Space Redacted @SpaceRedacted

🧵 4/4 It was the last Mercury flight. Alan Shepard reportedly pushed for one more, a longer mission. NASA said no and moved on to Gemini. Two readings of Faith 7 have argued with each other ever since. One says it proved the pilot was the backup that mattered, and the automation was the weak link. The other says it proved Mercury's hardware was at its limit, and ending the programme was the right call. Which one did Faith 7 actually prove? If anyone has the postflight report's finding on what caused the short, I want to read it.

🧵 3/4 Retrofire had to happen at the right moment and the right angle, or he came down far from anyone waiting for him. The system built to hold that angle was dead. So he did it by eye. By most accounts he had drawn lines on the window and held them against the stars. He timed the burn on his watch. The countdown came from John Glenn, on a tracking ship off Japan, fifteen months after his own reentry scare. Cooper deployed both parachutes by hand. Faith 7 landed about four miles from USS Kearsarge. NASA's page says less than five. It is usually called the most accurate splashdown of the programme.

🧵 1/4 The last Mercury flight lost its automatic control on the way home. Gordon Cooper flew the reentry himself. He lined it up with marks on his window and timed the burn on his wristwatch. He came down about four miles from the ship.

@NightSkyToday would they use the same letters and numbers like us?

🧵 3/3 Inside, a brass pendulum has swung since the building opened. It is not changing direction. The floor is turning under it. We live on a small rock, spinning through something so large it barely registers us. But a handful of people on that rock refused the answers they were handed, and because of them we know where we are. Small, but not insignificant. Thank you to every one of them. Which name would you add to that monument? Also, food is my second favorite topic, so any recommendations in LA are more than welcome :)

🧵 2/3 The observatory's own history says that in 1904 Griffith J. Griffith looked through a telescope on Mount Wilson. He is widely quoted as saying that if every person could look through it, it would revolutionize the world. He left Los Angeles the money to build a place where anyone could. It opened in 1935, and entry is still free. Out front stands a monument to six astronomers. Hipparchus. Copernicus. Galileo. Kepler. Newton. Herschel. Every one of them pushed against what everyone already knew. Galileo was put on trial in 1633 for it.

🧵 1/3 A bit of a departure from my usual posts today. Everyone knows the feeling. You look up at night, and for a second the size of it all is too much. I had it again, walking the halls of Griffith Observatory. This time it did not leave me feeling small.

@histories_arch Just posted about them a day or two ago - what brave man! what courage and vision one must have to take on a mission like this!

@severs1966 If memory serves me right Vostok 1 was collected on April 1961 but feel free to fact check me with grok :)

🧵 1/5 In August 1960 America pulled a capsule out of the Pacific, the first object ever recovered from orbit, and put the flag that was inside it on the President's desk. It carried no camera. That was the point.

🧵 5/5 CORONA stayed classified until executive order 12951, signed 22 February 1995 and announced two days later, which released more than 800,000 frames to the National Archives. Thirty five years. The counting confusion has an answer. CORONA ran its own internal mission numbers alongside the public Discoverer numbers, and they are not the same sequence. Discoverer 13 was a recovery systems test, not a numbered camera mission, which is why the CIA's own tally of failed early imagery runs and the public Discoverer list do not line up one for one. Discoverer 14 was the first mission in that internal sequence to bring back usable film. I want the CORONA mission number for 13 and 14 from someone who has the NRO or CIA ledger in front of them, since I have only reconstructed the shape of it, not the actual numbers. So: was the flag a real morale gesture, or the cover story doing its job, since a recovery test without a camera still needed something worth being photographed holding

🧵 4/5 One week later, Discoverer 14 flew with a camera. Its film came home in a reentry capsule caught in mid air by a C-119 out of Hickam, on the last usable pass, with a hook trailing behind the aircraft. That single mission is usually said to have returned more coverage of Soviet territory than the entire U-2 programme had managed. None of that was public. The public got the flag. The flag was real. The instruments and the tracking gear around it were the part nobody explained.

@XEthanai Physics is the law. Our description of it is the recommendation. Newton got overruled on appeal 😅

@ExploreCosmos_ Humbling!

🧵 4/4 He kept the pack on. The straps across the shield were the whole idea. At four hours 43 he called it. "I think the pack just let go." Then, "A real fireball outside." Burning pieces went past the window and he had no way to know whether he was watching the retropack come apart or the shield. It was the retropack. "I had great chunks of that retropack breaking off all the way through." The shield had never been unlatched. Postflight teardown found a switch with a loose, bent stem that could break contact without the shield moving at all. Chris Kraft wrote later that he would never agree to a reentry like that again. Was keeping the pack on the right call, or did it add real risk to cover a fault they already believed was a fault? If anyone has the MA-6 postflight debriefing or the segment 51 failure analysis, I want to read them.

🧵 3/4 Mercury Control decided the signal was probably false. Probably. So the tracking stations started asking him things. Confirm the landing bag switch is off. Any banging noises. Anything unusual at higher rates. Cooper at Muchea, then the next station, then the next. The same switch every time. Glenn worked out what they were doing. At four hours 38 minutes the ground told him to leave the retropackage on through the entire reentry. The transcript has him coming straight back. "What is the reason for this? Do you have any reason? Over." "Not at this time; this is the judgment of Cape Flight." Two minutes later, at four hours 40, they finally said it. "We are not sure whether or not your landing bag has deployed."

🧵 1/4 Partway through the first American orbital flight, a signal reached the ground saying John Glenn's heat shield was no longer locked on. Nobody told him. They asked him about a switch instead...