_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [33]
Webb shifted in his seat. “I get your point.”
Wiesner looked at him soberly. “It’s simple, Jim,” he said. “Take him off the flight.”
Webb nodded a half-hearted agreement. He realized the presidential science adviser was still smarting over losing his argument that JFK should cancel the whole damn manned space program.
Deke had idiopathic paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, a disturbance of the rhythm in the muscle fibers in the upper chambers of his heart, and the NASA administrator called for a medical panel to review the facts. The panel agreed with Wiesner. The job of telling Deke fell to the Mercury Seven’s own flight surgeon, Bill Douglas.
“Goddamn it, Bill, those sons-a-bitches can’t do this to me,” Deke shouted. “No one was concerned about this during selection. After all the years I’ve been flying the hottest jets, flying test flights, they said it was no big thing. Now they want me to step down? I can’t believe it,” he pleaded, shaking his head. “There ain’t a damn thing wrong with me.”
There was more bad news.
“I know the rules call for the backup pilot to slip into the seat of an astronaut unable to make a mission,” Dr. Douglas told Deke, “but Wally won’t be going.”
“God!” Deke screamed, “What the hell else?”
Douglas explained that Bob Gilruth decided Scott Carpenter, John Glenn’s backup, had more time in the Mercury simulator than Schirra, and Carpenter would be going in his place.
NASA gave Deke a few minutes with the press and then got him out of Dodge, got him the hell out of the way of Carpenter’s mission. When Aurora Seven lifted off on May 24, 1962, Deke Slayton was at a remote tracking station in Australia.
Scott Carpenter made a perfect ride into orbit. He was a gatherer of facts and a builder of knowledge, and in a sense he was the first science-astronaut. He made the most of what he had on board. On his first two orbits he drank more and ate more. He wanted to know how the digestive tract would handle weightlessness, and he wanted to know the limits of Mercury’s attitude-control jets. By wringing them out, from one position and then to another, he virtually depleted the fuel available for attitude maneuvering. He took all the pictures he could until his cameras ran hot, and then he ran through his scheduled program checklist, which included releasing a balloon in space.
He was having a ball.
After his first two orbits, Mercury Control began to worry. Scott had consumed so much fuel, flight director Chris Kraft was giving serious thought to ending his mission an orbit early. But he made a last-minute decision to let Scott stay up for his third and final planned trip around Earth if he would go into a “drifting mode.” That would conserve fuel. Scott liked the idea. He lay back in the comfort of weightlessness.
But as he entered his final sunrise, he couldn’t control himself. Scott had an idea. He banged his hand against the inside wall of Aurora Seven. He was right. The moment he struck the wall he was flying through a swarm of John Glenn’s “fireflies.” Again he banged the capsule’s bulkhead, and more fireflies slowly moved into view. “Damn,” he cursed. “I must know.” He fired the jets, swung the capsule around, and proved the mysterious fireflies originated from water vapor vented from the Mercury capsule. Vapor produced primarily by the human on board.
The astronaut’s body perspired, urinated, and exhaled, and the moisture was removed from the spacecraft through an external vent on the side of the capsule. The instant this moisture entered the low temperatures of the space night, it froze into ice particles. Some particles