As to the movie The Right Stuff, you see Grissom, lying in his floating capsule, fumbling to remove his helmet, after which is an external shot of the hatch blowing. There is no specific cause and effect shown – though on my first viewing many years ago I thought the implication was pretty clear that he’d hit the switch while removing his helmet. What is shown, however, is this:
Grissom squirms out of the capsule and nearly drown while the helicopter attempts to save the capsule before securing his safety. He arrives subsequently on an empty carrier deck (contrasted with Shepherd’s triumphant reception).
Grissom repeatedly insists to the flight surgeon and an investigating committee that “the hatch just blew” (at the conclusion of which a panel member asserts that the premature detonation of explosive hatches has never one occurred in any testing or real-life situation).
a halfhearted awards ceremony is conducted by a NASA official (again, portrayed as empty and hollow next to Shepherd’s White House fete).
a crew of test pilots watches the footage on television, cynically asserting that even though Grissom had clearly “screwed the pooch”, NASA would spin anything their boys had done as a triumph. The character of Chuck Yeager weighs in at this point, stating that the astronauts are under an entire different kind of pressure and that “Ol’ Gus did allright.”
Grissom and Betty’s marriage starts to crack at the seams as they try to cope with his mission being regarded as a failure, and his being blamed for it.
A couple of points on this.
First, as I see it, the movie does not portray Grissom as being as fault, but seems to imply that NASA unfairly pinned the blame on him.
Secondly, others clearly did not interpret this the same way, since a couple of the surviving Mercury astronauts complained that the movie’s portrayal of Grissom was unfair, and refused to attach their names to the film.
Third, Tom Wolfe’s book makes repeated comments that in the macho fraternity of test pilots, a crash is always blamed on the pilot. Assertions of mechanical failure are greeted with a chorus of scorn from the elect brethren. This is echoed in an earlier scene in the movie, where Deke Slayton is arguing with his wife about the frequency of test pilot fatalities. She’s clearly distraught about the high probability of his dying in a fiery crash, and Deke brushes aside her concerns with the comment that the pilot most recently immortalized on Pancho’s wall was “dead before he went up”. In other words, that the crash was entirely the pilot’s fault. So Grissom’s whole situation was meant to be seen in an ironic light.
Oh yes, one more thing. In an interview in The Right Stuff bonus CD, Gordo Cooper asserts that he was the only one of the seven Mercury astronauts who was not a smoker. This was significant because the data from Faith 7 showed that he’d consumed oxygen at about half the rate of any astronaut before him – just one of many factors that made his flight remarkable.
To resurrect this zombie (as redirected from a current post), in the movie The Right Stuff, it is Grissom that keeps insisting that the capsule have explosive bolts. Were they going for irony or trying to imply something?
It’s a shame the film in LB7 was destroyed by the seawater.
Ok, I haven’t seen the film in ages but, you mean the scene were the ‘cap-sule’ is first presented to the Mercury 7 by the German scientists. Even if it was Fred Ward who says, *“We need a hatch with explosive bolts…” *etc. no, I wouldn’t put much emphasis on that. The Right Stuff is a good movie, but it seriously abridges the Tom Wolfe book and even the book abridges history in general. It wasn’t Grissom’s fault. An explosive hatch wasn’t his idea.Reality is more complicated than the movies…
It occurs to me that, from Uncle Sam’s perspective, the carrier recovery might have been considered a feature, not a bug. The whole point of the Apollo program was to show off our technological might to those wimpy Soviets. If that includes an opportunity to parade our most advanced warships right under their nose, so much the better.
First, re landing on water (US) vs landing on land (USSR). The cosmonauts who flew in the first series of Soviet manned spaceflights, the Vostok missions, did NOT land in their spacecrafts. They exited from the spacecraft before it touched down and deployed a personal parachute. Then the spacecraft deployed it’s parachute. After both had landed and were located, helicopter crews very quickly picked up the cosmonaut and transported him or her to the Vostok, where they would remove their parachute, climb back in, have a hatch put back on, then the recovery crews would turn on the cameras to film the cosmonauts triumphantly exiting the Vostok after their successful mission. Think about it, Valentina Tereshkova was not a pilot, she was a parachutist.
On the Liberty Bell 7’s hatch: At the time of the flight, nobody knew what happened. All the events described/portrayed in both the book and the file “The Right Stuff” about the incident were during the immediate aftermath of the flight. Wally Schirra finally hammered the last nail in the coffin when after he landed in Sigma 7, he remained buttoned up in the capsule and stayed inside until it was securely on the deck of the recovery carrier. Then he hit the button to blow the hatch. This way the engineers would have a hatch to examine. And he bruised his hand from hitting the button. There was no way to blow the hatch by hitting the button without the pilot bruising his hand, and Grissom had no bruising. The only mistake Grissom MIGHT have made was failing to close that inlet valve on his suit, but there’s the probability he hadn’t gotten around to it yet when the hatch blew and he had only seconds to skedaddle.
Don’t know about the rest of your post, but I believe that our own lunar lander, and the return module were both flown by pilots who were standing up, too.
And “one and a half 55-gallon oil drums welded together” isn’t really all that much less elegant than “pile of wadded-up tinfoil sitting on a giant spider”.
This “would have bruised his hand if it was his fault” thing - why so?
Couldn’t he have hit it with his elbow? His boot? His helmet? If it was going to hurt so much to bruise I would be looking for something other than my hand to hit it with.
I don’t think it could have been activated by accident, and certainly not with his boot, it wasn’t in an accessible location. There wasn’t any room at all to unstrap and then maneuver with the hatch closed. I suppose an argument could be made that he took off his helmet and whacked it, but all signs indicate some sort of malfunction. If he had done it deliberately his personal recovery would have gone much more smoothly because he would have been prepared for it.
