By Tom Wolfe
The young men in Group 20 and their wives were Pete’s and Jane’s entire social world. They associated with no one else. They constantly invited each other to dinner during the week; there was a Group party at someone’s house practically every weekend; and they would go off on outings to fish or waterski in Chesapeake Bay. In a way they could not have associated with anyone else, at least not easily, because the boys could talk only about one thing: their flying. One of the phrases that kept running through the conversation was “pushing the outside of the envelope.” The “envelope” was a flight-test term referring to the limits of a particular aircraft’s performance, how tight a turn referring to the limits of a particular aircraft’s performance, how tight a turn it could make at such-and-such a speed, and so on. “Pushing the outside,” probing the outer limits, of the envelope seemed to be the great challenge and satisfaction of flight test. At first “pushing the outside of the envelope” was not a particularly terrifying phrase to hear. It sounded once more as if the boys were just talking about sports.
(Wolfe 2008, 8)
Seven years later, when a reporter and a photographer from Life magazine actually stood near her in her living room and watched her face, while outside, on the lawn, a crowd of television crewmen and newspaper reporters waited for a word, an indication, anything – perhaps a glimpse through a part in a curtain! – waited for some sign of what she felt – when one and all asked with their ravenous eyes and, occasionally, in so many words: “How do you feel?” and “Are you scared?” – America wants to know! – it made Jane want to laugh, but in fact she couldn’t even manage a smile.
“Why ask now?” she wanted to say. But they wouldn’t have had the faintest notion of what she was talking about.
(Wolfe 2008, 14)
Then there was a test pilot, Bill Bridgeman. In 1952, when Bridgeman was flying at Edwards Air Force Base, sixty-two Air Force pilots died in the course of thirty-six weeks of training, an extraordinary rate of 1.7 per week. Those figures were for fighter-pilot trainees only; they did not include the test pilots, Bridgeman’s own conferences, who were dying quite regularly enough.
Extraordinary, to be sure; except that every veteran of flying small high-performance jets seemed to have experienced these bad strings.
In time, the Navy would compile statistics showing that for a career Navy pilot, i.e., one who intended to keep flying for twenty years as Conrad did, there was a 23 percent probability that he would die in an aircraft accident. This did not even include combat deaths, since the military did not classify death in combat as accidental. Furthermore, there was a better than even chance, a 56 percent probability, to be exact, that at some point a career Navy pilot would have to eject from his aircraft and attempt to come down by parachute. In the era of jet fighters, ejection meant being exploded out of the cockpit by a nitroglycerine charge, like a human cannonball. The ejection itself was so hazardous – men lost knees, arms, and their lives on the rim of the cockpit or had the skin torn off their faces when they hit the “wall” of air outside – that many pilots chose to wrestle their aircraft to the ground rather than try it … and died that way instead.
The statistics were not secret, but neither were they widely known, having been eased into print rather obliquely in a medical journal. No pilot, and certainly no pilot’s wife, had any need of the statistics in order to know the truth, however. The funerals took care of that in the most dramatic way possible. Sometimes, when the young wife of a fighter pilot would have a little reunion with the girls she went to school with, an odd fact would dawn on her: they have not been going to funerals. And then Jane Conrad would look at Pete … Princeton, Class of 1953 … Pete had already worn his great dark sepulchral bridge coat more than most boys of the Class of ‘53 had worn their tuxedos. How many of those happy young men had buried more than a dozen friends, comrades, and co-workers? (Lost through violent death in the execution of everyday duties.) At the time, the 1950’s, students from Princeton took great pride in going into what they considered highly competitive, aggressive pursuits, jobs on Wall Street, on Madison Avenue, and at magazines such as Time and Newsweek. There was much fashionably brutish talk of what “dog-eat-dog” and “cutthroat” competition they found there; but in the rare instances when one of these young men died on the job, it was likely to be from choking on a chunk of Chateaubriand, while otherwise blissfully boiled, in an expense-account restaurant in Manhattan. How many would have gone to work, or stayed at work, on cutthroat Madison Avenue if there had been a 23 percent chance, nearly one chance in four, of dying from it? Gentlemen, we’re having this little problem with chronic violent death …
And yet was there any basic way in which Pete (or Wally Schirra or Jim Lovell or any of the rest of them) was different from other college boys his age?
(Wolfe 2008, 15-16)
A young man might go into military flight training believing that he was entering some sort of technical school in which he was simply going to acquire a certain set of skills. Instead, he found himself all at once enclosed in a fraternity. And in this fraternity, even though it was military, men were not rated by their outward rank as ensigns, lieutenants, commanders, or whatever. No, herein the world was divided into those who had it and those who did not. This quality, this it, was never named, however, nor was it talked about in any way.
As to just what this ineffable quality was … well, it obviously involved bravery. But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life. The idea seemed to be that any fool could do that, if that was all that was required, just as any fool could throw away his life in the process. No, the idea here (in the all-enclosing fraternity) seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the movie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment – and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite – and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God. Nor was there a test to show whether or not a pilot had this righteous quality. There was, instead, a seemingly infinite series of tests. A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramis extraordinarily high and steep, and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even – ultimately, God willing, one day – that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.
