_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [30]
“Roger, zero-g and I feel fine,” Glenn reported. “Capsule is turning around. Oh! That view is tremendous!”
John Glenn and America were in orbit. A grateful country shed its tears and screamed its cheers. Some of its lost prestige had just been restored.
Friendship Seven set its course for the first of three planned trips around Earth, and Glenn reminded himself he had a debt to pay to American taxpayers. They were all anxious, almost desperate, to hear from him. He offered glowing descriptions of the planet sliding beneath Friendship Seven: the sculpted sands of the deserts, the mantle of snow covering the mountains, and closer to home, the rich deep green of Bahamian waters. He peered down volcanoes, and when it was night, he looked into the blackest of black below and saw great thunderstorms split themselves apart with lightning bolts that left trails of snarling fire.
In that blackness, only the motors and instruments of his spaceship offered any sounds and light. The remainder of the universe had gone mute, and suddenly he was staring at the brightest, most clearly defined stars and planets he had ever seen.
He was surprised by the speed and completion of his first night as he saw the thinnest crease in the darkness behind him, just a sliver of light, and then the sliver grew swiftly, growing into a shout of color and the brightest of suns as the horizon quickly transformed itself from night to day.
Half of his Mercury capsule was now lit; the other half lay in shadow and the dim reflected light from a planet below that was still in darkness. Sunrise on Earth itself was still minutes away.
Suddenly, he saw something strange out of the corner of his eye. Lightning bugs, good old-fashioned Ohio summer lightning bugs were swarming around Friendship Seven. Swarms of the tiny creatures. Some came right to his window, and then he realized they were frost, possibly ice dancing and swirling along with him as he moved through orbit.
Glenn had no idea what caused this stunning phenomenon, and he radioed Mercury Control. “I’ll try to describe what I’m [seeing] in here.” Every person hearing his voice snapped to, eyes wide.
“I’m in a big mass of thousands of very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they’re luminescent,” Glenn explained. “They are bright yellowish-green. About the size and intensity of a firefly on a real dark night. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Roger, Friendship Seven, this is Canton CapCom, can you hear any impact with the capsule? Over.”
“Negative, negative. They’re very slow. They’re not going away from me at more than maybe three or four miles an hour.”
As Friendship Seven moved into brighter sun, the fireflies disappeared, and flight managers shifted their attention to an immediate urgency that could be threatening John Glenn’s life. Shining like a pit of deadly snakes on the Mercury Control’s wall-wide tracking map was Segment 51—a warning that told flight controllers Friendship Seven’s heat shield could be loose.
Everyone stopped. If the warning was correct, John Glenn could be cremated during reentry. Temperatures during the atmospheric plunge would reach 4,000 degrees.
Every member of Glenn’s team concentrated on the problem. They studied every idea floated, but there seemed to be only one in-flight fix: They could leave the retro-rocket pack strapped to the outside of the heat shield. This package contained six small rockets. Three had been used after Atlas shutdown to push Friendship Seven away from the Atlas booster; three larger rockets remained. They would be used to slow the spacecraft for reentry.
The theory was simple. If they left the retro-pack in place after the three de-orbit rockets fired, the straps should be strong enough to hold the heat shield in place until Glenn’s dive took him deep into the atmosphere. There, the growing air pressure would keep the heat shield pressed against the Mercury capsule