In January 1961, NASA selected Gus Grissom as an astronaut for the second suborbital Mercury mission (Mercury-Redstone 4). John Glenn was assigned as the replacement pilot. This was only announced to the public on July 15, a few days before the launch.
Mercury-Redstone 4 launched on July 21, 1961. After two minutes and 22 seconds, the engine shut down and the spacecraft separated from the Redstone rocket. The speed at this time was 2 km/s. For about five minutes, Grissom was in zero gravity.
Grissom was able to rotate the spacecraft on multiple axes. The re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere occurred at over 11g. After a ballistic flight and reaching the summit altitude of 190 km, an astronaut fired the spacecraft’s braking rockets by hand for the first time. During the descent, Grissom observed cracks in the parachute, but they did not increase. Finally, after a flight of 15 minutes and 37 seconds, Liberty Bell 7 splashed down 487 km from the launch point.
Gus Grissom prepared to exit the landing capsule by opening his helmet, removing the oxygen hose and the seat belts. He then armed the hatch’s blasting mechanism. After consulting with the Hunt Club rescue helicopter, Grissom waited for them to retrieve the capsule. In the meantime, he noted the positions of the levers and buttons on the dashboard, as Alan Shepard had forgotten this during his flight.
Suddenly, however, the hatch explosive device exploded and water immediately entered the interior of the Liberty Bell 7. Instinctively, he immediately left the sinking landing capsule, leaving all paraphernalia behind, and was later recovered by another helicopter. The incoming water caused the capsule to become increasingly heavier and the helicopter was pushed beyond its limits, so that it had to cut the rescue rope that had already been attached and the Liberty Bell 7 sank into the sea.
It was not until 1999 that the Liberty Bell 7 was recovered from the Atlantic. Parts of the film that Grissom had made on board were cast in acrylic glass by the salvage financier as a souvenir and then sold. There are exactly 1000 of these acrylic glass souvenirs.
The recovery of the capsule was the most expensive commercial recovery from the deep sea to date, as the Mercury capsule was almost 6,000 meters deep at the bottom of the Atlantic.
Grissom then moved to the Gemini program and became commander of the first manned Gemini mission, “Gemini 3”. On March 23, 1965, the Titan II took off on a successful maiden flight with Gemini capsule Molly Brown at the helm. The astronauts’ main task was to test the spacecraft for its spaceworthiness and control characteristics. It was the first time a spacecraft tested docking, rendezvous and turning maneuvers in space, as the Gemini spacecraft was much more agile in space than its Mercury counterpart.
During the Gemini program, work toward a successful lunar landing continued. Gus Grissom was also taken into account early on in the follow-up project and was supposed to lead the first manned Apollo mission and thus once again become NASA’s maiden flyer.
However, the Apollo spacecraft was nowhere near as sophisticated as the previous Gemini model, so the technicians and astronauts worked hard to complete the first Apollo spacecraft (serial number 012), since it was essential to be on the moon in the 1960s wanted to land, as the former President of the USA, John F. Kennedy, had promised and publicly announced in 1961. The mission was scheduled to take place in the spring of 1967 as Apollo Saturn 204 (AS-204).
One of the most important tests took place at Cape Canaveral on January 27, 1967. The entire crew, Edward H. White, Roger B. Chaffee and Gus Grissom, took seats in the command module to conduct a plugs-out test. However, during testing, the interior of the capsule caught fire. By using pure oxygen at a slight overpressure as the atmosphere in the capsule, the fire spread to all combustible materials within seconds. The internal pressure of the capsule was immediately significantly increased by the computer-controlled oxygen supply. All three astronauts died because the hatch could not be opened quickly enough either from the inside (too high internal pressure due to the fire) or from the outside (no rescue teams directly at the capsule). The hatch was then completely redesigned and more than a thousand other changes were made to the spacecraft and its workmanship. The original design of the hatch was designed by NASA to prevent another accident like Grissom’s with the Liberty Bell 7 from happening again.
Based on his accomplishments in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, Grissom would have had a pretty good chance of being selected to be the first human to set foot on the moon. Deke Slayton, his close friend from test pilot days and Mercury comrade who assembled the astronaut crews for the Apollo program, wrote in his 1994 autobiography, Deke!, that he wanted a Mercury program astronaut to have been the first man on the moon , and if Grissom had still been alive at that time, he would have been. (“Had Gus been alive, as a Mercury astronaut he would have taken the step.” // If Gus had survived, he would have taken this step as a Mercury astronaut.)
Alan Shepard was medically unfit to fly at the time of the first moon landing; At the request of US President Kennedy, John Glenn was no longer allowed to fly because, as an American hero, he should no longer be exposed to danger in space; Scott Carpenter was no longer assigned a new spaceflight by NASA after his Mercury mission and had already left the active astronaut team; Walter Schirra had ended his space career with Apollo 7 and Gordon Cooper was a difficult character who would have been unsuitable as a new figurehead for NASA and was also not scheduled for any more space missions after Gemini 5. Deke Slayton after all, was still unfit to fly and would have had no space experience whatsoever. Grissom would have been the only Mercury veteran available for the first moon landing. After his death, through various plan changes and mission cancellations, Neil Armstrong was given the honor of taking man’s first steps on the moon. He did so on July 21, 1969, eight years to the day after Virgil Grissom made his maiden flight into space on the Liberty Bell.
Gus Grissom was one of NASA’s most experienced and famous astronauts at the time of his death. The fact that he was the first astronaut to be offered a second maiden flight and was the first astronaut to walk on the moon is evidence of his outstanding position within NASA’s astronaut teams. Even the sinking of the Liberty Bell 7 couldn’t stop his stellar career. The setback that NASA suffered after Apollo 1 and the worldwide media coverage still bear witness to its importance today.