Early US astronauts faced uncertainty, danger and death
MIAMI: John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962, but for a solid hour of that journey, NASA feared he was about to die in a blazing fireball.
In fact, all of the original crew of astronauts, known as the Mercury 7, risked life and limb in order to explore the frontier of space, and some died in the effort.
The death Thursday at 95 of Glenn, the last of the so-called Original Seven who were chosen as NASA’s first astronaut corps in 1959, reminded many Americans just how far the US space program has come in the past five decades.
“Back before any human had actually gone into space the doctors weren’t sure they would survive,” said space policy expert John Logsdon.
He recalled concerns that powering into space aboard a rocket, then shifting to weightlessness in microgravity, might prove fatal. “It was all new territory.”
Monkeys and mice were blasted off on rockets in the 1940s and 50s, and often they died in the process.
Eventually, a chimpanzee named Ham blasted off aboard the new Mercury 7 rocket in 1961 and survived, offering limited reassurance that human astronauts might be OK.
Then, Russia launched Yuri Gagarin, the first man ever in space, in 1961, and his survival took some concern away from the US crew. But not much. Rockets teetered on liftoff, exploded over the launch pad and collapsed into smoke and flames with jarring regularity.
“Many of us were skeptical and deeply concerned about NASA’s plans to launch the Navy test pilot Alan Shepard on what would be our first space flight,” wrote news anchor Walter Cronkite in his 1997 book, ‘A Reporter’s Life.’
He recalled watching those explosions, one after another, and described NASA as making a ‘feeble attempt’ to catch up with the Soviets in the space race.
Shepard survived his 1961 trip to become the first American in space ” although not orbit, which was Glenn’s feat — but years later, some of his colleagues were not so lucky. — AFP