I didn't always live like I had this confidence, but I kept trying.' And he talks about the importance of his mission.

I made peace with God a long time ago before this happened. He says, 'If you hear this, I've been killed. Space The Great 'Beyond': Contemplating Life, Sex And Elevators In Space And I found this in his files in Columbus at Ohio State, and it had never been published before. And as he sat and thought about it again later, he felt that he hadn't said everything he wanted to say, so he wrote himself a script. He wrote a long letter to his children that he wanted them to read whether or not he came back safely. On Glenn preparing to die in space and writing his family letters So all of these things seemed to heighten the sense of danger and make it seem increasingly possible over months and months of problems and delays that Glenn was never going to get into orbit and that if he did actually finally lift off from the pad that something terrible was going to happen. You can't send a person into space and not allow them to communicate with mission control. If they couldn't fix that, they couldn't send them to space because otherwise he couldn't communicate with mission control. Sitting in the van down at the bottom of the gantry, there was an extra helmet. They found another helmet, thankfully, at the last minute. When you think about the number of components in a space capsule and in a giant rocket like that, the number of things that can go wrong at any given moment, the number of things that could go wrong and kill the astronaut by one means or another, whether it was the rocket blowing up on the way up or whether it was the spacecraft leaking or getting stuck in orbit, there were an endless number of things that could go wrong.Īnd these little things, I mean, it sounds funny, this little clip. These little things went wrong all the time. Even within NASA there was not a whole lot of confidence. On how dangerous the Friendship 7 launch was The Soviets were so incredibly able to do amazing things in space that no one had thought possible, that there was simply a willingness to believe on the part of many Americans and policymakers and even many in the White House, that the Soviets could simply do whatever it was that they set their minds to doing. It didn't matter how many experts said that this was impossible. And the feeling on the part of the military was that if we didn't begin to build our arsenal in space, the Soviets were certainly going to beat us to it. And so at any point, they could push a button and it would fire a missile from the moon onto some spot in the United States. defenses and that we couldn't destroy it.

Now, why would you build a nuclear base on the moon when you've got perfectly good nuclear bases across Siberia and wherever else? Well, the idea was that building it on the moon would take it outside the range of U.S. This sounds incredibly fanciful, but it was something that was widely accepted by experts as inevitable that the Soviets would build a nuclear base on the moon. On the fear that the Soviets were going to build a nuclear base on the moon On the public nature of America's failed rocket launches Were they going to become democracies, or were they going to essentially sign up with the communists in the Cold War? And one of the things that they were watching to see which system better provided for their people in the future, which system offered more in terms of science, technology and economic advancement, what was happening in space was seen as the great indicator of the future. These were mostly developing countries that were coming out of colonialism, and many of them were said to be deciding which system they were going to follow. Soviet Russians themselves were watching, and the so-called undecided nations of the world were watching. it felt actually that the Soviets might be onto something, that, in fact, communism might indeed be as they said it was: the wave of the future. The Soviet program appeared invincible because all we ever saw were the successes.

Mercury rising