(Wolfe 2008, 17-18)
In the Navy, in addition to the stages that Air Force trainees went through, the neophyte always had waiting for him, out in the ocean, a certain grim gray slab; namely, the deck of an aircraft carrier; and with it perhaps the most difficult routine in military flying, carrier landings. He was shown films about it, he heard lectures about it, and he knew that carrier landings were hazardous. He first practiced touching down on the shape of a flight deck painted on an airfield. He was instructed to touch down and gun right off. This was safe enough – the shape didn’t move, at least – but it could do terrible things to, let us say, the gyroscope of the soul. That shape! – it’s so damned small! And more candidates were washed our and left behind. Then came the day, without warning, when those who remained were sent out over the ocean for the first of many days of reckoning with the slab. The first day was always a clear day with little wind and a calm sea. The carrier was so steady that it seemed, from up there in the air, to be resting on pilings, and the candidate usually made his first carrier landing successfully, with relief and even elan. Many young candidates looked like terrific aviators up to that very point – and it was not until they were actually standing on the carrier deck that they first began to wonder if they had the proper stuff, after all. In the training film the flight deck was a grand piece of gray geometry, perilous, to be sure, but an amazing abstract shape as one looks down upon it on the screen. And yet once the newcomer’s two feet were on it … Geometry – my God, man, this is a … skillet! It heaved, it moved up and down underneath his feet, it pitched up, it pitched down, it rolled to port (this great beast rolled!) and it rolled to starboard, as the ship moved into the wind and, therefore, into the waves, and the wind kept sweeping across, sixty feet up in the air out in the open sea, and there were no railings whatsoever. This was a skillet! – a frying pan! – a short-order grill! – not gray but black, smeared with skid marks from one end to the other and glistening with pools of hydraulic fluid and the occasional jet-fuel slick, all of it still hot, sticky, greasy, runny, virulent from God knows what traumas – still ablaze! – consumed in detonations, explosions, flames, combustion, roars, shrieks, whines, blasts horrible shudders, fracturing impacts, as little men in screaming red and yellow and purple and green shirts with black Mickey Mouse helmets over their ears skittered about on the surface as if for their very lives (you’ve said it now!), hooking fighter planes onto the catapult shuttles so that they can explode their afterburners and be slung off the deck in a red-mad fury with a kaboom! that pounds through the entire deck – a procedure that seems absolutely controlled, orderly, sublime, however, compared to what he is about to watch as aircraft return to the ship for what is known in the engineering stoicisms of the military as “recovery and arrest.” To say that an F-4 was coming back onto this heaving barbecue from out of the sky at a speed of 135 knots … that might have been the truth in the training lecture, but it did not begin to get across the idea of what the newcomer saw from the deck itself, because it created the notion that perhaps the plane was gliding in. On the deck on knew differently! As the aircraft dame closer and the carrier heaved on into the waves and the plane’s speed did not diminish and the deck did not grow steady – indeed, it pitched up and down five or ten feet per greasy heave – one experienced a neral alarm that no lecture could have prepared him for. This is not an airplane coming toward me, it is a brick with some poor sonofabitch riding it (someone muck like myself!), and it is not gliding, it is falling, a thirty-thousand-pound brick, headed not for a stripe on the deck but for me – and with a horrible smash! it hits the skillet, and with a blur of momentum as big as a freight train’s it hurtles toward the far end of the deck – another blinding storm! – another smear of rubber screams out over the skillet – and this is normal! – quite okay! – for a wire stretched across the deck has grabbed the hook on the end o the plane as it hit the deck tail down, and the smash was the rest of the fifteen-ton brute slamming onto the deck, as it tripped up, so that it is now straining against the wire at full throttle, in case it hadn’t held and the plane had “boltered” off the end of the deck and had to struggle up into the air again. And already the Mickey Mouse helmets are running toward the fiery monster …
(Wolfe 2008, 18-20)
The military did not have very merciful instincts. Rather than packing up these poor souls and sending them home, the Navy, like the Air Force and the Marines, would try to make use of them in some other role, such as flight controller. So the washout has to keep taking classes with the rest of his group, even though he can no longer touch an airplane. He sits there in the classes staring at sheets of paper with cataracts of sheer human mortification over his eyes while the rest steal looks at him … this man reduced to an ant, this untouchable, this poor sonofabitch. And in what test had he been found wanting? Why, it seemed to be nothing less than manhood itself. Naturally, this was never mentioned, either. Yet there it was. Manliness, manhood, manly courage … there was something ancient, primordial, irresistible about the challenge of this stuff, no matter what a sophisticated and rational age one might think he lived in.
(Wolfe 2008, 21)
In fact, the feeling was so righteous, so exalted, it could become religious. Civilians seldom understood this, either. There was no one to teach them. It was no longer the fashion for serious writers to describe the glories of war. Instead, they dwelt upon its horrors, often with cynicism or disgust. It was left to the occasional pilot with a literary flair to provide a glimpse of the pilot’s self-conception in its heavenly or spiritual aspect. When a pilot named Robert Scott flew his P-43 over Mount Everest, quite a feat at the time, he brought his hand up and snapped a salute to his fallen adversary. He thought he had defeated the mountain, surmounting all the forces of nature that had made it formidable. And why not? “God is my co-pilot,” he said – that became the title of his book – and he meant it. So did the most gifted of all the pilot authors, the Frenchman Antoine de Saint-Exupery. As he gazed down upon the world … from up there … during transcontinental flights, the good Saint-Ex saw civilization as a series of tiny fragile patches clinging to the otherwise barren rock of Earth. He felt like a lonely sentinel, a protector of those vulnerable little oases, ready to lay down his life in their behalf, if necessary; a saint, in short, true to his name, flying up here at the right hand of God. The good Saint-Ex! And he was not the only one. He was merely the one who put it into words most beautifully and anointed himself before the altar of the right stuff.
