Excerpts from Lost Spacecraft

Chapter 1 - Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom: The Man, the Pilot, and the Astronaut

"… At high school age, Virgil Ivan Grissom's frame stood only 5 feet 4 inches tall, weighing slightly less than 100 lbs. Even though he was not large enough for varsity sports, he was very athletic, played basketball, and loved to swim. Even more important was that he had excellent eye, hand, and foot coordination and was very competitive. In other words, what he lacked in size and mass, he made up for by trying harder. From the human factors standpoint, it meant that he had the ability to quickly and accurately command his body to do what he wanted based on what he observed with his eyes. Everyone can do this, but the people who make skilled pilots are really good at it, having the ability to control aileron, rudder, and elevator simultaneously, track an enemy aircraft, and lead them just the right amount before squeezing off a hail of gun fire. Overall, Gus had the ability to make quick decisions based on what he saw, do things with uncanny calmness, and exhibit a fierce determination to prevail against all obstacles - the perfect combination of abilities for a fighter pilot…"
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Chapter 2 - Reaching for Space: The Birth of Project Mercury

"… In the period between the end of the Second World War and the late 1950's, the approach to the technical challenge of spaceflight diverged into two camps: those who viewed spaceflight as a natural extension of high performance experimental aircraft and people who felt that the emerging rocket technology (and vehicles devoid of wings) was the way to go. In a way, both ideas had their strong points: If you had an aircraft, such as the X-15, that could already fly above much of the earth's atmosphere (and keep the pilot alive while doing it), all you had to do was figure out a way to accelerate it past the critical 17,000 mph speed and presto, you were in orbit. When you wanted to land, assuming that you had figured out a way to slow down and descend back through the atmosphere without burning up, you could guide the aircraft down in a fairly conventional manner, much like the Space Shuttle lands today. To many people, it seemed to make sense: simply take a high-flying experimental aircraft and modify it to go all the way - into real space and orbit.

Unfortunately, the technical reality was different than what appeared to make sense. All of those wings, control surfaces, landing gear, and nose art end up weighing quite a bit - weight that needs fuel to get to altitude and accelerated to orbital velocity. If you got rid of all those wings and landing gear, you could use the weight for more fuel and perhaps other things. Also, even if you managed to build a winged craft that could get into orbit and keep the pilot alive, how were you going to get him down? If you didn't come up with some new materials, those sleek wings would end up being nothing but molten stubs of metal which would not be of much use to the pilot once he got back into the atmosphere, to say the least. And getting back through the earth's thick atmosphere is a lot more difficult when you're going 17,000 mph, as opposed to 4,520 mph…"
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Chapter 3 - The Mercury Spacecraft: Building and Testing America's First Spaceship

"… From the airframe standpoint, what McDonnell eventually created was a marvel in 1960's materials technology. Overall, the basic physical structure of the spacecraft was made from a framework of longitudinal "hat stringers," each made of a titanium alloy containing aluminum and tin. These stringers, coupled with framing rings made from an aluminum-vanadium alloy of titanium, were welded together and formed the basic cone shape of the spacecraft. All of the welded components were made from annealed materials, so no strength was lost during the later spot welding process.

The panels forming the pressurized cabin were created from commercially pure titanium and were of a double wall construction. While the inner sheeting was flat, the outer panels were formed from 0.010 inch thick titanium in a drop hammer using Kirksite dies (this outer section was beaded or corrugated, giving the composite wall section a rigidity equivalent to a much thicker structure). These two skins were fusion-welded together in an inert gas atmosphere; an impressive accomplishment, considering the minimal thickness of the materials being used. The pressure skin and capsule framework were then spot welded together (additional thickness was added around the hatch and window openings). In some cases, as many as seven thicknesses were joined during the spot welding process. In addition, each pressure skin corrugation was individually sealed by welding, further stiffening the structure and effectively turning the space between the two walls into hundreds of separate compartments. It took over 20,500 inches of seam welding (done on Sciaky three-phase welders with Dekatron controls) to complete each spacecraft. All of the above procedures created the overall capsule structure and astronaut cabin, allowing the astronaut to exist in a pure oxygen atmosphere holding a nominal pressure of 5.5 psi. While from the structural standpoint, the basic Liberty Bell 7 assembly was very rigid in the longitudinal axis, it was less so with respect to side loadings. This fact was borne out by the fact that one of Liberty Bell 7's titanium frames was slightly creased, the damage probably caused by the capsule's lateral impact with the ocean after the craft was released by the recovery helicopter…"
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Chapter 4 - July 21, 1961: The Flight of Liberty Bell 7

