Here's a short headline option: The Liberty Bell 7 Mystery: How an Exploding Hatch Nearly Drowned an Astronaut and Puzzled NASA for Decades
About this episode
The episode explores the mysterious incident of the Liberty Bell 7 mission where an explosive hatch unexpectedly blew off, nearly drowning astronaut Gus Grissom.
On July 21st, we travel back to the year 1961, out over the choppy waters of the Atlantic Ocean, where one of the strangest unsolved mysteries in American space history took place. This was the day of the Liberty Bell 7 mission, the second crewed flight of Project Mercury, carrying astronaut Gus Grissom on a fifteen minute suborbital hop into space and back. The flight itself went beautifully. Grissom rocketed upward, experienced a few precious minutes of weightlessness, watched the curvature of the Earth, and then plunged back down toward the ocean exactly as planned. His capsule splashed down safely, bobbing in the swells with Grissom still strapped inside, waiting for recovery helicopters to arrive and hook onto the spacecraft so it could be hoisted from the sea. And this is where things take a bizarre and, to this day, genuinely unexplained turn. The Mercury capsules were fitted with an explosive hatch, a ring of charges that could blow the door off in an emergency so the astronaut could escape quickly. To trigger it, the astronaut had to physically remove a safety pin and then strike a plunger with enough force to set off the explosive bolts. It was not a hair trigger. It…
Topics covered
- space history
- Project Mercury
- astronauts
- mysteries
- explosive hatch
- Gus Grissom
Keywords
- Liberty Bell 7
- Gus Grissom
- NASA
- Project Mercury
- space mystery
- exploding hatch
- 1961
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: NASA
Places: Atlantic Ocean
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