(Wolfe 2008, 30)
Combat had its own infinite series of tests, and one of the greatest sins was “chattering” or “jabbering” on the radio. The combat frequency was to be kept clear of all but strategically essential messages, and all unenlightening comments were regarded as evidence of funk, of the wrong stuff. A Navy pilot (in legend, at any rate) began shouting, “I’ve got a MiG at zero! A MiG at zero!”—meaning that it had maneuvered in behind him and was locked in on his tail. An irritated voice cut in and said, “Shut up and die like an aviator.”One had to be a Navy pilot to appreciate the final nuance. A good Navy pilot was a real aviator; in the Air Force they merely had pilots and not precisely the proper stuff.
(Wolfe 2008, 31-32)
Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot… coming over the intercom… with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless!—it’s reassuring)… the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because “it might get a little choppy”… the voice that tells you (on a flight from Phoenix preparing for its final approach into Kennedy Airport, New York, just after dawn): “Now, folks, uh… this is the captain… ummmm… We’ve got a little ol’ red light up here on the control panel that’s tryin’ to tell us that the landin’ gears’re not… uh… lockin’ into position when we lower ’em… Now… I don’t believe that little ol’ red light knows what it’s talkin’ about—I believe it’s that little ol’ red light that iddn’ workin’ right”… faint chuckle, long pause, as if to say, I’m not even sure all this is really worth going into—still, it may amuse you… “But… I guess to play it by the rules, we oughta humor that little ol’ light… so we’re gonna take her down to about, oh, two or three hundred feet over therunway at Kennedy, and thefolks down there on the ground are gonna see if they caint give us a visual inspection of those ol’ landin’ gears”—with which he is obviously on intimate ol’-buddy terms, as with every other working part of this mighty ship —”and if I’m right… they’re gonna tell us everything is copacetic all the way aroun’ an’ we’ll jes take her on in”… and, after a couple of low passes over the field, the voice returns: “Well, folks, those folks down there on the ground—it must be too early for ’em or somethin’—I ‘spect they still got thesleepers in their eyes… ’cause they say they caint tell if those ol’ landin’ gearsareall the way down or not… But, you know, up here in the cockpit we’re convinced they’re all the way down, so we’re jes gonna take her on in… And oh”…(I almost forgot)… “while we take a little swing out over the ocean an’ empty some of that surplus fuel we’re not gonna be needin’ anymore—that’s what you might beseein’ comin’ out ofthe wings—our lovely little ladies… if they’ll be so kind… they’re gonna go up and down the aisles and show you how we do what we call ‘assumin’ the position’”… another faint chuckle (We do this so often, and it’s so much fun, we even have a funny little name for it)… and the stewardesses, a bit grimmer, by the looks of them, than that voice, start telling the passengers to take their glasses off and take the ballpoint pens and other sharp objects out of their pockets, and they show them the position, with the head lowered… while down on the field at Kennedy the little yellow emergency trucks start roaring across the field—and even though in your pounding heart and your sweating palms and your broiling brainpan you know this is a critical moment in your life, you still can’t quite bring yourself to believe it, because if it were…how could the captain, the man who knows the actual situation most intimately… how could he keep on drawlin’ and chucklin’ and driftin’ and lollygaggin’ in that particular voice of his—
Well!—who doesn’t know that voice! And who can forget it!—even after he is proved right and the emergency is over.
That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in LincolnCounty, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, “they had to pipe in daylight.” In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down, from the upper reaches of the Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.
(Wolfe 2008, 33-35)
At the end of the war the Army had discovered that the Germans not only had the world’s first jet fighter but also a rocket plane that had gone 596 miles an hour in tests. Just after the war a British jet, the Gloster Meteor, jumped the official world speed record from 469 to 606 in a single day. The next great plateau would be Mach 1, the speed of sound, and the Army Air Force considered it crucial to achieve it first.
The speed of sound, Mach 1, was known (thanks to the work of the physicist Ernst Mach) to vary at different altitudes, temperatures, and wind speeds. On a calm 60-degree day at sea level it was about 760 miles an hour, while at 40,000 feet, where the temperature would beat at least sixty below, it was about 660 miles an hour. Evil and baffling things happened in the transonic zone, which began at about .7 Mach. Wind tunnels choked out at such velocities. Pilots who approached the speed of sound in dives reported that the controls would lock or “freeze” or even alter their normal functions. Pilots had crashed and died because they couldn’t budge the stick. Just last year Geoffrey de Havilland, son of the famous British aircraft designer and builder, had tried to take one of his father’s DH 108s to Mach 1. The ship started buffeting and then disintegrated, and he was killed. This led engineers to speculate that the shock waves became so severe and unpredictable at Mach 1, no aircraft could survive them. They started talking about “the sonic wall” and “the sound barrier.”
(Wolfe 2008, 37)
Over the next five months Yeager flew supersonic in the X-1 more than a dozen times, but still the Air Force insisted on keeping the story secret. Aviation Week published a report of the nights late in December (without mentioningYeager’s name) provoking a minor debate in the press over whether or not Aviation Week had violated national security—and still the Air Force refused to publicize the achievement until June of 1948. Only then was Yeager’s name released. He received only a fraction of the publicity that would have been his had he been presented to the world immediately, on October 14, 1947, as the man who “broke the sound barrier.” This dragged-out process had curious effects.
