Word: grissom
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...Grissom has flown more than 3,000 hours, 2,000 of them in jets. Chosen as one of the seven astronauts in 1959, he went about his tasks quietly and efficiently, was almost unnoticed as he backstopped the more ebullient Commander Alan Shepard during the first shot. His specialty: control of the space capsule's, attitude system. After he was picked as an astronaut, he admitted that he sometimes lay in bed thinking: "Now what in the hell do I want to get up in that thing for?" He had his own answer. "I'm a test pilot...
...cleared as the launching time (7:20 a.m.) approached. The crowds of official and unofficial spectators grew tense with excitement, even though most of them had already witnessed Shepard's successful flight last May; they knew that the odds against success increased with each try. Least excited was Grissom. Strapped to his contour couch, he talked by telephone with his wife in Newport News, Va. He told her that he felt fine...
News from Grissom began to be relayed over the control-room loudspeaker. He felt fine, and all systems were working properly. At T plus 141 sec., officials told the waiting crowd that Liberty Bell 7 had separated successfully from the Redstone booster. The crowd clapped and yelled. Grissom looked out through his four-pane "picture window"-a new feature of the capsule-but was at first too dazzled to see much. "Boy," he reported, "that sun is really bright." Later he saw the clouded coastline far below, watched the sky grow blacker-and became so fascinated with the view that...
...Liberty Bell 7 approached its apogee, traveling at 5,310 miles per hour, Grissom took manual control with a new and hopefully more precise set of controls. Weightless by now, he found the manual controls sluggish, had difficulty turning his capsule by means of its small hydrogen peroxide rocket nozzles. "Having a little bit of trouble with the manual controls," he reported. Seven minutes after launch, he managed to point the capsule and fire the retrorockets. They slowed his speed only slightly, but if he had been in full orbital flight, they would have curved him down into the atmosphere...
Coming Down. Back at Canaveral, the electronic computers carefully watched the capsule's trajectory. They announced (through human intermediaries) that it would take Grissom to almost exactly the chosen impact point (302 miles down range)-though wind finally blew him six miles off target. Excitement rose on the aircraft carrier Randolph, whose helicopters were hovering to pluck the capsule out of the water. Second-by-second reports came down from space, Grissom chatting over his radio with Shepard...