John Glen & Friendship 7 - historic flight

[mike20papa]

In memory of our fellow pilot I went on youtube and listened to his full mission recording.  When I was a kid, I never will forget at the Smithsonian looking at his capsule and first impression - how it reminded me more of a rocket propelled garbage can - not a space craft! 

Interesting to listen to how he is constantly plagued with gyro & attitude control problems.  Cages & recages the gyros and basically hand flies with visual reference to correct his autopilot and gyro errors.  Really cool when he references the constellation Orion out the window as visual attitude reference!  All the while he is constantly changing frequencies to talk to poorly received ground control stations flying around the globe and his "fly by wire" inputs playing into his headset.  And when was the last time you went thru a "pre-entry check list" & adjust your clock for a one second deviation, then loose all radio contact as you ready for "the approach".  Love his statement upon firing retro rockets, "feels like I'm going back to Hawaii".  Then he gets the infamous command to leave his retro rocket assembly in place and with no explanation for the deviation.  "Friendship 7, real fireball outside" - "Boy, but that was a real fireball outside"  Splash down is within 6 miles of his recovery ship.  God speed John. You'll be missed, but never forgotten!

[1964-M20E]

yes all that and flying backwards.  amazing accomplishments through the years.

I'm young enough to not have personally witnessed the Mercury or Gemini programs but I do remember Apollo 11 and the Apollo program.  I wanted to be an astronaut in those days and built Saturn V rockets with legos.  Somewhere I have an 8mm movie my grandfather bought of the Apollo 11 mission just need to go to a museum and get a projector.

Where did I put those legos?

 

 

 

[Piloto]

I remember very well the Mercury program. I even got a cardboard capsule to play astronaut. I also remember Gagarin's first in space flight.

Unlike Glenn that splashed on the ocean and was rescued by the Navy, Gagarin parachuted from the capsule and landed on a farm in Russia. He was rescued by a mother and her daughter and carried on horse drawn wagon to the nearest town to make a phone call to Moscow.

Unlike launching from Florida at a tropical latitude launching from Siberia at temperate latitudes requires bigger rockets. In the early 1960s Nikita Khrushchev wanted to stablish a space port in Cuba to launch to the Moon but Kennedy changed his mind.

The Vostok capsules used vacuum tubes were primitive compared to the Mercury capsules. Gagarin height was 5' 2" vs Glenn 5' 10". Glenn would have not fit in the Vostok. Nevertheless the Vostok were the first to return an astronaut on land.

 José 

Edited December 9, 2016 by Piloto