_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [24]
We had a thousand things to say about Alan Shepard, his family, the mission, the Redstone, Freedom Seven. But we’d never seen a man disappearing into bright sunlight—a single point of silvery flame leaving Earth.
Merrill was the master, but we had been on the air all morning and we both were running dry on things to say. Our voices fading, Merrill swallowed hard. Then the master found one last masterful thought…
“He looks so lonely up there…”
The sixteen worldwide NBC Radio networks fell silent.
The rocket’s thrust increased Shepard’s weight sixfold, and he found it difficult to speak. The growing force of gravity squeezed his vocal cords and he drew on experience, on the techniques he had mastered catapulting off carriers in fighter jets. Slayton heard him clearly.
He was struggling, but he was smiling broadly inside his helmet. End of powered flight was near.
Three, two, one, cutoff!
The Redstone stopped burning.
Above Shepard’s head a large solid-propellant rocket fired, spewing thrust from three canted nozzles. These broke connecting links to pull the escape rocket and tower away. They were no longer needed.
Next, more rockets fired, and Freedom Seven separated from its Redstone. A new light flashed on the instrument panel.
“This is Seven. Cap sep is green.”
Shepard and Freedom Seven were on their own, moving through space at more than four thousand miles per hour.
“Roger,” Slayton confirmed.
Mercury Control had its ears on. They wanted to hear what it was like to be up there.
Well, first, only seconds ago Shepard weighed a thousand pounds. Now he weighed less than a thousandth of a pound.
“I’m free!” he shouted.
“Does Louise know?” Deke joked.
Alan laughed and moved within his restraints to feel the freedom of weightlessness. It was…well, hell, it was wonderful and marvelous and a miracle. That’s what it was. Were he not strapped in, he would have floated about in total relaxation. No up, no down, and as John Glenn had posted on the capsule’s instrument panel before Alan entered, “No handball playing in here.” A missing washer and bits of dust drifted before him. He smiled.
No rush of wind crossing the skin of Freedom Seven despite its speed. No friction. No turbulence. Outside, the silence of ghosts reigned.
But inside, his Mercury capsule had its own pressurized atmosphere where ghosts were real. They made their own sounds. Inverters moaned. Gyroscopes whirred. Cooling fans spun. Cameras snapped. Radios hummed. They were the voices of Freedom Seven.
Alan Shepard took to space with fierce pleasure as he felt Freedom Seven slowly turning around, and he realized it was time to go flying. He wrapped his gloved right hand around the three-axis control stick.
“Switching to manual pitch,” he radioed Mercury Control.
“Roger.”
He moved the stick. Small jets of hydrogen peroxide gas shot into space from exterior nozzles. Instantly he felt the reaction as the capsule’s blunt end raised and lowered in response to his commands. He couldn’t believe how easy Freedom Seven was to fly. It was doing precisely what he asked.
“Pitch is okay,” he reported. “Switching to manual yaw.”
“Roger. Roll.”
Again Seven moved on invisible rails. Shepard wasn’t just a passenger. He was flying his spacecraft, controlling its attitude. “Finally,” he shouted aloud, “we’re first with something!”
He checked his flight plan.
Fun time, he smiled, moving to look through the periscope at the Earth below.
Damn, he cursed.
While on the launch pad he had checked the periscope and stared into a bright sky. Immediately he had moved in filters and now, looking through the scope, instead of a brilliant blue Earth, he saw only a gray planet.