"… In every way, the world from which Gus Grissom would soon be launched was far different than today. Computers were massive contraptions that filled whole rooms, like the IBM 7090 mainframes at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Calculators? There were slide rules. There was no such thing as satellite navigation because there were no navigational satellites. The aircraft carrier USS Randolph, a veteran of the Second World War and the prime recovery ship, fixed their position in the splashdown area using Loran A (a form of radio navigation) and sextants. Cable TV was something you used when you were in the middle of nowhere and had to put a quarter in a hotel room TV set. The satellite clock inside of his Mercury capsule was hand wound and the earth path indicator consisted of a small plastic globe rotated by dozens of small brass gears. Grissom's Redstone booster was almost a direct copy of the German Army's 1945 V-2 rocket and used the same fuel; it didn't even have a gimbaled exhaust nozzle, instead relying on graphite vanes for guidance. In fact, the escape tower used on the later Apollo Command Module had more thrust. The Beatles were still some unknown British pop band in Liverpool and if you wanted money, you had to go to a bank during business hours instead of an ATM machine. People bought 33 1/3 speed vinyl High Fidelity records instead of CD's and had never heard of 8-track or cassette tapes. Television was black and white and the NBC television footage taken of Grissom's splashdown were kinescopes. There was no calling Houston and saying "… we have a problem," because the Johnson Space Center didn't exist…
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Chapter 5 - Underwater Vehicles: Pushing the Underwater Envelope

"… While underwater search and recovery operations have been conducted since the beginnings of recorded history, it has only been through the application of advanced technology that salvors have been able to locate and retrieve objects from the ocean floor with any real success. However, before the advent of sophisticated undersea equipment, the sea, in particular the deep ocean, was considered a mysterious world, inhabited by sea monsters and other frightening creatures. The ocean was a place that swallowed up things such as whole fleets of ships, along with their doomed crews. Even today, the fact that massive man-made objects can disappear into the dark, cold abyss, never to be seen again, is a terrifying thought; one that perpetrates rumors of Bermuda Triangles, windows into other dimensions, powerful magnetic fields, and long-lost cities. Unexplored areas on early sailing charts were shown as being inhabited by sea serpents with huge jaws, ready to crush any ship that dared venture forth. Even the explorer Magellan was not immune to a misconception of the abyss. In 1521 he once tried to measure the depth of the Pacific Ocean by splicing together several lines and lowering a cannonball more than 400 fathoms down (2,400 feet). After failing to detect the bottom, he declared "that the Pacific was immeasurably deep." Surprisingly, the preconceived notions of the peril of the deep are not much different from the reality, as the danger of the environment makes it nothing to trifle with. The deep ocean is easily the most deadly location on Earth, in comparison to Mount Everest, the Sahara Desert, the jungles of Africa, and Antarctica. In no other place can you be killed as quick as in the abyss. As a result, the sea remains a daunting place, still harboring the remnants of aviators Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson, big band leader Glenn Miller, balloonist Tom Gatch, the Revolutionary Warship Bonhomme Richard, Flight 19, and the Heavy Cruiser USS Indianapolis, to name a few…"
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Chapter 6 - Investigation: Unlocking NASA's Archives

"… Finding information on the Mercury Redstone No. 4 mission was hard, because none of the documents were in one place. A handful were at the NASA history office, others at the Kennedy Space Center Archives, even more at Rice University, and a scattering at the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville. This took many months, even years, to do but once I had the documents, I had an even greater problem: I had to actually understand what they meant. This was not easy as my expertise was in underwater operations, not ballistic trajectories. I had to try and learn what the difference was between landing points created by things called FPS-16, I.P. 7090 Integrated, Mils (Sofar), MCC at loss of signal, and AZUSA MK II. I had no idea what this terminology meant. How accurate were the locations created by these assets? Were they radars? Or something else? The declassified NASA documents were useless to me unless I could figure out what the information meant with respect to mounting an underwater search operation. However, one thing burned its way into my mind. In NASA's Postflight Memorandum, they listed two locations in a numerical table, one called "Planned," and the other called, "Actual." If nothing else, I knew what that meant. The "actual" location listed by the Space Task Group had to be their best estimate of where Liberty Bell 7 actually landed. However, even with that, it was a matter of opinion. What I figured out was that many people worked on the trajectory of Liberty Bell 7, not just the Space Task Group at Langley. Engineers and scientists at both the Marshall Space Flight Center and the Goddard Space Flight Center created their own technical documents detailing where they thought the spacecraft was when it landed. Which location was I supposed to use? Early on, I decided to baseline my search area as a box eight miles square on each side; Liberty Bell 7 had to be in there somewhere…"
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Chapter 7 - Target 71: Liberty Bell 7 Discovered

"… When Dr. Robert Ballad discovered the remains of the famed White Star ocean liner, the Titanic, he had one of the most advanced and maneuverable research ships in the world, the RV Knorr, with its cycloidial propulsion system. With that highly-sophisticated rotating assembly of propellers, the ship could spin on a dime and move at very slow speeds in any direction… the target he was searching for was the Titanic, 882 feet of steel ocean liner, which was broken into two large sections (one of them almost 500 feet in length), and sitting amongst a mile long debris field. Some of the ship's massive wreckage in the debris field was over 40 feet tall. Also, the bottom terrain in the area was generally flat with few abnormalities. Plus, it was "only" 12,600 feet deep.