(Wolfe 2008, 46)
Yeager was not terribly impressed. The thing was so goddamned small. The idea of an artificial earth satellite was not novel to anyone who had been involved in the rocket program at Edwards. By now, ten years after Yeager had first flown a rocket faster than Mach 1, rocket development had reached the point where the idea of unmanned satellites such as Sputnik 1 was taken for granted. Two years ago, 1955, the government had published a detailed description of the rockets that would be used to launch a small satellite in late 1957 or early 1958 as part of the United States’ contribution to the International Geophysical Year. Engineers for NACA and the Air Force and several aircraft companies were already designing manned spacecraft as the logical extension of the X series. The preliminary design section ofNorthAmericanAviation had working drawings and most of the specifications for a fifteen-ton ship called the X-15B, a winged craft that would be launched by three enormous rockets, each with 415,000 pounds of thrust, whereupon the ship’s two pilots would take over with the X-15B’s own 75,000- pound engine, make three or more orbits of the earth, reenter the atmosphere, and land on a dry lake bed at Edwards like any other pilots in the X series. This was no mere dream. North American was already manufacturing a ship almost as ambitious: namely the X15. Scott Crossfield was in training to fly it. The X-15 was designed to achieve an altitude of 280,000 feet, just above fifty miles, which was generally regarded as the boundary where all trace of atmosphere ended and “space” began. Within a month after the launching of Sputnik 1, North American’s chief engineer, Harrison Storms, was in Washington with a completely detailed proposal for the X-15B project. His turned out to be one among 421 proposals for manned spacecraft that had been submitted to NACA and the Defense Department. The Air Force was interested in a rocket glider craft, similar to the X-15B, that would be called the X-20 or Dyna-Soar, for “dynamic soaring”; anAir Force rocket, the Titan, which was under development, would provide the 500,000 pounds of thrust that would be required. Naturally the pilots of the X-15B or the X20 or whatever—the first Americans and possibly the first men in the world to go into space—would come from Edwards. At Edwards you had men like Crossfield, Iven Kincheloe, and Joe Walker, who had already flown rockets many times.
So what was the big deal about Sputnik 1? The problem was already on the way to being solved.
That was the way it looked to Yeager and to everybody involved in the X series at Edwards. It was hard to realize how Sputnik 1 looked to the rest of the country and particularly to politicians and the press…and other technological illiterates with influence… It was hard to realize that Sputnik 1, if not the MiG-15, would strike terror in the heart of the West.
After two weeks, however, the situation was obvious:a colossal panic was underway, with congressmen and newspapermen leading a huge pack that was baying at the sky where the hundred-pound Soviet satellite kept beeping around the world. In their eyes Sputnik 1 had become the second momentous event of the Cold War. The First had been the Soviet development of the atomic bomb in 1953. Froma purely strategic standpoint, the fact that the Soviets had the rocket power to launch Sputnik 1 meant that they now also had the capacity to deliver the bomb on an intercontinental ballistic missile. The panic reached far beyond the relatively sane concern for tactical weaponry, however. Sputnik 1 took on a magical dimension—among highly placed persons especially, judging by opinion surveys. It seemed to dredge up primordial superstitions about the influence of heavenly bodies. It gave birth to a modern, i.e., technological, astrology. Nothing less than control of the heavens was at stake. It was Armageddon, the final and decisive battle of the forces of good and evil. Lyndon Johnson, who was the Senate majority leader, said that whoever controlled “the high ground” of space would control the world. This phrase, “the high ground,” somehow caught hold. “The Roman Empire,” said Johnson, “controlled the world because it could build roads. Later—when it moved to sea—the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. In the air age we were powerful because we had airplanes. Now the Communists have established a foothold in outer space.”The New York Times, in an editorial, said the United States was now in a “race for survival.” The panic became more and more apocalyptic. Nothing short of doom awaited the loser, now that the battle had begun. When the Soviets shot a Sputnik called Mechta into a heliocentric orbit, the House Select Committee on Astronautics, headed by House Speaker John McCormack, said that the United States faced the prospect of “national extinction” if it did not catch up with the Soviet space program. “It cannot be overemphasized that the survival of the free world—indeed, all the world—is caught up in the stakes.” The public, according to the Gallup poll, was not all that alarmed. But McCormack, like a great many powerful people, genuinely believed in the notion of “controlling the high ground.” He was genuinely convinced that the Soviets would send up space platforms from which they could drop nuclear bombs at will, like rocks from a highway overpass.
