John Glenn was the oldest among the first American astronauts, but he was destined to be the first to repeat Gagarin's achievement and complete several orbits around the Earth. In flight, he had to face a number of difficulties and instrument failure, and therefore key maneuvers had to be performed manually. On February 20, 1962, John Glenn made the Mercury-Atlas 6 space flight. He became the first American in orbit, but the course of his mission was significantly different from Gagarin's flight.
Glenn became the most popular American astronaut of the early 1960s, but looking at the mission's technical parameters alone, it's hard to see why. He was not the first American in space: Alan Shepard and Virgil Grissom flew there on a ballistic trajectory, not reaching the first space velocity, in May and July 1961. Yuri Gagarin and German Titov were in orbit before him, and Titov's flight lasted much longer.
I must say that even Glenn got into the detachment of the first astronauts not without difficulty. According to NASA criteria, military test pilots with higher education, under forty and, due to the limitations of the Mercury spacecraft, no taller than 180 centimeters were to be selected there. Glenn was an experienced fighter pilot who fought in World War II and the Korean War, but at the time of selection he was nearly forty, 179 centimeters tall, and did not have a bachelor's degree. However, only the height requirement was strictly observed, and Colonel Jake Dill, the commander of the future astronaut at the test pilot school, during a personal visit, convinced NASA that Glenn was an excellent candidate.
The first American in orbit fell into this role due to a combination of circumstances. Initially, Glenn wanted to go on the first American space flight, but program leaders decided to select an astronaut for this by voting within the squad itself.
It's worth mentioning Glenn's personality here. If Gagarin was described as a modest, friendly and purposeful guy, then his American counterpart was like him only in purposefulness. Glenn was a born TV star. While other astronauts were asked about their families' attitudes towards the space program with routine soothing phrases, Glenn said that "it's unlikely that any of us could continue to do this without really good support at home, I'm serious."
The first American in orbit was a staunch Christian, constantly talking about "faith and fatherland," and once joked about his decision to become an astronaut:
"I joined the project because it's probably the only time I'll ever be allowed any kind of access to heaven."
According to one of the researchers of the history of space programs, reporters were jubilant looking at this, but fellow astronauts could not help yawning at such scenes.
In addition, Glenn believed that the astronauts should demonstrate to the public the standard of morality and did not hesitate to make comments to his squadmates. This was especially true of relations with wives, which not all candidates for the flight developed well. “He positioned himself slightly as some kind of saint,” says John Logsdon, a professor at the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. All this did not add to Glenn's popularity among his comrades, and although open hostility in the astronaut detachment is impossible, relations with him were strained.
This may have been one of the factors why Shepard won the first flight vote. Because of this, Glenn flew only third, but the first - into orbit.
His path was very different from the fate of Gagarin, who was well suited for all selection criteria, was the undisputed leader, and his primacy was approved by the State Commission.
The flight itself, like previous American ones, took place on a Mercury ship, but it was carried by an Atlas LV3B rocket, more powerful than Redstone. Glenn gave the ship its own name, Friendship 7, and personally wrote it on board, as he once did with his fighters. Problems began immediately with pre-launch preparations, during the countdown there were eleven stops due to technical problems and bad weather. Scott Carpenter, another astronaut in contact with the spacecraft, said "God bless John Glenn" as he left the launch pad, but a radio malfunction prevented the addressee from hearing him.
The carrier worked normally, and at first the flight went well. Flying over Africa, Glenn reported seeing a dust storm, and over the Indian Ocean he admired his first sunset from orbit. At the same time, due to cloudiness, the astronaut could not see the signal rocket launched by the US Navy ship during the experiment.While flying over Australia, where it was night, Glenn said he saw a bright light and what looked like a city. He was probably looking at the city of Perth, whose inhabitants deliberately turned on the lights as brightly as possible, knowing about the flight. When the ship again took off for the day side, the astronaut noticed a swarm of "fireflies" around him. They slowly flowed around and didn't seem to come from any part of the spacecraft. Subsequent analysis determined that Glenn most likely saw small ice crystals flying out of the onboard systems.
At the end of the first orbit, problems began with the automatic control system, and Glenn had to manually stabilize the ship. In general, the active use of manual control can be considered the main difference between the Friendship 7 flight and the first Soviet ones. During Gagarin's flight, manual control was blocked, and in order to activate it in an emergency, it would be necessary to solve a difficult task, since the mission leadership was afraid of the unpredictable reaction of the human psyche to space. In Titov's flight, manual maneuvers were performed, but according to plan. Glenn, on the other hand, periodically resorted to manual control during the entire flight, including due to emergency situations.
The main problems began towards the end of the flight, which consisted of three orbits.
According to telemetry data, the heat shield was not firmly attached to the ship, and was only held in place by the brake motor mounting system.
Without a heat shield, an astronaut would have been guaranteed to die upon entry into the atmosphere, and therefore a non-standard decision was made at the mission control center. Glenn was instructed not to reset the brake block after disengagement, which meant that the descent would be done manually. The astronaut had to overcome the programmed sequence of actions, and he activated the boosters over California. "Received. Brake motors are on ... Indeed! Feeling like flying back to Hawaii,” he reported.
At the time of entry into the atmosphere, Glenn controlled the ship manually, he was ordered not to reset the braking system until the accelerometer showed 1.5 g. At one moment, he saw how the mounting element of the installation moved away from it and hung in front of the porthole, after which it burned out in the plasma stream. At the moment of peak heating, the astronaut noticed flying fragments around the ship and was afraid that these were pieces of his heat shield, but it turned out that it was only the dropped braking unit that was being destroyed. After passing the peak overload, the device began to fluctuate in pitch, and for stabilization with the help of engines, automation had to be used.
As a result, the device released a parachute and successfully landed in the North Atlantic. As it turned out, everything was in order with the shield, the problem was with the sensor. Yuri Gagarin in flight experienced partly mirror problems: everything was in order with the shield, but the brake installation gave out an insufficient impulse, and as a result, the automation forbade the separation of the descent vehicle from the instrument compartment. This led to somersaults of the ship upon entry into the atmosphere, but with further heating, the reset occurred already at the signal of the temperature sensors.
The fame that the flight brought to Glenn allowed him to become a senator from Ohio and run for president in 1984. However, many years later, he returned to space again, being already an elderly man. At first, NASA was reluctant to send an elderly astronaut into space, but Glenn was able to convince the agency of the feasibility of this experiment. As a result, in 1998, he went on the Shuttle to fly STS-95 at the age of 77, setting a record. John Glenn lived thereafter for almost twenty years, passing away in 2016 at the age of 95.
bbabo.Net