My crew and I were sailing with an aging 180 foot Gulf of Mexico "mud" boat, called that because it is used to haul drilling mud to oil rigs. Because the Tide had fixed pitch propellers, it was incapable of moving at less than four knots even with only one screw engaged. Our target speed for the search phase was 1.5 knots along our tracklines.

And then, of course, there was our target. Tiny by any standard, you could fit several Mercury capsules into only one of the boilers from the Titanic. In fact, the spacecraft was smaller than one propeller blade from that ship. Even worse was the fact that we had to locate and identify this tiny object with no massive debris field to guide us. One little heave of the sonar at the wrong time and Liberty Bell 7 would elude our sonar.

Then there was the terrain. During my previous experience in the area, known as the Blake Basin, I discovered to my horror that the location was characterized by numerous "sand waves." The crests of some of these sand dunes approached 50 feet! Definitely tall enough to hide a nine foot tall spacecraft from our towed sonar. Finally, there was the water depth. Liberty Bell 7 was thought to be in about 15,600 feet of water, a half mile deeper than the Titanic. It would take us anywhere from six to 10 hours just to reposition the ship after each search line. Even if we managed to image the capsule, the Liberty Bell 7 would look like little more than a tiny trail of bright pixels on our computerized display. To put it all in perspective, you'd have to stack 28 Washington Monuments on top of each other to equal the water depth. Simply getting our underwater vehicle to the bottom would take four hours. When towing our sonar at depth, if our ship was over Arlington National Cemetery, the sonar would be somewhere around the United States Capitol, over three miles away…"
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Chapter 8 - Return to the Cape: The Recovery of Liberty Bell 7

"… The vehicle's manipulator mounted hydraulic motor whined three miles below us in the darkness as the final connection to Liberty Bell 7 was made. A thick steel pin was screwed into a circular opening linking Grissom's capsule to the Ocean Project via several miles of space-age kevlar line. Far overhead, the ship's propellers chewed at the warm Atlantic Ocean waters keeping our recovery platform in place. I found it ironic that much of the technology we were using was a direct result of NASA's space program. If our country had not committed itself to going to the Moon, would we have had kevlar, miniature computers, broadcast quality color video cameras, satellite navigation systems, and the ability to form titanium into impregnable electronics bottles? Maybe not.

Finally, after a few minutes it was done. Liberty Bell 7 was now poised to be yanked from the year 1961 into 1999, whether it liked it or not. It's 38 year long flight was going to finally end. There was an undeniable connection between the day that Grissom fought for his life in the ocean and our struggles to return Liberty Bell 7 to the American people.

As the Ocean Discovery ROV was hauled to the surface it deployed the kevlar line and I wondered what would we find when the capsule was on deck. Would it hang together as I had predicted?"
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Chapter 9 - Epilogue

"… Taking everything into account, Liberty Bell 7 was in remarkable condition. The spacecraft's basic titanium load bearing structure looked like it could have flown again; it was still shiny and except for the fact that all of the air-filled panelettes (part of the double wall cabin structure) had been squashed, it was a breathtaking sight. About 60% of the aluminum panels covering the parachute compartment had corroded away due to galvanic action with the capsule's titanium structure. The flat black colored nickel-steel alloy shingles on the spacecraft exterior were nearly perfect and it did not look like we had lost much more paint on the craft's lettering and famous crack. The impact landing skirt, except for a couple of small rips, was intact. The interior, however, was another story. Everything that had corroded heavily ended up in the bottom of the spacecraft creating about a two foot slurry of water and bits of dissolved control panel. The control panel, from the periscope to the left side, along with assorted circuit breakers, switches, etc., was intact. However, the right side of the control panel from the periscope on simply didn't exist anymore. All that was left were numerous gauges, toggle switches, and dials, dangling on the ends of their wiring bundles like the leaves of a tree. Of the two low pressure helium gas spheres (for the Stabilization and Control System), only one was still there and it had been popped by the tremendous water pressure as the capsule sank. However, both of the grapefruit sized titanium high pressure oxygen spheres were intact. The optical periscope was broken in half and had fallen into the astronaut's seat. I had not expected that much corrosion on the aluminum components, but there it was.

Even with the above, there was much to impress everyone involved as we explored the guts of Grissom's capsule. The foam padding on his seat was totally intact, complete with darkened outlines where his restraint harness had rested for almost four decades. Rummaging around in the capsule's "bilge," I discovered Grissom's Randall survival knife and the cap to the explosive hatch actuator, with still readable lettering saying, "EXPLOSIVE HATCH IGNITER." The knife was only slightly rusted, attached to a small coiled lanyard; I found it stuck to the aft pressure bulkhead by a solidified mass of gunk. The emergency flashlight, after getting a new bulb and batteries, worked like new. Grissom's orbital maps and post flight checklist were both readable and we could even see the grease pencil markings the astronaut made on the checklist after splashdown. His Mylar life raft still held air. There was still fresh water inside of his can of emergency drinking water. I was able to remove the stainless steel fasteners holding the exterior shingles to the titanium cabin with a Phillips head screwdriver and a small hammer. All it took was a few taps and they came out…"
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Copyright © 2004 Curt Newport
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