The Secret Flight of Friendship Eleven: The Space Race’s Best Kept Secret

The Secret Flight of Friendship Eleven by Alfred Connable - Behind closed doors and under the cover of night, a spacecraft rises. Conceived in confidence and launched in silence, this is the unforgettable tale of Friendship Eleven.

In its major details, project Friendship Eleven was perhaps the best-kept secret since Hiroshima. It was initiated on August 14, 1961, following a massive screening of potential astronauts. Because of the flight's special purposes (unknown even to us before blast-off time), qualifying interviews and examinations used rigid criteria which were largely foreign to the previous experience of the examiners.

Seven astronauts were chosen, but by the end of the first month's tests it became apparent that one of them was unsuitable. This was our first confused clue that something extraordinary was afoot. Robin Hood (his true name) had been a picturesque aviator of some renown in the early 1940's. Barely two weeks before Pearl Harbor, he had won the Distinguished Flying Cross for destroying nine suspicious aircraft, including occupants, which had approached him one evening in a beautiful moonlit sky over the Fiji Islands.

It was a particular misfortune that Major Hood should fail so early in the training period. Project spokesmen had considered him a prime contender for orbit. Curiously, they repeatedly praised him as the leading, and most consistently articulate, contributor to the poetry section of The Air Force Times. Incidentally (which was not known to us at the time), his demise left the Project without a single experienced test pilot.