Restoration Efforts on Space Capsule Don’t Clean Up Mystery

HUTCHINSON, Kan. —  The salt and corrosion come off with diligent scrubbing. So, bolt by bolt and cable by cable, the famed Liberty Bell space capsule is being cleaned up.

But all the scouring has not yet rubbed away the mystery that clings to the Liberty Bell. Or the tarnish that stains a hero’s reputation.

The Liberty Bell carried astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom into space on July 21, 1961. It was America’s second manned spaceflight, a triumph right up until splashdown. Then, as a helicopter maneuvered to lift the Liberty Bell from the Atlantic, the escape hatch suddenly blew.

The capsule flooded and sank. Grissom very nearly drowned.

And no one had any clue why.

“I was just laying there, minding my own business,” Grissom recalled not long afterward, “when pow, the hatch went.” An inquiry by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration concluded the astronaut was not to blame. But Tom Wolfe’s book “The Right Stuff” and the movie that followed forever shaped public opinion by suggesting that a bumbling, panicked Grissom had blown the hatch prematurely.

With Liberty Bell at the bottom of the ocean, the truth seemed well out of reach.

Until now.

Reassembly Yields ‘Intriguing Little Clues’

Here in this modest farm town, restoration experts at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center have spent the last few months uncovering secrets of the Liberty Bell, which was plucked from the ocean floor in a salvage expedition last summer. Working with dental picks and Brillo pads, the crew has painstakingly dismantled, scraped, washed and reassembled nearly every one of the capsule’s 25,000 parts.

In the process, the restorers have come across tantalizing hints--though no definite answers--to the mystery of the hatch.

“We’ve got some intriguing little clues,” says Max Ary, president of the Cosmosphere center.

For instance, restoration experts noticed that the titanium strip that once connected the hatch door to the capsule is warped by more than half an inch. Perhaps, they speculate, the titanium buckled under the sheer force of impact when Liberty Bell hit the Atlantic. Perhaps the hatch blew through no fault of Grissom’s but simply because the metal holding it in place gave out.

They find significance as well in the lack of burn marks around the 70 bolts that welded the hatch to the capsule. The bolts all had been rigged with explosives, which Grissom was supposed to detonate once the rescue helicopter lifted the Liberty Bell a few feet above the Atlantic.

Grissom armed the explosives but insisted he never hit the plunger that would have detonated them. And indeed, he had none of the telltale bruises that other astronauts suffered when they strained to move the plunger into place. In trial after trial, NASA simulated Grissom’s movements inside the capsule to see if he might have hit the plunger accidentally, perhaps with his helmet. But no plausible scenario emerged.

The lack of burn marks could signal that the bolts popped off on their own because of some malfunction--a conclusion that would exonerate Grissom. Yet Ary notes that other Mercury capsules in which the hatch worked fine also lack burn marks. So he’s reluctant to read too much into the discovery.

Although he pledges to “follow all these leads all the way through,” Ary doesn’t think it’s likely his crews will ever reach an undisputed conclusion, especially with the hatch itself still on the ocean floor. The Liberty Bell, he says, will always have “an aura” of wonder about it. “There’s still going to be a mystery there.”

That’s fine by many of the center’s visitors, some of whom return week after week to watch the restoration through oversized windows in the lab. Afraid that any new investigation would sully Grissom’s reputation still more--and captivated by the idea of a puzzle for the ages--many insist they’d rather not know the truth.

“I don’t think they ought to tell us,” said Les Hensley, a store manager in town who stopped by recently to catch a glimpse of the capsule’s gears and gizmos being scrubbed. “They ought to leave it the way it was, as a mystery.”

For his part, Grissom’s brother, Lowell, says he never was much concerned about the hatch. (“If Gus said he didn’t do it, he didn’t do it,” he explains.) He’s more interested in seeing the Liberty Bell spruced up and put on display as a reminder of the harrowing heroism of early spaceflight. “It’s going to do a lot for Gus’ memory.”

(Grissom and two crew mates died during a 1967 test drill for Apollo 1 when a fire on the launch pad consumed their capsule. They were unable to flee, in part because the escape hatch, which Grissom had helped design, was extremely difficult to open.)

Although the Liberty Bell will always be remembered for the hatch, plenty of other artifacts survived its sinking.

The laminated post-flight checklist that Grissom was reviewing when the hatch blew is legible still. Even the grease pencil marks he made as he awaited the rescue helicopter are there.

Sifting through the ocean muck clogging the capsule, Cosmosphere staffers found 52 dimes, some carved with initials, that launch pad workers may have sneaked on board as souvenirs. (Grissom carried commemorative coins of his own in the pocket of his spacesuit.) They came across a cigarette butt too, and a plastic cup that some technician must have left behind as the Liberty Bell was prepared for flight.

Grissom’s survival kit also made it through 38 years of crushing underwater pressure--and yielded some mysteries of its own, like why NASA thought a vacuum-packed bar of Dial soap might be needed on a 15-minute spaceflight. More useful, perhaps, were the motion sickness pills NASA provided. Wrapped in their plastic bubbles, the pills are still intact. So are Grissom’s shark repellent, his small red flashlight and the survival knife he was supposed to use if his capsule landed on some remote and hostile shore.

It’s these human touches that fascinate the crew restoring the Liberty Bell.

“This is a big part of history, and we’re right here living it,” says John Glass, who came to his job from a background in auto restoration. “It’s something that no one else will ever get a chance to do.”

When the $250,000 restoration is complete next month, the capsule will tour the country for three years, including a stop in Los Angeles tentatively planned for the summer of 2002. It will then return to Kansas for permanent display.

Renowned Collection of Space Artifacts

This small Midwest town might seem an unlikely place for a space museum. But through sheer persistence--and a reputation as experts in the oddball field of spacecraft restoration--the Cosmosphere staff has amassed a renowned collection of American and Soviet artifacts.

There’s the Apollo 13 command module, which the restoration team rebuilt after tracking down many of its original parts. There’s the glove Neil Armstrong wore on his moonwalk. And the Mach meter that test pilot Chuck Yeager used in his efforts to fly faster than sound until his crew decided it was defective. (On his very next flight, with a new Mach meter, he at last broke the sound barrier.)

There’s an immense SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, so big they had to build the lobby around it. There are German V-1 and V-2 rockets. A Soviet moon probe. An American nuclear warhead.

And soon, there will be the Liberty Bell.

With or without an answer to its riddles, “I always liked the idea of trying to . . . not only find it but retrieve it and restore it,” Lowell Grissom says. “It’s the kind of challenge Gus would have been all for.”