the capsule around on the next pass so that I was looking right into the flow, and though I could see far fewer of them in the light of the rising Sun, they were still there. Watching them come towards me, I felt certain they were not caused by anything emanating from the capsule. I thought perhaps I'd stumbled into the lost batch of needles the Air Force had tried to set up in orbit for communications purposes. But I could think of no reason why needles should glow like fireflies, nor did they look like needles. As far as I know the true identity of these particles is still a mystery. I started having my troubles with the automatic control system late in the first orbit. The capsule started to swing over to one side along the yaw axis and then correct itself with a large expenditure of hydrogen peroxide fuel. Then it would do the same thing again. Later on it started yawing in the other direction. Something was obviously wrong with the system and it became necessary for me to control the capsule's movements by hand. For most of the rest of the trip I controlled the capsule myself. This did cut down on other activities we'd planned. It meant that I had to cancel out several of the experiments and observations I wanted to make on the second and third orbits. I had a number of instruments on board, including one which was designed to make a series of tests of the Sun's corona, the brightness of clouds, the ability of a pilot in space to adapt himself to darkness and withstand the effects of weightlessness, and several others. I was able to take far fewer pictures than I'd intended and I had to pass up my plan to have two meals during the flight to test my ability to get food down under various conditions. I ate only one of them, a squeeze-tube of apple-sauce, over the Pacific on the first orbit. I pulled the tube out of its receptacle and parked it out in the air in front of me. Weightless, it stayed put while I opened up the visor on my helmet. Then I squeezed the apple-sauce into my mouth and swallowed it without spilling a drop and closed up the visor again. I felt completely relaxed at zero-g but I did conduct one experi ment to see if the long period of weightlessness was having any ill- effects on me. First I started moving my head up and down very slowly, then I moved it from side to side. I tried the same thing again with my eyes closed. I still had no feeling of nausea or disorientation, so I speeded up until I was shaking my head and rolling it and nodding it as fast as I could, with no more sensation than one would expect doing this on the ground. I reached out for the switches and had no tendency to overreach them. Weightlessness, at least for a period of a few hours, is no problem at all in space flight. This, actually, was one of the major findings of the mission. During much of the second orbit I worked the control system trying to pin down a pattern of errors so I could tell what was wrong. I could hear the large fuel thrusters outside the capsule as they popped off their bursts of hydrogen peroxide in first one direction and then in the other. I could feel the slight throb of the smaller nozzles when I cut
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