President Lyndon B. Johnson sat in his office nervously watching his television set just as millions of people across the country were doing. If everything went right, something new would happen. If things went wrong, he might be watching two men die.
The countdown ticked off and the 109-foot-tall Titan II rocket shot into the sky and then into space. Within two minutes, the spacecraft was traveling at 3,000 miles per hour. The rocket burned 10,000 gallons of propellant a minute to push the Molly Brown into a 100-mile orbit.
“At 9:24 AM eastern time the time of the liftoff, a faint smile played momentarily on the “president's face. When he heard an excited television commentator shout, ‘Go, baby!’ a look of relief came over Johnson's face when the report came that the first few minutes of the flight looked excellent,” reported The Fresno Bee.
The Flight To Space
Once in space, Grissom and Young were able to maneuver the spacecraft named “Molly Brown” on three orbits around the earth. During their journey, “Twice, they thrust their space ship Molly Brown into different orbits, and they maneuvered it forward, backwards, sideways and upside down in a significant step toward the time when other craft will rendezvous in space and send their riders on toward the moon,” reported The Fresno Bee. The orbits ranged between 100 miles and 140 miles above the earth.
During the second orbit, one of the communicators at Cape Kennedy asked, “Pretty spectacular, up there, eh?”
“Yeah, it is…it really is,” Grissom replied.
Grissom also conducted scientific experiments while on the flight. At different times, sea urchin eggs were fertilized. They would be studied later to see if weightlessness had any effect on the development of the eggs.
The Landing Missed the Mark
Their capsule then did a parachute landing into the Atlantic Ocean at 2:18 p.m. This is where the only “hitch” in the journey came. The Molly Brown landed 58 miles off its mark.
The flight lasted 4 hours and 54 minutes and traveled more than 81,000 miles.
Grissom and Young were the 18th and 19th men to go into space since Yuri Gagarin first entered space in 1961.
Virgil Grissom
At age 38, Virgil Grissom, an Air Force major, became the first man to go into space twice. His first journey was July 21, 1961, when he became the third man and second American to go into space.
Luckily, this flight went smoother than his first flight. It sank upon landing, leaving Grissom swimming in the middle of the ocean. Hence, the name of the Molly Brown, a nod to the musical, “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”
