Sixty years ago today: 2/20/62. John Glenn's Mercury flight.
SkyMan
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Sixty years ago today, 2/20/62, John Glenn became the first American to fly in Earth orbit aboard his Mercury capsule, Friendship 7. He became the third human to orbit the Earth, as the USSR had beaten the USA to launch the first man into space. Yuri Gagarin flew on 4/12/61, and the USSR sent the first human to orbit the Earth multiple times, indeed for a full day, Gherman Titov, on 8/6/61. Both these flights punctured the American psyche.
NASA astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom flew into space on 15 minute short suborbital flights using Redstone boosters in 1961, but they were seen as popgun flights compared to the USSR's success. Glenn orbited the Earth 3 times, roughly 4 1/2 hours, launching on the Atlas booster, which was roughly 4 - 5 times as powerful as the Redstone. This flight made the US people, indeed many in the Free World, feel like the USA was in the Space Race for real. It was a huge emotional lift for the USA.
Here's a short snorter from Bill Dana, the comedian who created the skit, Jose Jimenez the reluctant astronaut. Given that it's a true short snorter, e.g. kept in his wallet, it's rather hard to read some of the signatures, but the name at the top of the list is John Glenn.
Here's a picture of the launch of Friendship 7, signed by all 4 Mercury astronauts who flew on the Mercury-Atlas system.
Atlas 109 D was the Atlas that launched Glenn into orbit. A chunk of it was found in East Africa. Here is a piece that was cut from that chunk. The piece was given to Deke Slayton who kept it on his desk until his death. Slayton was a Mercury 7 astronaut, who became Chief of the Astronaut office.
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Very cool!
I was a little kid at the time and remember very well the excitement and sense of awe and accomplishment that accompanied these early endeavors in space.
Living in Southern California, many of my friends parents, and later my wife’s father worked in the aerospace industry. The occasional odd and somewhat secretive rockets blasting off from Vandenberg Airforce base and their indescribable aerial visual displays only added to the excitement of those times.
Thank you for sharing.
Happy, humble, honored and proud recipient of the “You Suck” award 10/22/2014
Great short snorter, Sy. A great collection of signatures. I see John Glenn, Jr., ???, Wally Schirra, Virgil Grissom, Leroy Cooper, Deke Slayton, John Young, Charles Conrad and Joe Walker. Do you know who the second signer is?
The signatures in order are Glenn, Bill Lyon(s?) who I understand was Dana's business manager, Schirra, Grissom, Cooper, Slayton, Young, Conrad and AL WORDEN.
Given the assorted signing utensils, my best guess is that this short snorter was signed at 4 different bars and/or 4 different times... Glenn and Lyon(s?), Schirra/Grissom/Cooper/Slayton, Young and Conrad, and Worden. I SUSPECT that Glenn and the rest of the "Mercury" guys all signed relatively near each other time wise. Young and Conrad, being members of the "New Nine", arrived about 3 1/2 years after the Mercury 7. Al Worden was part of the "Original 19", who were selected in April 1966, so quite a bit later.
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What a great journey Mr Glenn had had 🙂
Some of those secretive rockets were test ICBMs headed over the pacific to be intercepted by missiles launched from the Kwajalein Missile Range (later called the Reagan Test Site). This was part of what later became the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars program).
I was a kid living on Kwajalein island in the early 1970s and once in a while we would get advance notice of a missile launch so we could watch.
What a great piece of memorabilia..... I was in the Navy at the time, and as a Radioman, got all the communications about the Russian flights and ours as well. Cheers, RickO
Fantastic history @SkyMan you know your stuff! Or should I say, you know the "right stuff"!
Super cool!
This discussion brought back some memories and I recall having taken a photo a dusk from high in the Sierra's on a backpacking trip of one of these rocket tests. It's a very old image, taken on slide film but one can see the crazy stuff going on in the sky. Dug it out of my files to share here. Thought you'd get a kick out of it. @Skyman too.
