65 years ago today, astronaut Gus Grissom flew NASA's second human spaceflight, a suborbital mission lasting 15 minutes.
All went well until after splashdown.
The Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft hatch door blew prematurely and it began filling with water. Grissom escaped, but while the helicopters worked to recovery the sinking spacecraft, his spacesuit began to lose buoyancy. As he struggled to keep his head above water, he thought, “Well, you’ve gone through the whole flight, and now you’re going to sink right here in front of all these people.”
The spacecraft sank to the bottom of the ocean that day, but Grissom was eventually rescued.