The Soviet program gave off an aura of sorcery. The Soviets released practically no figures, pictures, or diagrams. And no names; it was revealed only that the Soviet program was guided by a mysterious individual known as “the Chief Designer.” But his powers were indisputable! Every time the United States announced a great space experiment, the Chief Designer accomplished it first, in the most startling fashion. In 1955 the United States announces plans to launch an artificial earth satellite by early 1958. The Chief Designer startles the world by doing it inOctober 1957. The United States announces plans to send a satellite into orbit around the sun in March of 1959. The Chief Designer does it in January 1959. The fact that the United States went ahead and successfully conducted such experiments on schedule, as announced, impressed no one—and Americans least of all. In a marvelously morose novel of the future called We, completed in 1921, the Russianwriter Evgeny Zamyatin describes a gigantic “fire-breathing, electric”rocket ship that is poised to “soar into cosmic space” in order to “subjugate the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in the primitive, condition of freedom”—all this in the name of”the Benefactor,”ruler of”the One State.”This omnipotent space ship is called the Integral, and its designer is known only as “D-503, Builder of the Integral.” In 1958 and early 1959, as magical success followed magical success, that was the way Americans, the leaders even more so than the followers, began to look on the Soviet space program. It was a thing of misty but stupendous dimensions… the mighty Integral… with an anonymous but omnipotent Chief Designer… Builder of the Integral. Within the federal government and throughout the education bureaucracies rose a cry for a complete overhauling of American education in order to catch up with the new generation, the new dawn, of socialist scientists, out of which had come geniuses like the Chief Designer (Builder of the Integral!) and his assistants.
The panic was greatly exacerbated by the figure of Nikita Khrushchev, who now emerged as the new Stalin in terms of his autocratic rule of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev was a type whom Americans could readily understand and fear. He was the burly, hearty, crude but shrewd farmboy capable of grinning with barnyard humor one moment and of tormenting small animals the next. After Sputnik 1 Khrushchev became the wicked master of mocking the United States for its incompetence. Two months after Sputnik 1 the Navy tried to launch the first American satellite with a Vanguard rocket. The first nationally televised countdown began… “Ten, nine, eight…” Then…”Ignition!” A mighty surge of noise and flames. The rocket lifts—some six inches. The first stage, bloated with fuel, explodes, and the rest of the rocket sinks into the sand beside the launch platform. It appears to sink very slowly, like a fat old man collapsing into a Barcalounger. The sight is absolutely ludicrous, if one is in the mood for a practical joke. Oh, Khrushchev had fun with that, allright! This picture—the big buildup, the dramatic countdown, followed by the exploding cigar—was unforgettable. It became the image of the American space program. The press broke into a hideous cackle of national self-loathing, with the headline KAPUTNIK! being the most inspired rendition of the mood.
The rocket pilots at Edwards simply could not understand what sort of madness possessed everybody. They watched in consternation as a war effort mentality took over. Catch up! On all fronts! That was the imperative. They could scarcely believe the outcome of a meeting held, in Los Angeles in March of 1958. This was an emergency meeting (what emergency?) of government, military, and aircraft industry leaders to discuss the possibility of getting a man into space before the Russians. Suddenly there was no longer time for orderly progress. To put an X-15B or an X-20 into orbit, with an Edwards rocket pilot aboard, would require rockets that were still three or four years away from delivery. So a so-called quick and dirty approach was seized upon. Using available rockets such as the Redstone (70,000 pounds of thrust) and the just developed Atlas (367,000 pounds), they would try to launch not a flying ship but a pod, a container, a capsule, with a man in it. The man would not be a pilot; he would be a human cannonball. He would not be able to alter the course of the capsule in the slightest. The capsule would go up like a cannonball and come down like a cannonball, splashing into the ocean, with a parachute to slow it down and spare the life of the human specimen inside. The job was assigned to NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which was converted into NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The project was called Project Mercury.
The capsule approach was the brainchild of a highly regarded Air Force research physician, Brigadier General Don Flickinger. The Air Force named it the MISS project, for “man in space soonest.” The man in the MISS capsule would be an aero-medical test subject and little more. In fact, in the first flights, as Flickinger envisioned it, the capsule would contain a chimpanzee. Mercury was a slightly modified version of MISS, and so naturally enough Flickinger became one of the five men in charge of selecting Project Mercury’s astronauts, as they would be called. The fact that NASA would soon be choosing men to go into space had not been made public, but Scott Crossfield was aware of it. Shortly after the Sputnik 1 launching, Crossfield, Flickinger, and seven others had been named to an emergency committee on “human factors and training” for space flight. Crossfield had also worked closely with Flickinger when he was testing pressure suits at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in preparation for the X-15 project. Now Crossfield approached Flickingerand told him he was interested in becoming an astronaut. Flickinger liked Crossfield and admired him. And he told him: “Scotty, don’t even bother applying, because you’ll only be turned down. You’re too independent.” Crossfield was the most prominent of the rocket pilots, now that Yeager was no longer at Edwards, and he had as well developed an ego as any of Edwards’ fabled jocks, and he was one of the most brilliant of all the pilots when it came to engineering. Flickinger seemed to be telling him that Project Mercury just wasn’t suited for the righteous brethren of yore, the veterans of those high desert rat- shack broomstick days when there were no chiefs and no Indians and the pilot huddled in the hangar with the engineer and then went out and took the beast up and lit the candle and reached for the stars and rode his chimney and landed it on the lake bed and made it to Pancho’s in time for beer call. When Flickinger explained to him that the first flight of the Mercury system would be made by a chimpanzee… well, Crossfield wasn’t even particularly interested any more. Nor were most of the other pilots who were in line to fly the X-15. A monkey’s gonna make the first flight. That was what you started hearing. Astronaut meant “star voyager,” but in fact the poor devil would be a guinea pig for the study of the effects of weightlessness on the body and the central nervous system. As the brethren knew, NASA’s original civil-service job specifications for Mercury astronaut did not even require that the star voyager be a pilot of any description whatsoever. Just about any young male college graduate with experience in a physically dangerous pursuit would do, so long as he was under five feet eleven and could fit into the Mercury capsule. The announcement calling for volunteers did mention test pilots as being among the types of men who might qualify, but it also mentioned submarine crew members, parachute jumpers, arctic explorers, mountain climbers, deep sea divers, even scuba divers, combat veterans, and, for that matter, mere veterans of combat training, and men who had served as test subjects for acceleration and atmospheric pressure tests, such as the Air Force and Navy had been running. The astronaut would not be expected to do anything; he only had to be able to take it.
