As he prepared for re-entry, Glenn experienced another problem. The capsule’s gyroscopes were not giving him accurate attitude readings. Glenn flew the capsule literally by hand, like a pilot, keeping the constellation Orion centered in the cockpit window. He was the first astronaut, American or Soviet, to take so much control of a spacecraft. As he re-entered the atmosphere, flaming chunks of the retro package streamed past his window.

Like Shepard, who had been the first American in space, Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, received a hero’s welcome, including a ticker-tape parade and a White House visit, after his successful return. Like Grissom, who merely duplicated Shepard’s achievement, Carpenter would not receive such adoration. In Aurora 7, launched May 24, 1962, Carpenter duplicated much of Glenn’s flight – down to manually compensating for a failure in the capsule’s automatic control system. Carpenter’s maneuvers, however, consumed fuel at a higher-than-anticipated rate, and he was a few seconds late in firing the retro-rockets that brought the capsule out of orbit. As a result, he missed his splashdown target in the Atlantic by about 250 miles.

Overall, both man and machine had proven fallible by the completion of Aurora 7 – but problems with Glenn’s flight, especially, had proven the wisdom of placing a trained pilot inside even the most highly automated craft.

 

Sigma 7 and Faith 7: the Long-Duration Flights

On Oct. 3, 1962, – a month after NASA had selected a second group of astronauts to help carry out the objective of the Gemini program, and a mere 11 days before U.S. reconnaissance planes spotted missile bases under construction in Cuba – astronaut Wally Schirra conducted a nearly flawless six-orbit engineering test flight, in a capsule he’d named Sigma 7. Mindful of the problems encountered by Glenn and Carpenter, he conserved fuel carefully, and splashed down almost exactly on target.

Schirra’s mission was so nearly perfect that many NASA officials believed the agency, having pushed the Mercury hardware far enough, should make it the last of the program’s missions and move on to the Gemini program. Officials at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, however, thought it would be useful to test a man in space for a full day – as all the Soviet space flights since Gagarin’s had done.

Gordon Cooper piloted the last Mercury flight in the capsule Faith 7 from May 14 -15, 1963, orbiting the Earth 22 times and staying in space for more than 34 hours. The only problems to surface during the mission occurred at the end, when a series of faults in the electrical system forced Cooper to take control of nearly every aspect of the capsule’s re-entry and landing, which he did expertly; his landing was the most accurate of the six manned Mercury missions. Cooper had demonstrated, once again, the need for experienced test pilots to fly in the early days of the American space program.

 

The Mercury Legacy

NASA canceled the final three Mercury missions in order to clear the way for pursuing the more ambitious goals of Project Gemini. But in four years and nine months, the United States’ first manned space flight project had successfully met, and even surpassed, the original three program objectives. The project demonstrated that a human could function well as a pilot, engineer, and scientific experimenter in space without unpleasant reactions or degraded bodily functions for more than 34 hours of weightless flight. It was an unprecedented scientific effort, calling upon the skills and experience of more than 2 million people from government agencies and the aerospace industry.

Project Mercury also brought several less-tangible results. In placing Cooper in space for 34 hours, American astronauts had proven there was nothing a cosmonaut could do that they couldn’t. For ordinary Americans, the beginning of the U.S. space program would mark a turning point in the national consciousness – which would, in the years to come, never again take its eyes off the stars. And for the new – and growing – corps of U.S. astronauts, it would vindicate the quintessentially American approach to space flight, which valued the individual expert slightly more than it did the fully automated machine. “We proved,” recalled Schirra years later, “man could do a lot more than a machine could do.”