Episode 45: Project Mercury, Part IV

 

In the days and weeks following Gagarin's flight, there was a lot to distract President Kennedy from space, including the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, but in the end, he agreed that it was important for the United States to not just continue Project Mercury, but to try to beat the Russians in putting a man on the moon if it was at all possible, thanks in no small part to the encouragement of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson (rear left). Breaking with norms, JFK address a joins session of Congress a second time in 1961, in an attempt to convince both lawmakers and the American public of the importance of continuing (and continuing to fund) the US Space Program, despite the massive assessed cost. 

After Kennedy's speech to Congress, NASA announced Virgil "Gus" Grissom would be the second American in space. Like Shepard, he would only spend 15 minutes in space in an up and down "short shot" because the rocket NASA was using at the time - the Redstone - didn't have enough thrust to get a Mercury capsule into orbit.

Grissom's flight was just about perfect, that is until splash down when the escape hatch blew open, Grissom almost drowned, and Liberty Bell 7 was lost at the bottom of the ocean. It was found and recovered in the late 1990s and is now on display, just like all the Project Mercury capsules. To this day it is unknown if Grissom panicked and blew the hatch early or if, like he claimed, there was a malfunction that caused the hatch to blow on its own. Either way, losing the capsule was embarrassing for NASA and Grissom didn't receive the same sort of post-flight treatment that Alan Shepard did a few months earlier.

In an attempt to remind the world that what the US space program was doing was cute and all, but that the Soviet program was heads and tails better, Russia sent its second cosmonaut into space, Gherman Titov. And unlike Gagarin's single orbit of Earth, Titov did 17 orbits over nearly 25 hours to prove whether or not humans could sleep in space. It turns out we can. It also turns out that Titov got space sick and spent most of his flight nauseous with a massive headache. He eventually got to sleep but it didn't come easy.

As you might imagine, just as his colleague had been, Titov was hailed a national and international Soviet hero and celebrity. He and his spaceship, Vostok II, were all over the place after he landed, going on a junket to tout the Soviet space program.