NASA was ready to issue the call when the President himself, Eisenhower, stepped in. He foresaw bedlam. Every lunatic in the U.S.A. would volunteer for this thing. Every dingaling in the U.S. Congress would be touting a favorite son. It would be chaos. The selection process might take months, and the inevitable business of security clearances would take a few more. Late in December Eisenhower directed that NASA select the astronauts from among the 540 military test pilots already on duty, even though they were rather overqualified for the job. The main thing was that their records were immediately available, they already had security clearances, and they could be ordered to Washington at a moment’s notice. The specifications were that they be under five feet eleven and no older than thirty-nine and that they be graduates of test-pilot schools, with at least 1,500 hours of flying time and experience in jets, and that they have bachelor’s degrees “or the equivalent.”One hundred and ten of the pilots fit the profile. There were men on the NASA selection committee who wondered if the pool was big enough. They figured that they would be lucky if one test pilot in ten volunteered. Even that wouldn’t be quite enough, because they were looking for twelve astronaut candidates. They only needed six for the flights themselves, but they assumed that at least half the candidates would drop out because of the frustration of training to become passive guinea pigs in an automated capsule.
After all, they already knew how the leading test pilots at Edwards felt. North American had rolled out the first X-15 in the fall of 1958, and Crossfield and his colleagues, Joe Walker and Iven Kincheloe, had become absorbed in the assignment. Joe Walker was NASA’s prime pilot for the project, and Kincheloe was prime pilot for the Air Force. Kincheloe had set the world altitude record of 126,000 feet in the X-2, and the Air Force envisioned him as the newYeager… and then some. Kincheloe was a combat hero and test pilot from out of a dream, blond, handsome, powerful, bright, supremely ambitious and yet popular with all who worked with him, including other pilots. There was absolutely no ceiling on his future in theAir Force. Then one perfectly sunny day he was making a routine takeoff in an F-104 and the panel lit up red and he had that one second in which to decide whether or not to punch out at an altitude of about fifty feet… a choice complicated by the fact that the F-104’s seat ejected straight down, out of the belly… and so he tried to roll the ship over and eject upside down, but he went out sideways and was killed. His backup, Major Robert White, took his place in the X-15 project. Joe Walker‘s backup was a former Navy fighter pilot named Neil Armstrong. Crossfield, White, Walker, Armstrong— they no longer had time to even think about Project Mercury. Project Mercury did not mean the end of the X-15 program. Not at all. The testing of the X-15 would proceed, in order to develop a true spacecraft, a ship that a pilot could fly into space and fly back down through the atmosphere for a landing. Much was made of the fact that the X-15 would “land with dignity”rather than splash down in the water like the proposed Mercury capsule. Press interest in the X-15 had become tremendous, because it was the country’s sole existing “spaceship.” Reporters had started writing about Kincheloe as “Mr. Space,”since he was the one who held the altitude record. After his death they hung the title on Crossfield. It was a bother… but a fellow could learn to live with it… In any case, Project Mercury, the human cannonball approach, looked like a Larry Light-bulb scheme, and it gave off the funk of panic. Any pilot who went into it would no longer be a pilot. He would be a laboratory animal wired up fromskull to rectumwith medical sensors. The rocket pilots had fought this medical crap every foot of the way. Scott Crossfield had reluctantly allowed them to wire him for heartbeat and respiration in rocket flights but had refused to let them insert a rectal thermometer. The pilots who signed up to crawl into the Mercury capsule —the capsule, everybody noted, not the ship—would be called “astronauts.” But, in fact, they would be lab rabbits with wires up the tail and everywhere else. Nobody in his right mind would hang his hide out over the edge of ten or fifteen years and ascend the pyramid and finally reach the dome of the world, Edwards…only to end up like that: a lab rabbit curled up motionless in capsule with his little heart pitter-patting and a wire up the kazoo.
Some of the most righteous of the brethren weren’t even eligible for the preliminary screening for Project Mercury. Yeager was young enough—still only thirtyfive—but had never attended college. Crossfield and Joe Walker were civilians. Not that any of them gave a damn… at the time. The commanding officer at Edwards passed the word around that he wanted his top boys, the test pilots in Fighter Ops, to avoid Project Mercury because it would be a ridiculous waste of talent; they would just become “Spam in a can.” This phrase “Spam in a can” became very popular at Edwards was the nickname for Project Mercury.
