Within the famously competitive group, Glenn had emerged as the
face of the space program, while Grissom was reticent in front
of the press. When he wrote to his mother, Grissom was still
stinging from his Liberty Bell 7 flight on July 21, 1961, that
ended with a blown hatch, a sunken space capsule and accusations
that the former Air Force fighter pilot had panicked.
"The
flight crew for the orbital mission has been picked and I'm not
on it," he writes in slanting script, each line of blue ink
climbing slightly from left to right on the Project Mercury
letterhead. "Of course I've been feeling pretty low for the past
few days. All of us are mad because Glenn was picked. But we
expressed our views prior to the selection so there isn't much
we can do about it but support the flight and the program."
The letter is being auctioned online by RR Auction of
Amherst, N.H., which got it from Grissom's brother, Lowell.
"Those original seven Mercury astronauts were extremely
competitive people," Lowell Grissom said this week. "If one was
picked over another, they all thought it should be them. It's
that kind of atmosphere; they all wanted to be first."
Virgil "Gus" Grissom was the second American to make a
suborbital flight. After splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean,
his craft sank when the hatch blew open prematurely and it
filled with water. Grissom narrowly escaped drowning and
insisted until his death in a 1967 Apollo launch pad fire that
he did nothing to cause the hatch to blow.
Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth in February
1962 and is the last surviving Mercury 7 astronaut. He did not
return calls seeking comment.
In the Oct. 7 letter to his mother Cecile, Grissom candidly
shares his disappointment at being named a flight controller for
the second orbital flight, to be piloted by Donald "Deke"
Slayton. (Slayton was replaced by Scott Carpenter because of a
heart condition.)
"It's not a job I want," Grissom writes. "I have to do a
great deal of the work, I'll be gone from home a lot and I don't
get any of the credit, but if anything goes wrong, I'll get a
good deal of the blame."
Grissom would later pilot the Gemini III orbital mission.