Happy, humble, honored and proud recipient of the “You Suck” award 10/22/2014
Those old transparencies had the best color, didn’t they?! Cool photo.
I found an archived article from 1989 that explains some of what you saw.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-03-27-me-328-story.html
Kodachrome film. Basically a 3 layer B&W film. The color was added during the processing. My dad left some old Kodachrome slides he shot in the 1950’s that look they were shot yesterday.
Interesting to note, on the Kodachrome, it was indeed the most incredibly stable transparency film- as opposed to the E-6 films which had the dies incorporated into the emulsions.
I have many thousands of Kodachrome slides going back into the 1940-s- which I'm going to be digitizing over the next few years. Most of my images, I've already scanned, but now I have my father's and my aunt's collections- which are of minor historical significance and really should be archived. What a job for my retirement years!
As for the space stuff. Thank you for the article link @pruebas. It was super interesting.
I'm sure we could have a great time chatting about films and such, as I made my living as a photographer for many years until eventually going back to school when the digital revolution made it even harder to make a living.
On a coin related note though, I'm curious as to why there haven't been more coins commemorating the space program?
There are MANY stamps which pay tribute to the programs but not so many coins.
Just to keep this somewhat on topic, I pose that question. And, here's just one- of many of those stamps, along with an original photo from the Space Shuttle- which my father in law was very much involved in working on.
And- a roll of good old Kodachrome 64- still sitting on my desk, as a reminder of the good old days, and waiting a week to see your images! I used to really love the K-25 but that was some SLOW film! Amazing resolution in the Kodachrome 25- if you could deal with the low light sensitivity. Great memories! I do love digital though....
Happy, humble, honored and proud recipient of the “You Suck” award 10/22/2014
I was a nine year old kid fascinated by the space program and hoping for the day I could witness a launch. Sixty years later I'm snowbirding on Cocoa Beach and have seen five launches in the past two months! Still awe inspiring to me but the best part is watching one of the boosters land at Cape Canaveral followed by the sonic booms
The Project Mercury stamp was released an hour after Glenn returned to Earth. It was designed, printed, and distributed in secret. This cover is signed by the stamp’s designer, Charles Chickering, who designed it secretly from home. It’s also signed by Glenn in his early astronaut style signature (JHGlennJr), as well as the two engravers, who did their work in secret at night or on the weekends.
This program was signed by Glenn in 1962. My neighbor gave it to me when I was a boy in 1981…his dad was one of the speakers at the event…
He who knows he has enough is rich.
Film is fascinating stuff. As you might imagine, there are interesting film related stories during the Space Race. I assume you've heard of the Roswell "UFO" crash, and the weather balloon cover-up story. Well, there WAS a weather balloon that crashed, it was a test article of the sort that would come to be released in Europe. What was classified was that the weather balloon also carried high quality cameras. The crash site was cordoned off and a much simpler unclassified weather balloon was used for the coverup.
Getting back to these classified balloons, they would start to be used in the 1950's. Back in the 1950's the USA would release these classified weather balloons in Europe. Their cameras would be triggered by a timer as they HOPEFULLY were passing over the USSR. The weather balloons would follow the jet stream over to Japan, or all the way across the Pacific to Alaska, Canada or the lower 48, where they would be recovered, and hopefully some useful pictures would come out from the program. Needless to say, it was not a successful program. Also, a lot of these camera weather balloons came down in the USSR.
If you are going to use a high quality camera it behooves you to use a high quality film. Kodak developed a special film for these cameras. The Russians did not have any film that was anywhere near this Kodak film in quality. In the late 1950's the Soviets were attempting to capture pictures of the backside of the Moon. Their camera film was not of high enough quality. So the Russians repurposed the Kodak film canisters that were unexposed to be the film carried aboard their Luna spacecraft. The first pictures of the backside of the Moon were taken by Luna 3 in October, 1959. The film used was the USA weather balloon spy film.
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