The Right Stuff

It was decided that one of Wally's major operational tests would consist of powering down all of the attitude-control systems, automatic as well as manual, and just drifting in any attitude the capsule's inertia took it, upside down (in relation to the earth), head over heels, canted this way and that, whatever. Scott heard about it and told Wally that he didn't really think it was necessary. He had drifted for most of his last orbit, in an attempt to conserve fuel for the re-entry, and had proved to his own satisfaction that you could stand the capsule right up on its aerial or let it revolve or put yourself in any other attitude and it was not the least bit disorienting or uncomfortable. Why didn't Wally put the proposed drifting time to other uses? Wally said no, he was going to devote his flight to experimenting with drifting flight and to conserving fuel, in order to prepare the way for missions of long duration.

Scott would learn that pla

Given the goal of the flight—which was to prove that a cool pilot could travel twice as far as Carpenter with half as much fuel consumption and ten times the accuracy—Schirra was terrific. From the moment he got up that morning, he was about as cool and relaxed a human being who ever went out to sit on top of a rocket shaft. A few days ago Wally had played one of his patented gotchas on Dee O'Hara, the nurse. One of her tasks was to collect urine samples. She gives him the usual little bottle and asks him to bring in a sample and leave it on her desk. She comes into her office, and on top of her desk is not a little bottle but a huge beaker holding about five gallons of an amber liquid with a head of foam on top. It couldn't possibly be—but could it possibly be?—and so she puts her hands on the sides of the beaker to see if it's warm, and—

"Gotcha!"

—she wheels about, and there's Wally peeking in the doorway, him and his beaming face and a couple of the boys. He had concocted it of water, tincture of iodine, and detergent. The next day Dee O'Hara presents Wally with a clear plastic bag, a big thing, about four feet long, telling him that it's the urine receptacle for his flight, replacing the little condom device that Grissom, Gle

Chris Kraft, the flight director, gave his approval for the first orbit, and Deke Slayton, the capcom at the Cape, told Schirra: "You have a go from Control Center."

Schirra said: "You have a go from me. It's real fat."

Then Slayton said: "Are you a turtle today?"

"Going to VOX recorder only," said Wally. Then he spoke into the tape recorder, whose microphone was not hooked into the open radio circuit.

"You bet your sweet ass I am," he said.

The Turtle Club was one of Wally's gotcha games. If one good buddy who played the turtle game met another good buddy in public—preferably in the company of very proper folk—and challenged him with the question "Are you a turtle?" that good buddy had to answer, "You bet your sweet ass I am," in a loud voice or else treat everybody else to a round of drinks. This was three minutes and forty-one seconds into the flight. Wally was already maintaining an even strain.

He buckled down to the task of conserving hydrogen peroxide. Ordinarily, when the booster rocket separated from the capsule, the capsule was then turned around by the automatic control system, but this consumed considerable fuel. This time Schirra nudged it around manually, using only the low thrusters, the five-pound thrusters, of the fly-by-wire system. Soon he was telling Deke at the Cape: "I'm in chimp mode right now and she's flying beautifully." He started using this phrase chimp mode. On the chimpanzee flights the attitude of the capsule had been controlled automatically throughout. The chimp mode was a little zinger for the benefit of all those on the mighty ziggurat, whether astronauts or X-15 "dream pilots," who were aware of the taunt: "A monkey's go

"I'm having a ball up here drifting," said Wally. "Enjoying it so much I haven't eaten yet."

When he came over California during the fourth orbit, John Gle

"Ha, ha," said Wally. "I suppose an old song, 'Drifting and Dreaming,' would be apropos at this point, but at this point I don't have a chance to dream. I'm enjoying it too much." When he was over South America, he was asked to say something in Spanish for live broadcast.

"Buenos dias, you all," said Wally. (And the Latins loved it.)

After nearly four orbits, drifting and yakking and yukking it up, cool, relaxed, a turtle to the last, Wally had used up barely 10 percent of his hydrogen peroxide. He had already traveled one orbit farther than Carpenter or Gle

"Flight" meant the flight director, Kraft himself, was coming onto the circuit.

"Been a real good show up there," said Kraft. "I think we are proving our point, old buddy!"

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