The Flight of the Molly Brown

For a few anxious minutes after voice contact was lost with the Gemini capsule Molly Brown last week, the fate of the largest man-carrying spaceship ever launched by the U.S. worried a waiting nation. But the electronic blackout had been made familiar by earlier space shots. And despite the fact that the capsule dropped into the Atlantic about 60 miles short of its se lected landing spot, Molly's three-orbit cruise, like the moon flight of Ranger IX, was an all-but-perfect mission. By changing their course three times, Astronauts Gus Grissom and John Young demonstrated that U.S. spacemen are making noteworthy progress as they tackle the burgeoning problems of getting a man to the moon.

Even the Russians, who startled the world by letting a space traveler take a "stroll" outside his orbiting capsule only a few days before (TIME cover, March 26), have yet to claim that their cosmonauts have varied the earth-girdling curve of a spacecraft in flight.* But before men can make a lunar excursion or perform other active missions outside the earth's atmosphere, they must learn to make those orbit alterations with exquisite precision. Spaceships must be maneuvered so surely that they can meet and mate aloft; their pilots must act as accurate and reliable links in the chain of information and command that loops between computers in flight and computers on the ground. Molly and her men showed surprising skill in that arcane art.

Bristling Cockpit. The agile two-man capsule constructed by McDonnell Aircraft was both larger and heavier than its Mercury predecessors. Still, there was no room to spare. All sections contained rocket motors of assorted sizes capable of firing in every direction for the control of attitude in flight, and to change speed and orbital path. As for the crowded cockpit itself, its instrument panels bristled with an intricate array of switches, knobs and dials that controlled everything from the air conditioning of the astronauts' space suits to the most delicate computer computations necessary for the mission. Everything was there in carefully planned, expensive detail; there was even a little mechanical pencil dangling by a chain from a spring-loaded reel. Price of one pencil: $128.89.

Molly's men began work right after a tall Titan booster had tossed them into an elliptical orbit 139.2 miles at apogee, 100.1 miles at perigee. There was a pair of biological experiments to get out of the way: the fertility and growth of sea-urchin eggs had to be checked for the effects of weightlessness; human blood cells were exposed to the stress of radiation plus weightlessness. Then, as the Molly Brown curved round the bottom of the globe and came up across the Pacific toward the American coast, Gus Grissom got ready for the first orbital change.

"Flying" his ship with brief bursts of energy from the appropriate rockets, Capsule Commander Grissom brought it absolutely level. Then he fired two forward-pointing rockets for precisely 73 seconds. Molly slowed down; the apogee of her orbit dropped by 34 miles. The spacecraft was now on an almost circular course.

That small switch in flight path was the first such change ever accomplished under any degree of human control. But there was more to come. On the second orbit, as he passed high over the Indian Ocean, Grissom turned his ship 90DEG to the right. In its new attitude it was still circling through the same orbit, but a burst out of his rockets moved Molly about a mile to the south, shifting the orbital plane (see diagram). After that, Gus turned his ship until it pointed down the track once more. While the earth turned below him, he had, in effect, made a right turn, driven a mile and then turned left. In between such operations, Astronaut Young prepared and ate the freeze-dried rations and successfully tested the system that dealt with human waste.

Lifting Heat Shield. On the third orbit, as he came up on Hawaii, Grissom turned Molly blunt end forward and fired two forward rockets to slow down once more. The capsule went into a decaying orbit; without any further action by its passengers it would have splashed to a landing near Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. But the mission was planned with more precision than that. Following orders from the ground that he checked with his capsule computer, Grissom put his ship into the proper attitude for firing of its retrorockets. Now the sharp re-entry curve and the final drop by parachute should have tak en Molly into the Atlantic close to the carrier Intrepid, waiting 70 miles north of Grand Turk Island. For even more exact control of the landing point, Molly's curving heat shield was built to provide a certain amount of lift. Changing Molly's attitude would permit small changes in the final glide path.

But there had been some small miscalculation either aloft or on the ground. Even before Molly's landing, Gus Grissom knew his ship would hit 60 miles short of its target. Once Molly was bobbing on the water, it was perhaps understandable that Air Force Major Grissom got seasick, while John Young, the former Navy test pilot, showed a little more seaworthiness. But until frogmen arrived by helicopter to put a flotation collar around his ship, Gus Grissom was careful not to open a hatch. The very name he had given the capsule (after Colorado's famed "Unsinkable" Molly Brown*) testified to his determination not to allow a repetition of the still unexplained disaster of his Mercury flight, when a hatch opened prematurely and the capsule sank.

Brought back to the Intrepid by helicopter before the Molly Brown was picked up, Grissom and Young faced the final requirements of space flight: medical checks, debriefing, a phone call from President Johnson, and a series of parades and press conferences. The very look of space, to say nothing of the ability to fly there, was almost too much for Young, at least, to handle. "When that vehicle pitches over and reaches the horizon," he said at the Cape Kennedy press conference, "you know you're really hauling the mail. The view is unbelievable. There are no words in

*It was a failure of automatic controls, say the Russians, that forced Voskhod II into an extra orbit and an off-target landing.

*An illiterate chambermaid out of Hannibal, Mo., who made her way to Colorado at the turn of the century, married a lucky miner, and traveled to Europe to purchase culture and cultured friends. She survived the Titanic disaster to earn her "Unsinkable" nickname and the fame that was celebrated half a century later in a Broadway musical and a Hollywood movie.

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