“Gravity-Defying Dilemmas: The Ingenious Solutions Astronauts Use to Conquer the Ultimate Space Challenge!”
…which brings us back to the morning of May 5, 1961, and Alan Shepard’s awkward pre-flight dilemma. While NASA records indicate that a urine collection container was installed near the capsule’s entrance hatch, this would have been impossible for Shepard to use, being firmly strapped into his form-fitting flight couch. And letting Shepard out to use the regular facilities would have required the pad crew to laboriously unfasten the 70 bolts holding the hatch shut, further delaying the launch. Unable to resist the urge any longer, Shepard requested permission to urinate in his spacesuit. At first Mission Control refused, fearing that the urine would short out the biosensors monitoring Shepard’s vital signs. But when Shepard suggested they simply switch the sensors off, they relented, and a very relieved Shepard proceeded to – well, relieve – himself. Due to Shepard’s supine, legs-up position, the urine pooled in the small of his back and soaked into his one-piece wool undergarment, where the cool pure oxygen flowing through the spacesuit quickly dried it out. The crisis averted, the countdown resumed, and at 9:34 AM Shepard blasted off into the wild blue yonder, reaching an altitude of 187.5 kilometres before reentering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean 487 kilometres east of Cape Canaveral. Though less impressive than Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s historic orbit of the earth less than a month before, the flight of Mercury Redstone 3 finally put the United States firmly in the Space Race – and for more on the – shall we say less than stellar – early days of the U.S. space program, please check out our previous video ‘Kaputnik’: America’s Largely Forgotten Disastrous First Attempt to Launch a Satellite.
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