This was the moment. He had worked toward it for three years. He had suffered agonies of frustration. Now he was alone, flat on his back on a form-fit couch inside the instrument-packed capsule named Friendship 7. In an incredibly matter-of-fact voice, John Glenn began to count: "Ten, nine, eight, seven, six . . ." A great yellow-white gush of flame spewed out from the Atlas-D missile. For nearly four seconds, it seemed rooted to its pad in the space-age wasteland of Cape Canaveral, a flat, sandy scrubland dotted by palmetto trees and looming, ungainly missile gantries. Then the rocket took off, heading into the brilliant blue sky. "Lift-off," said Glenn. "The clock is operating. We're under way."
In the next four hours and 56 minutes, John Glenn lived through and shared with millions a day of miracles. There was beauty. "I don't know what you can say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets," Glenn said later, "three in orbit, and one on the surface after I was back on board the ship." There was the wonder of weightlessness. "This," said Glenn, "is something you could get addicted to." And there was danger: "This could have been a bad day all the way around."
Eerie World. After liftoff, the next crucial stage of the flight was the separation of the rocket and capsule at the proper angle to put Glenn into the programmed orbit. When his orbit was confirmed at the Cape, Glenn jubilantly radioed back: "Capsule is turning around. Oh, that view is tremendous! I can see the booster doing turnarounds just a couple of hundred yards behind. Cape is go and I am go."
As he left the Atlantic behind and began to cross Africa, Glenn set out to test his reactions to the eerie world of weightlessness. He gobbled some malt tablets and carefully squeezed a tube of applesauce into his mouth. He felt fine. Swallowing was no problem. "It's all positive action. Your tongue forces it back in the throat and you swallow normally. It's all a positive displacement machine all the way through." He shook his head violently to see if the motion would induce space sickness. Nothing happened. "I have had no ill effects at all from zero G," he reported. "It's very pleasant, as a matter of fact. Visual acuity is still excellent. No astigmatic effects. No nausea or discomfort whatsoever."
Floating Camera. Indeed, weightlessness became a sort of sport. Glenn had with him a small hand camera to take pictures with through his window. "It just seemed perfectly natural, rather than put the camera away, I just put it out in mid-air and let go of it." With the camera suspended as though on an invisible shelf, Glenn went on with other work, then reached back and plucked the camera out of the air. Only once was there any difficulty. Preparing to change film, Glenn let the roll slip out of his fingers. He grabbed for it, but "instead of clamping onto it, I batted it and it went sailing off around behind the instrument panel, and that was the last I saw of it."