The Right Stuff

As soon as Cox and his co-pilot pulled Grissom up into the helicopter, they could see that he was in a bad way. He looked fu

Once they got over the carrier Randolph, Grissom calmed down a bit. The same sort of awed faces that had welcomed Alan Shepard were craning up at the helicopter. But Grissom hardly noticed them. His head was in a very dark cloud.

When he went below deck, he was still shaking. He kept saying, "I didn't do anything. The damned thing just blew."

Within an hour they had started the preliminary debriefing, and Grissom kept saying, "I didn't do anything, I was just lying there—and it just blew."

A couple of hours later, at the formal debriefing on Grand Bahama Island, Grissom was much calmer, although he looked exhausted and drawn. He was grim. He was a very unhappy man. His pulse was still up to 90.

Normally, at rest, it was 68 or 69. He kept saying, "I didn't touch it, I was just lying there—and it blew."

According to Gus, here was what happened. Once he knew the helicopters were nearby, he felt secure in the capsule and therefore asked for five minutes to finish getting unhooked and record his switch positions. While the capsule was still descending under the parachute, he had opened his face plate and disco

"I had the cap off and the safety pin out," Gus said, "but I don't think that I hit the button. The capsule was rocking around a little, but there weren't any loose items in the capsule, so I don't see how I could have hit it, but possibly I did."

As the day wore on, and the formal debriefing got underway, Gus discounted even the possibility that he had hit the button. "I was lying there, flat on my back—and it just blew."

Nobody was about to accuse Gus of anything, but the engineers kept rolling their eyes at each other. The explosive hatch was new to the Mercury capsule, but explosive hatches had been in use on jet fighters since the early 1950's. When a pilot pulled his cinch ring and ejected, the hatch blew and a TNT charge rocketed the pilot and his seat-parachute rig through the opening. The pilot and anyone who might be riding backseat routinely armed their hatches and the TNT charges out on the runway before takeoff. This was the equivalent of Gus's removing the detonator cover and the safety pin.

Of course, any apparatus rigged up with explosive charges had the potential of exploding at the wrong time. Later on, NASA put a hatch assembly through every test the engineers could dream up to try to make the hatch blow without hitting the detonator button. They subjected it to trial by water, trial by heat; they shook it, pounded it, dropped it on concrete from a height of one hundred feet—and it never just blew.

There were many conjectures uttered very quietly, very privately.

And at Edwards… the True Brothers… well, my God, as you can imagine, they were… laughing! Naturally they couldn't say anything. But now—surely!—it was so obvious! Grissom had just screwed the pooch!

In flight test, if you did something that stupid, if you destroyed a major prototype through some lame-brain mistake such as hitting the wrong button—you were through! You'd be lucky to end up in Flight Engineering. Oh, it was obvious to everybody at Edwards that Grissom had just fucked it, screwed the pooch, that was all. It was doubtful that he had hit the detonator on purpose, because even if he were feeling a little panicky in the water (you have to be afraid to panic, old buddy), he wasn't likely to ask for trouble by blowing the hatch before the helicopter hooked on and was overhead with the horse collar. But if a man is begi