LIBERTY BELL IS LOST The sub-orbital flight of Liberty Bell manned by Virgil Grissom took place on 2 July 1961. For this mission my deployment to the Cape also served as another orientation to the rapidly expanding Cape launch facilities and opportunity for further flight control training. The botched up recovery and loss of the capsule was a black mark on our space program, which only time and more experience could erase. Gus Grissom was a quiet, unassuming, thoroughly professional pilot. I suppose the blowing of the hatch easily could have been an entirely automatic unconscious act, identical to that of the thoroughly experienced senior pilot blowing the B-47 escape hatch while demonstrating my emergency escape routine as we sat on the tarmac. Other factors could have entered in. Anyone seeing the Mercury vehicle for the first time cannot help but remark on how small it was and how little room existed for the astronaut. He was ‘canned’ so to speak and potentially trapped. Recently, while looking at a mock-up of the Mercury capsule in the Astronaut Hall of Fame and trying to imagine the stresses of just sitting there in rough seas, with the capsule whirling about, waiting for the recovery team to arrive, all I could do was nod my head in deep respect. Gus went through all the stresses with some extra ones thrown in and received none of the glory.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 21:05:47 +0000
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