CBS News Extra: Project Mercury flight of Frienship 7
Ten-part live "CBS News Extra" coverage of the Project Mercury flight of the Frienship 7 space capsule and astronaut Lt. Col. John Glenn who thus becomes the first American to orbit the earth. Douglas Edwards opens from New York with an update on the weather around the launch area at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Walter Cronkite reports from CBS News Control Center at Cape Canaveral on the scope of coverage to be broadcast by CBS; an animated film explains various stages of the flight such as orbit, reentry, splashdown, and recovery; Cronkite reports it is T minus eighty-four minutes; Lt. Col. John "Shorty" Powers of Mercury Control gives a status report as the camera shows technicians bolting the capsule hatch; videotape shows Glenn suiting up earlier this day and boarding the space capsule; Hughes Rudd reports from the home of Glenn's parents in New Concord, Ohio; Nancy Hanschman reports from Glenn's home in Arlington, Virginia; Grant Holcomb and Robert Schakne report from General Dynamics in San Diego, California; Robert Pierpoint, Neil Strawser, and Roger Mudd report from Washington, D.C.; Dave Dugan, Joe Campbell, and Bill Downs report from ships in the Atlantic Ocean recovery zone; and Bernard Eismann reports from St. Louis on the McDonnell Aircraft Corp., makers of the space capsule. Next, Cronkite opens from Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the count is T minus sixty and holding due to a broken bolt on the capsule's hatch. Highlights of this portion include coverage of the following: Bernard Eismann reports from the McDonnell Aircraft Corp. in St. Louis and interviews an engineer who helped design the capsule; in a film clip, Richard Bate interviews a NASA capsule engineer; Nancy Hanschman reports from Glenn's home in Arlington, Virginia, where she describes the day of Glenn's wife, Annie, thus far; Grant Holcomb reports from General Dynamics in San Diego, CA, and interviews its president, J.R. Dempsey who discusses the Atlas booster built by his company for Project Mercury; Eismann reports again from McDonnell Corp. where an engineer talks about space capsule improvements; Richard C. Hottelet reports from New York with a news summary; Cronkite describes Glenn's morning as the camera shows the launch pad area and the scene at nearby Cocoa Beach; an animated film shows the capsule in orbit; the countdown resumes at T minus fifty-nine minutes; Eismann and a McDonnell manager discuss new techniques required in the building of the space capsule; Cronkite illustrates various stages of the flight such as lift-off, orbit, reentry, splashdown, and recovery; Lt. Col. John "Shorty" Powers of Mercury Control reports the countdown at T minus forty-five minutes and holding; and a film illustrates how the space capsule will be tracked by Cape Canaveral Control Center and seventeen other tracking stations throughout the world.
