Apollo 50: Apollo VII, part 1

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."
-John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961

"All of us in the flights that followed were dependent on the Apollo 7 crew doing their job, so thanks Walt and Wally and Donn."
-Neil Armstrong, October 20, 2008

"23:58:03   (Music - JINGLE BELLS - from Spacecraft VI)"
-official Gemini 6 radio transcript

Righto. We've hit the fiftieth anniversary of the first manned Apollo mission, so it's time for me to nerd out at you.

Apollo 7 launched on October 11, 1968, but to tell the full story, you have to go back six years and start on October 3, 1962. That was the day that Wally Schirra, who would later command Apollo 7, orbited the Earth six times as the fifth American in space.

Schirra during Project Mercury

Schirra (pronounced "shir-RA") had a lot to prove on that flight, designated MA-8 (Mercury-Atlas 8). John Glenn's orbital flight, MA-6, was plagued by a faulty alarm and a tense reentry. Scott Carpenter's MA-7 likewise came down after only three orbits because the astronaut had been wasting too much fuel maneuvering. (It's possible that there was a technical issue, and the blame should have been shared between Carpenter and a NASA ground controller, but flight director Chris Kraft didn't see it that way and vowed that Carpenter would never fly for him again.) Schirra had to make it through six orbits if the Americans hoped to tie the Russians' full day in space (17.5 orbits) by the end of Project Mercury.

Schirra performed his mission admirably. MA-8 was so successful that NASA officials considered cancelling Leroy "Gordo" Cooper's MA-9 and proceeding straight to two-man flights in Project Gemini. (A desire to match the Russians' ability to put a one-man spacecraft in orbit for a day led to this proposal being rejected, and MA-9 flew as planned, completing 22 orbits in 34 hours.)

But Schirra felt that he had one last task to perform, even after a successful splashdown only half a mile from the recovery ship.* There was one more mission to redeem: Mercury-Redstone 4, America's second manned spaceflight. Virgil "Gus" Grissom had flown a perfect replica of Alan Shepard's suborbital flight, right up until splashdown. Before a recovery helicopter could secure the craft, the explosive bolts on Grissom's hatch blew, and the spacecraft sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

*Schirra's splashdown was so precise that future NASA missions deliberately kept the recovery ships further away from the expected splashdown point, so that the spacecraft didn't accidentally land on them.

Rather than have a swimmer pull the release lanyard on his hatch while he was still in the water, Schirra radioed that he wanted to be towed inside his spacecraft to the recovery ship. His request was duly obliged, and Schirra blew his hatch on the deck of the USS Kearsarge. A subsequent medical examination revealed a bruise on his hand left by the heavy manual trigger switch. Grissom's post-flight examination showed no such injury. Any lingering suspicion over Grissom swiftly dissipated.*

*Grissom proposed - and pad leader Guenter Wendt accepted - the theory that the external release lanyard, which had been held in place by only one screw, came loose while the spacecraft was rolling in the ocean and triggered his hatch release. Grissom's spacecraft had a bomb aboard meant to destroy it if it sank to prevent the Soviets from recovering it, but this bomb failed to detonate. The craft was recovered in 1999.

Schirra's star rose swiftly, due to both his successful flight and heavy Mercury astronaut attrition. Donald "Deke" Slayton was medically grounded before his flight and replaced by Scott Carpenter due to an irregular heartbeat. Carpenter was grounded for poor performance on his flight. John Glenn, like his Soviet counterpart Yuri Gagarin, was grounded because he was seen as too valuable a propaganda object to risk losing on a future spaceflight.* Alan Shepard was medically grounded early in Project Gemini due to bouts of extreme nausea and vertigo caused by Meniere's disease. This left three Mercury astronauts to fly Gemini: Schirra, Grissom, and Cooper.

*Both men would successfully lobby their governments to permit them to return to space, but only Glenn would fly again, in 1998 at the age of 77 on the Space Shuttle Discovery. Gagarin died in a MiG crash in 1968 before he could return to space.

For Gemini, Schirra was assigned as the backup commander of Gemini 3 (the first manned Gemini flight, with Gus Grissom commanding and flying with rookie John Young) and the prime commander of Gemini 6, with Tom Stafford as his copilot. Originally, Gemini 6 was meant to rendezvous and dock with a unmanned vehicle called Agena, but problems with that craft caused NASA to scrub the docking idea and work solely on rendezvous; Gemini 7, commanded by Frank Borman, would launch before Gemini 6 for a 14-day endurance marathon. Then Schirra would launch in what was now dubbed Gemini 6A and rendezvous with Gemini 7 (but not dock, as the Gemini spacecraft were not equipped to dock with each other).

Gemini 7, with Borman and Jim Lovell aboard, launched on December 4, 1965, and would come down on schedule on December 18. Gemini 6A was due to launch on December 12. The engines ignited and then immediately shut down. Per the mission rules, Schirra should have pulled the ejector handle. Unlike Mercury and Apollo, Gemini did not have a Launch Escape System designed to carry the command module away from a burning rocket. Instead, the astronauts sat in ejector seats. If the Titan II missile blew up on the pad (or if it lifted off, failed, and dropped back down), the mission commander was supposed to fire the ejector seats.

But Schirra didn't. He hadn't felt the missile lift off the launchpad before it shut down. Moreover, he knew that ejecting would ruin the spacecraft (and the opportunity to rendezvous with Gemini 7) and would likely injure him and Stafford as well, since the seats weren't particularly safe to land in. What he didn't know - and what nobody would think about until just over a year later - was that the Gemini cabin had been soaking in 16 psi of pure oxygen. Firing the ejector seats in that would, as Stafford later put it, have made "two Roman candles" of the astronauts.

"I had heard the booster liftoff in Atlas, and this Titan didn't work exactly the same way, so I knew in milliseconds that something had gone wrong, that we had not lifted off. The rule was to eject, to punch us both out. That was kind of a mission rule, and that's another of those rules that was kind of a what-if. And the what-ifs are not all necessarily in a row, or in the proper sequence."
-Wally Schirra, 2002

Schirra may have violated the mission rules, but his quick thinking saved the mission. The cause of failure was swiftly investigated and corrected, and Gemini 6A launched successfully on December 15, and rendezvoused with Gemini 7 roughly five hours later. Because Gemini 7 was staying up so long and had to conserve fuel, Schirra performed most of the rendezvous maneuvers.

A practical joker at heart, "Jolly Wally" played two pranks during the mission. Schirra, Stafford, and Lovell were all Navy men who'd graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis; Borman was Air Force out of West Point. The annual Army-Navy game had been played a few weeks earlier, ending in a 7-7 tie. At one point, floating just a few feet from Gemini 7's nose, Schirra held up a piece of cardboard on which he'd written "BEAT ARMY." Borman (mis)read it aloud, without missing a beat, as "Beat Navy." According to Borman, Schirra promptly took the sign down to make sure he'd written the right thing.

"BEAT ARMY"

Later, shortly before reentry on December 16, Schirra reported seeing "a satellite going north to south in a polar orbit." He then played "Jingle Bells" on a harmonica he'd smuggled aboard. NASA got the joke, and Jolly Wally sailed for home.

Jolly Wally would never fly in space again. Schirra would, one more time, on Apollo 7. But there would be no jokes about inter-service rivalries or Santa Claus. Jolly Wally would disappear on January 27, 1967, and be replaced by a much grumpier, mutinous Schirra.

To be continued...