A New Analysis May Have Just Solved A Decades-Old Mystery Of The Space Race
A U.S. Marines helicopter hovers over the Atlantic ocean during an attempt to retrieve astronaut Gus Grissom's Liberty Bell 7, which sank 15,000 feet shortly after splashdown on July 21, 1961. AP hide caption
A U.S. Marines helicopter hovers over the Atlantic ocean during an attempt to retrieve astronaut Gus Grissom's Liberty Bell 7, which sank 15,000 feet shortly after splashdown on July 21, 1961.
Anyone who's seen the 1983 film The Right Stuff might remember the scene where astronaut Virgil "Gus" Grissom (played by actor Fred Ward) nearly drowns after splashdown when the hatch on his Mercury capsule unexpectedly blows, flooding the spacecraft with seawater.
The movie — and the book by Tom Wolfe that it was based on — suggest that Grissom panicked and manually triggered the explosive bolts that open the hatch, despite the astronaut's insistence in debriefs following his 1961 flight that it was caused by a mechanical malfunction.
