_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [28]
Despite the failures, there seemed to be little concern around the Mercury-Atlas pad. Many thought the problems would resolve themselves. O’Malley called the launch team together. He gave them the new word: “The next son of a bitch who says no sweat, who tells me or anybody else we don’t have a problem, will ride the toe of my boot out the door.” T. J., as he was known, was simply the tough, hard-nosed manager Atlas-Mercury needed. His hard-boiled attitude whipped the Pad 14 launch team into shape—a team ready to work 24–7 to turn the Atlas into a piece of reliable machinery.
The troublesome Atlas systems were modified, the fragile skin was given its own steel belt, and on September 13, 1961, five months after the last Atlas failure, the rocket was ready for another try. Atlas drilled its unmanned Mercury capsule into a perfect orbit, and after completing one trip around Earth, a California tracking station fired the capsule’s retro-rockets and the spacecraft returned for a safe splashdown.
T. J. O’Malley ready to launch John Glenn, the first American, into Earth orbit. (O‘malley Collection).
NASA and the Atlas managers were pleased. O’Malley, the Irish altar boy, had gotten the job done.
John Glenn was ready. He’d been ready from the moment he was selected as an astronaut to be first in space, but Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov had shot the hell out of that plan. No more suborbital flights. Mission number three would go for orbit, and Glenn, as backup to both Shepard and Grissom, was in a perfect position. No astronaut had better credentials. Glenn was born in the heart of the great radio days. To the Marine Corps he was a public-relations dream, and to the public, he was Jack Armstrong, all-American.
He was ready, but NASA wasn’t. Not quite. John Glenn would have to endure the same humiliation that had tormented Alan Shepard. On November 29, 1961, the marine fighter pilot stepped aside while NASA loaded another chimpanzee, Enos, into a Mercury capsule. The Atlas and Mercury capsule performed flawlessly, but the chimp’s equipment failed and the electrical system and light tests went haywire.
Every one of Enos’s display’s buttons lit up wrong. He banged on every lever he could find, but that didn’t help. For his efforts, instead of a banana pellet, he was rewarded with a nasty shock.
Enos came out of orbit biting anything that moved. NASA went through a sort of scheduled greeting, but the chimp wouldn’t let handlers diaper him. Enos had a large erection, but this didn’t stop the proud officials. NASA news chief Jack King paraded the chimp before the media. This prompted a popular woman broadcaster to ask, “Jack, are you going to breed that chimp?”
Satisfied with the chimp’s flight, NASA managers scheduled Glenn’s launch for December 20, 1961. Get into orbit before year’s end was the cry; it was to be a Christmas present for the boss, JFK. But Santa Claus’s elves were not on John Glenn’s side. No sooner than the Atlas and Mercury capsule were erected on the launch pad, there began a series of frustrating delays. It would have broken the spirit of most, but Glenn and the launch team kept pushing ahead. Finally, on the morning of February 20, 1962, after eighty-two days of weather and mechanical delays, Glenn was strapped into the spacecraft he had named Friendship Seven. Lady luck smiled. It was try number ten, and the countdown nudged its way toward 9:47 A.M. Eastern time.
But before Glenn could be launched, there was one last thing. The international community needed to certify that John Glenn was actually on board Friendship Seven—that he had not slipped down the gantry’s elevator before the structure had been moved. So, with the Mercury-Atlas standing alone on its launch pad, lead rocket engine engineer Lee Solid left the blockhouse and escorted