The Right Stuff

"The clock is operating," he said. "We're underway."

It was all very smooth, much smoother than the centrifuge… just as Shepard and Grissom said it would be. He had gone through the same g-forces so many times… he hardly noticed them as they built up. It would have bothered him much more if they had been less. Nothing novel! No excitement, please! It took thirteen seconds for the huge rocket to reach transonic speed. The vibrations started. It was just as Shepard and Grissom said: it was much gentler than the centrifuge. He was still lying flat on his back, and the g-forces drove him deeper and deeper into the seat, but it all felt so familiar. He barely noticed it. He kept his eyes on the instrument panel the whole time… All quite normal, every little needle and switch in the right place… No malevolent instructor feeding Abort problems into the loop… As the rocket entered the transonic zone, the vibration became intense. The vibrations all but obliterated the roar of the engines. He was entering the area of "max q," maximum aerodynamic pressure, in which the pressure of the shaft of the Atlas forcing its way through the atmosphere at supersonic speed would reach almost a thousand pounds per square foot. Through the cockpit window he could see the sky turning black. Almost 5 g's were driving him back into his seat. And yet… easier than the centrifuge… All at once he was through max q, as if through a turbulent strait, and the trajectory was smooth and he was supersonic and the rumble of the rocket engines was more muffled than ever and he could hear all the little fans and recorders and the busy little kitchen, the humming little shop… The pressure on his chest reached 6 g's. The rocket pitched down. For the first time he could see clouds and the horizon. In a moment—there it was—the Atlas rocket's two booster engines shut down and were jettisoned from the side of the shaft and his body was slammed forward, as if he were screeching to a halt, and the g-forces suddenly dropped to 1.25, almost as if he were on earth and not accelerating at all, but the central sustainer engine and two smaller engines were still driving him up through the atmosphere… A flash of white smoke went up past the window… No! The escape tower was firing early—but the JETTISON TOWER light wasn't on!… He didn't see the tower go… Wait a minute… There went the tower, on schedule… The JETTISON TOWER light came on green… The smoke must have been from the booster rockets as they left the shaft… The rocket pitched back up… going straight up… The sky was very black now… The g-forces began pushing him back into his seat again… 3 g's… 4 g's… 5 g's… Soon he would be forty miles up… the last critical moment of powered flight, as the capsule separated from the rocket and went into its orbital trajectory… or didn't… Hey!… All at once the whole capsule was whipping up and down, as if it were tied to the end of a diving board, a springboard. The g-forces built up and the capsule whipped up and down. Yet no sooner had it begun than Gle

"Zero-g and I feel fine," he said. "Capsule is turning around…"

Gle

"Oh!" he said. "That view is tremendous!"

Well, it was a start. In fact, the view was not particularly extraordinary. It was extraordinary that he was up here in orbit about the earth. He could see the exhausted Atlas rocket following him. It was tumbling end over end from the force of the small rockets throwing the capsule free of it.

He could hear Alan Shepard, who was serving as capcom in the Mercury Control Center at the Cape. His voice came in very clearly. He was saying, "You have a go, at least seven orbits."

"Roger," said Gle

He was riding backward, looking back toward the Cape. It must be tremendous, it must be beautiful—what else could it be? And yet it didn't look terribly different from what he had seen at 50,000 feet in fighter planes. He had no greater sense of having left the bonds of earth. The earth was not just a little ball beneath him. It still filled his field of consciousness. It slid by slowly underneath him, just the way it did when you were in an airplane at forty or fifty thousand feet. He had no sense of being a star voyager. He couldn't see any stars at all. He could see the Atlas booster tumbling behind him and begi