(Wolfe 2008, 53-60)
Conrad, like Schirra or any other test pilot, did not look at the TV footage in the same light, however. What people were seeing on television were, in fact, ordinary test events. Blown engines were par for the course in testing aircraft prototypes and were inevitable in testing an entirely new propulsion system such as jet or rocket engines. It had happened at Muroc in testing the engine of the second American jet fighter, the XP-80. Obviously you didn’t send a man up with an engine until it had attained a certain level of reliability. The only thing unusual about the testing of big rocket engines like the Navaho and the Atlas was that so much of it was televised and that these normal test events came across as colossal “failures.” They were not even radical engines. The rocket engines that had been used in the X-1 project and all of the X projects that followed employed the same basic power plants theAtlas, the Jupiter, and the other rockets NASA was working with. They used the same fuel, liquid oxygen. The X Project rockets, inevitably, had blown in the testing stage, but had been made reliable in the end. No rocket pilot had ever had an engine blowup under him in flight, although one, Skip Ziegler, had died when an X-2 had exploded while it was still attached to the B-50 that was supposed to launch it. To pilots who had been through bad strings at Pax River or Edwards, it was hard to see how the risk would be any greater than in testing the Century series of jet fighters. Just think of a beast like the F-102… or the F-104… or the F-105…
(Wolfe 2008, 67-68)
Ravenous they were!—these swarming photographers who could grunt but not speak, who crawled over them for a full fifteen minutes. Nevertheless, who was dying for the press conference to start? Anytime Gus had to tell total strangers how he felt about anything, it made him uncomfortable;and the thought of doing so publicly, in this room, in front of several hundred people, made him extremely uncomfortable. Gus came from the sort of background where, to put it mildly, glibness was not encouraged. Back in Mitchell, Indiana, his father had been a railroad worker. His mother used to take the family to the Church of Christ, a Protestant denomination that was so fundamentalist no musical instruments were allowed in the church, not even a piano. The human voice raising thanks to God was music enough. Not that Gus was much of a singer, either, however. His public incantations consisted mainly of Hoosier gus gruffisms. He was a short man with sloping shoulders, a compact build, black crew-cut hair, and black bushy eyebrows, a broad nose, and a face given to very dour looks. The only time Gus felt like talking was when he was with other pilots, particularly at beercall. Then he became another human being. His sleepy eyes lit up to about 200 watts. A crazy confident grin took over his mouth. He would start talking a streak and drinking a lake and, when the midnight madness struck, getting into his hot rod and sucking the surrounding countryside up his two exhaust pipes. Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving, of course. Gus was one of those young men, quite common in the United States, actually, who would fight you down to the last unbroken bone over an insult to the gray little town they came from or the grim little church they fidgeted in all those years—while at the same time, in some hidden corner of the soul, they prostrated themselves daily in thanksgiving to the things that had gotten them the hell out of there. In Gus’s case those things had been hot rodsand, now,airplanes.
(Wolfe 2008, 87)
Most of them, Gus included, dealt with this question in typical military-pilot fashion. Which is to say, they managed to get out something brief, obvious, abstract, and above all safe and impersonal. But when it becomes the turn of the guy sitting on Gus’s left, John Glenn, the only Marine in the group—it’s hard to believe. This guy starts turning on the charm! He has a regular little speech on the subject.
“I don’t think any of us could really go on with something like this,” he says, “if we didn’t have pretty good backing at home, really. My wife’s attitude toward this has been the same as it has been allalong through my flying. Ifit is what I want to do, she is behind it, and the kids are, too, a hundred percent.”
What the hell was he talking about?I don’t think any of us could really go on with something like this… What possible difference could a wife’s attitude make about an opportunity for a giant step up the great ziggurat? What was with this guy? It kept on in that fashion. Some reporter gets up and asks them all to tell about their religious affiliations (religious affiliations?)—and Glenn tees off again.
“I am a Presbyterian,” he says, “a Protestant Presbyterian, and I take my religion very seriously, as a matter of fact.” He starts telling them about all the Sunday schools he has taught at and the church boards he has served on and all the churchwork that he and his wife and his children have done. “I was brought up believing that you are placed on earth here more or less with sort of a fifty-fifty proposition, and this is what I still believe. Weare placed here with certain talents and capabilities. It is up to each of us to use those talents and capabilities as best you can. If you do that, I think there is a power greater than any of us that will place the opportunities in our way, and if we use our talents properly, we will be living the kind of life we should live.”
Jesus Christ—share it, brother. You can see the boys cutting glances from either end of the table up at this flying churchman Gus is sitting next to. They’re seated in alphabetical order, with Scott Carpenter at one end and Deke Slayton at the other and Glenn in the middle. What can anybody say as a follow-up to this man and his speeches about the Wife and the Children and the Family and Sunday School and God? What can you do, say that as a matter of fact you can get along just as well without any of them as long as they’ll let you fly? That didn’t seem very prudent. (Turn on the halo—and lie!) You could see these pilots straggling to put up enough chips to stay in the God & Family game with this pious Marine named Glenn.
When it was Gus’s turn, he said: “I consider myself religious. Iama Protestantand belong to the Church of Christ. I am not real active in church, as Mr. Glenn is”—Mister Glenn, he calls him—”but Iconsider myself a good Christian still.”Deke Slayton says:”As far as my religious faith is concerned, Iama Lutheran, and I go to church periodically.” One of the Navy pilots, Alan Shepard, says: “I am not a member of any church. I attend the Christian Science Church regularly.”And so it went. It was a struggle.
