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

Exploring the Unknown 241
or the like, this is the actual schedule as the flying occurred. I realize there’s a lot
of detail here, but I’d like to talk about this overall schedule first. In accomplishing
this, in the period of about 45 months of activity, some 25 flights were made
which was an activity of a major flight in something less than every 2 months.
[Slide 5] [4] To do this, at various states, three launch vehicles were used and
two launch sites. The Little Joe was a research-and-development booster used for
the development, testing primarily the escape system; these tests were at Wallops
Island. The Redstone booster was used for the ballistic flights to help qualify the
spacecraft systems and the crew for orbital flight. And, of course, the Atlas was
used for orbital flights. It is interesting to note that one of the first major flights
was the BJ-1 up there, which was the Big Joe, which qualified the heat-protection
system and verified that this concept was proper. Dr. Gilruth talked about the
team getting right to work and I can talk a little about this one because I had
nothing to do with it. I think this was an amazing job done in something less than
a year from project go-ahead. This was a major activity and it involved a ballistic
reentry of a full-scale Mercury like spacecraft.
[Slide 6]
And, so, the first year or so we were concerned with these development
flights and it was about the end of 1960 really that the heavy activity in qualifying
the actual hardware for the manned orbital flights began and I’d like to look
at an expanded scale there and it’s on this next slide, on the right side, please.
This, I think, was the peak of our highest activity in Mercury. We began with our –
really, we should start with the Mercuy-Redstone 1 which was our first full-boosted
flight of our production spacecraft. We had problems; we fired the escape tower
when it was a premature cutoff, but we won’t go into this today. But, then, the
program moved along rather rapidly on the ballistic program between December
and May when Al Shepard made his flight and followed by Grissom’s [5] flight
that summer. Meanwhile, the Atlas was also moving along; we had a failure back
in July, that Dr. Dryden referred to, which cost us about six months in our Atlas
program and it was not until the following February, after suitable modifications
had been made to both the spacecraft adapter and the launch vehicle, that we
were able to resume the Atlas flights. The first of these qualified our production
spacecraft for the reentry heating case. That was followed by another Atlas
failure, MA-3, which was an electronic failure, but, by then, we had the team really
working together; we solved these problems and made our first orbital flight of a
Mercury spacecraft in September and within four or five months of that, we had
John Glenn’s flight following the flight of Enos in orbital flight. This, to me – to
anyone planning schedules – The flight program for this time should look at this
one, because there were periods here of major activities, at least once a month,
and in a research-and-development program, I feel that this is about the limits
of human tolerance. Everybody was working terribly hard on this period; it was a
rough one.
Now, this is about all of the detail (will you take those slides off)—detail
of the program that I can go into at this time (hold that one).
[Slide 7]