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No more red glow… he must be out of the fireball… seven g's were driving him back into the seat… He could hear the Cape capcom:
"… How do you read? Over."
That meant he had passed through the ionosphere and was entering the lower atmosphere.
"Loud and clear; how me?"
"Roger, reading you loud and clear. How are you doing?"
"Oh, pretty good."
"Roger. Your impact point is within one mile of the up-range destroyer."
Oh, pretty good. It wasn't Yeager, but it wasn't bad. He was inside of one and a half tons of non-aerodynamic metal. He was a hundred thousand feet up, dropping toward the ocean like an enormous ca
The parachute was supposed to deploy automatically, but he couldn't wait any longer. Rocking… He reached up to fire the parachute manually—but it fired on its own, automatically, first the drogue and then the main parachute. He swung under it in a huge arc. The heat was ferocious, but the chute held. It snapped him back into the seat. Through the window the sky was blue. It was the same day all over again. It was early in the afternoon on a su
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Al Shepard and Gus Grissom didn't know what the hell was happening. Poor Gus—all he had gotten after his flight was a medal, a handshake, a gust of rhetoric from James Webb, out on a brain-frying strip of asphalt at Patrick Air Force Base, plus a few attaboys from a crowd of about thirty. For John—well, the mobs that had showed up for the launch, for the fireworks, barely seemed to have thi
Something quite extraordinary was building up. It was a wave and a half, and the other six and their wives were more surprised than anybody else. It was ironic. They had all assumed that Al Shepard was the big wi