On the morning of July 21, 1961, Air Force pilot Virgil "Gus" Grissom rode a modified Army missile 118 miles above the Atlantic, spent five weightless minutes as only the second American ever to leave the planet, and splashed down 302 miles off Florida looking, by some accounts, like a man having a very good day. Here his hatch blew, and his capsule began to ingest seawater, and the very sea that helped him pull off a hero's feat only minutes earlier almost swallowed him up and his spacecraft as well. According to a NASA Kennedy Space Center archive , apparently a Marine rescue helicopter attempted to lift the capsule, which was underwater, but failed, and the capsule sank to the ocean floor without anyone being able to stop it. It went missing for roughly 38 years.
A capsule with a nine-word obituary: lost, presumed unrecoverable
