Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in ... - The Black Vault

Exploring the Unknown 207
Blind copy:
Mr. Lucius D. Battle, Director
Executive Secretariat
Department of State
Washington 25, D.C.
A
Webb:hhm
Cc: AD- Dryden
A- Phillips
Document I-38
Document Title: MR-4 Technical Debriefing Team, Memorandum for Associate
Director, NASA, “MR-4 Postflight Debriefing of Virgil I. Grissom,” 21 July 1961,
with attached, “Debriefing.”
Source: NASA Collection, University of Houston, Clear Lake Library, Clear Lake,
Texas.
The second flight of the Mercury program, astronaut Gus Grissom’s suborbital mission on
21 July1961, proved somewhat less successful than Alan Shepard’s because of the loss of the
capsule in the ocean. On Grissom’s mission, an explosively actuated side hatch was used to
blow open seventy 1/4-inch titanium bolts that secured the hatch to the doorsill. During the
water recovery effort a premature explosion of the side hatch allowed the capsule to sink in
15,000 feet of water. Grissom vacated the spacecraft immediately after the hatch blew off and
was retrieved after being in the water for about four minutes. Much of the debriefing for the
mission, as shown in this memorandum, relates to this important mishap. How this incident
took place has been a mystery ever since, with numerous theories abounding. Some thought
Grissom panicked and prematurely hit the control to blow the hatch, either accidentally or on
purpose to escape the capsule sooner. Others, especially test pilots who knew a steely-nerved
Grissom, have publicly doubted that explanation. Some thought that seawater might have
gotten into the system and somehow shorted it out. There is no definitive explanation, and
recovery of his capsule from the Atlantic Ocean in 1999 did not yield any final answer to
what happened during Grissom’s flight.
MEMORANDUM for Associate Director
Subject: MR-4 postflight debriefing of Virgil I. Grissom
NASA-Manned Spacecraft Center
Langely Field, Virginia
[7-21-61]
1. The enclosures to this memorandum constitute Captain Grissom’s
complete debriefing of MR-4. The first enclosure is a general outline of
the three sessions of the MR-4 debriefing. The second enclosure is an
index of enclosures four, five and six which are Grissom’s comments