posted 08-31-2004 11:07 AM               

Two errors that I spotted right away.

First, Carpenter was an on-and-off smoker since joining the Navy as an 18-year-old in 1943. Mostly on. Camel unfiltered. Once selected for Project Mercury, he would quit for purposes of training (prob. for MA-6 and MA-7 and perhaps for Sealab missions). But he smoked after those missions throughout the 1960s until about 1985.

Second, Glenn never smoked tobacco, according to Carpenter, who was aware of Schirra's account. On rare occasion, according to Carpenter, Glenn smoked kinnikinik, a medicinal plant (bearberry) used by native Americans. Berries are edible, and the dried leaves, when smoked, are said to be quite pleasant without the unpleasant (and addictive) properties common to tobacco.

As for Glenn's heartbeat on the launchpad and the urban legend (which I've never heard myself), one could check the bluebook report, which supplies charts of heart rate, with explanatory text from the medics.

posted 08-31-2004 01:00 PM               

"Although my mask was cold, my lower back was scalding hot. During the somersaults of daylight umbilical dynamics, I had ripped apart the rear seams on those seven inner layers of heavy insulation and the Sun had baked the exposed triangle of unprotected skin."

I spoke with Cernan in 2002 about his spacewalk when researching NASA's too-little too-late EVA training procedures ca 1965. He whistled ruefully, remembering the event. He urged me to read his account. Spacewalk from hell is right.

Max Faget anticipated high-G reentries as early as 1958. "What happens," he asks rhetorically, in oral interviews, "if the Atlas fails at a velocity near to 18,000 feet per second? . . . . the centripetal force from circling the earth at constant altitude would be only about one-half G." But then you start to fall and when this happens you're "reentering at about a ten- to twelve-degree flight-path angle." That produces at least 18 Gs of drag.

Faget asked Carter C. Collins to try these Gs at the Navy's Johnsville centrifuge. Collins went up to 20 Gs, allowing a grateful Faget to report to a skeptical and conservative Air Force medical community that reentry even at 20 Gs was humanly possible.

Note that the Navy medics had already figured out the superior supine position (G sub z) and used it at Johnsville; Faget used this mode for his supine contour couch for Project Mercury. The Air Force was still using the G sub x (seated) mode in their Wright-Pat centrifuge. Can't sustain as many Gs this way.

posted 08-31-2004 01:28 PM               

Incidentally, Dr Z also has a nice page on Presidential illness and infirmity - and I didn't know Bill Clinton wears hearing aids in both ears either.

posted 08-31-2004 03:07 PM               

Now that's perfectionism

Cheers,
Matt

posted 08-31-2004 07:12 PM              

Upside-down, of course!

posted 09-02-2004 12:57 PM               

After taking the measure of the psychiatrist with the cards, Carpenter said, "Oh, that looks like a bat." If you know Carpenter in the middle of a practical joke, you know the look on his face--wide-eyed pantomime of fear here.

"Oh?" the psychiatrist prompted, "What else do you see?"

Carpenter then exclaimed, "It's coming right at us!!"

Laughter ensued. Candidates got extra points, Allen Gamble said, for a demonstrating a sense of humor.

This account was first shared in WE SEVEN.