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Aviation History
1963
1963 - 1272.PDF
••• 100 On the morning of May 15 Gordon Cooper arrived at Pad 14, Cape Canaveral, to begin his 22-orbit flight Missiles and Spaceflight the spacecraft sway, even after the big booster had been completely fuelled. At T minus 30 minutes Al Shepard put through a telephone call to my home near Houston, and I was able to talk with Trudy and the girls. "Everything is going well," I assured them. "See you in Honolulu. I'm going for 22, and there's no stopping short." Just four minutes after scheduled launch time I felt the engines ignite. The capsule began to feel like a high-speed elevator. "Lift off," I reported. "The clock is started. Faith 7 is on the way." The boost phase of my flight was probably as close to perfect as we'll ever get. I had a few qualms at T plus 1.30 when vibration made the capsule yaw more than I thought she should. For an instant I was afraid the yawing would be sensed by the abort system, which could have brought about an abrupt end to the mission. But we got by that and then on up through booster engine cut-off and sustainer engine cut-off. By the time I was performing my manual turn-around to get the capsule into orbital position, I knew we had scored a bull's-eye. Between 70 and 80 thousand feet up, the sky darkened so that my only light came from the Sun's rays streaming through the cabin window. Then, after I made my turn-around, everything brightened as light was reflected from the Earth's surface. At this point Wally Schirra, in Mercury Control, told me my flight pattern was good for at least 17 orbits, and this was very welcome news. I put the spacecraft back on automatic control and began ob serving out the window. Back behind me—about 200 yards away but seemingly close enough to touch—the booster looked big and beautiful. There was a big belly-band of white frost around its centre section and the tail was still wisping lox. I took my 16mm motion picture camera and photographed the booster as it fell farther and farther from sight. Suddenly it dawned to me that I was being treated to the most fantastic view of the East Coast of the United States ever witnessed by man. It was a remarkably clear day and from my vantage point out over the Atlantic I would see all the way from the tip of Florida to Washington DC. It was mighty impressive. Early in the first orbit I ran into my first major problem: a serious defect in the environmental control system that was to plague me throughout the flight and, at times, threaten to terminate it well short of the 22-orbit goal. The heat exchanger, a device that regulates the temperature in our pressure suits by injecting cooling water through a radiator system, was behaving erratically. If the exchanger has to handle too much coolant water it freezes FLIGHT International, 18 July 1%) up; if there is too little moisture, the exchanger heats up. Either way it will fail to do the job, causing the pressure suit to heat. My exchanger constantly tended to one extreme or another so that I had to adjust the valve that controls the water flow every ten or 15 minutes. This trouble with the suit cooling system raised havoc with my plans for sleeping. My flight plan called for an eight-hour rest period, but, despite reports at the time, the best I could do was catnap my way through the trip. Whenever the opportunity arose, I dozed off for ten or 15 minutes, although I was always awakened by a mental alarm clock if there was a job to perform. I took my first nap during the second orbit. It lasted about ten minutes and when I awoke I saw the Moon for the first time. I plotted its location on my star chart only to discover, somewhat surprisingly, that it wasn't in the right place. I was confused until I figured out the spacecraft had swung around 180 degrees during my nap. I made the proper correction on the chart and, sure enough, there was the Moon right where it ought to be. A couple of times I slept so soundly that I awoke not quite knowing where I was. One time, after sleeping for an hour, I awoke with a start, which explains why my telemetered pulse rate went up to 100. There was a good reason. My heat exchanger had overheated and my suit temperature was rising. "Climbing aboard the spacecraft is probably the hardest task of all; ot first nothing seems to fit correctly, especially the pilot..." • Whenever I dozed off, my arms caused me some trouble. I found they would float out in front of me fairly freely. This was slightly disturbing, because there was a remote chance my fingers could accidentally upset some switches, so I locked my ringers together and hooked my thumbs behind my restraint straps. The spacecraft's plumbing system and drinking water supply became another headache as the flight wore on. By the final hours I could very nearly say, and mean it, "Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink." To begin with, I had a bad time with the hose from the drinking-water tank. If I pressurized the tank by means of a squeeze bulb, the water came through with a hard, unpleasant spurt. I was never very thirsty, but I knew I should drink to avoid dehydration, so I ignored the squeeze bulb and resorted to sucking up the water from the tank as you would throug a straw. It wasn't easy. Among other things, the hose hac- ° extend up and over a piece of the helmet's face plate to reach my mouth. Furthermore, although I didn't know this until later, a leaky valve was permitting air to flow up through the hose. soon felt an uncomfortable sensation in my throat and chest, took me a while to realize it was caused by what amounts to < weightless belch. We knew that storing the human perspiration that would accufflljj late on a long flight like this was going to be another problem a we had spent a lot of time before the flight arguing over way* handle it. The heat exchanger that cools the astronaut's suit as
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