(Wolfe 2008, 88-91)
By the next morning thesevenMercury astronauts were national heroes. It happened just like that. Even though so far they had done nothing more than show up for a press conference, they were known as the seven bravest men in America. They woke up to find astonishing acclaim all over the press. There it was, in the more sophisticated columns as well as in the tabloids and on television. Even James Reston of The New York Times had been so profoundly moved by the press conference and the sight of the seven brave men that his heart, he confessed, nowbeatalittlefaster. “What made them so exciting,” he wrote, “was not that they said anything new but that they said all the old things with such fierce convictions… They spoke of ‘duty’ and ‘faith’ and ‘country’ like Walt Whitman’s pioneers… This is a pretty cynical town, but nobody went away from these young men scoffing at their courage and idealism. “Manly courage, the right stuff—the Halo Effect, with Deacon Glenn leading the hallelujah chorus, had practically wiped the man out. If Gus and some of the others had been worried that they weren’t being regarded as hot pilots, their worries were over when they saw the press coverage. Without exception, the newspaper and wire services picked out the highlights of their careers and carefully missed them to create a single blaze of glory. This took true journalistic skill. It meant citing a great deal from John Glenn’s career, his combat flying in two wars, his five Distinguished Flying Crosses with eighteen clusters, and his recent speed record, plus the combat that Gus and Wally Schirra had seen in Korea and the medals they had won, one DFC apiece, and the bombing missions Slayton had flown in the Second World War and a bit about the jet fighters he had helped test at Edwards and the ones Shepard had tested at Pax River—and going easy on the subject of Scott Carpenter and Gordon Cooper, who had not flown in combat (Shepard had not, either) or done any extraordinary testing. John Glenn came out of it as tops among seven very fair haired boys. He had the hottest record as a pilot, he was the most quotable, the most photogenic, and the lone Marine. But all seven, collectively, emerged in a golden haze as the seven finest pilots and bravest man in the United States. A blazing aura was upon them all.
(Wolfe 2008, 94-95)
Just as the Soviet success in putting Sputniks into orbit around the earth revived long-buried superstitions about the power of heavenly bodies and the fear of hostile control of the heavens, so did the creation of astronauts and a”manned space program” bring back to life one of the ancient superstitions of warfare. Single combat had been common throughout the world in the pre-Christian era and endured in some places through the Middle Ages. In single combat the mightiest soldier of one army would fight the mightiest soldier of the other army as a substitute for a pitched battle between the entire forces. In some cases the combat would pit small teams of warriors against one another. Single combat was not seen asa humanitarian substitute for wholesale slaughter until late in its history. That was a Christian reinterpretation of the practice. Originally it had a magical meaning. In ancient China, first the champion warriors would fight to the death as a “testing of fate,” and then the entire armies would fight, emboldened or demoralized by the outcome of the single combat. Before Mohammed’s first battle as the warrior-prophet, the Battle of Badr, three of Mohammed’s men challenged the Meccans to pick out any three of their soldiers to fight in single combat, proceeded to destroy them with all due ceremony, whereupon Mohammed’s entire force routed the entire Meccan force. In other cases, however, the single combat settled the affair, and there was no full-scale battle, as when the Vandaland Aleman Armies confronted each other in Spain in the fifth century A.D. They believed that the gods determined the outcome of single combat; therefore, it was useless for the losing side to engage in a full-scale battle. The Old Testament story ofDavid and Goliath is precisely that:a story of single combat that demoralizes the losing side. The gigantic Goliath, with his brass helmet,coat of mail,and ornate greaves, is described as the Philistine “champion” who comes forth to challenge the Israelites to send forth a man to fight him; the proposition being that whoever loses, his people will become the slaves of the other side. Before going out to meet Goliath, David—an unknown volunteer commoner —is given King Saul’s own decorative armor, although he declines to wear it. When he kills Goliath, the Philistines regard this as such a terrible sign that they flee and are pursued and slaughtered.
(Wolfe 2008, 96-97)
And it didn’t have to be that personal for them to wave the wand and make it disappear. Look at what they did with John Glenn‘s wife, Annie. Annie was a good looking and highly capable woman, but she also had what was referred to as a “slight speech impediment” or “a hesitation in her speech.” The truth was that she had a terrific stutter, the classic kind, the kind in which you get hung up on a syllable until you either force it out or run out of breath. Annie was game about it, and she would hang in there until she said what she wanted to say, but it was a real disability—everywhere except in Life magazine. In Life magazine there were going to be no ferocious stammering jackhammer stutters on the homefront.
(Wolfe 2008, 126)
What some of the other five found eccentric in Carpenter was what Glenn (and the doctors) found interesting. Scott was about the only one you could sit down with and talk about the broader and more philosophical sides of Project Mercury and space exploration. Scott was the only one with a touch of the poet about him, in the sense that the idea of going into space stirred his imagination. He would even go out at night and prop a telescope up on top of his car on a tripod and just stargaze and let himself drift into the most profound speculation of astronomy:What is my place in the cosmos?
Just try to imagine Grissom doing that! If Gus had a telescope, he might use the small end of it to try to whack a turkey joint out of the maw of the Disposall if the thing was stuck, but that would be the end of that. Gus and Deke were the duo at the other end of the spectrum. The main thing was to ride the bird up there into space and get the job done and get back, and let’s hold the Mickey Mouse down to a minimum.
Shepard and Wally Schirra were paired somewhere in between. It was not that they were inseparable pals or even buddies, however. Shepard had no intimates, so far as anyone knew, and Schirra probably spent as much time wondering what made Shepard tick as the rest of them did. It was just that they came into the astronaut corps with similar backgrounds. There was no particular advantage to forming a clique in this sevenman corps, because only one man could win the competition, i.e., get the first flight,and it wasn’t a voting situation, in any case. Nevertheless, if any such situation came up, Al and Wally would probably tend to side with Deke and Gus… As for Gordon Cooper, he seemed to be regarded as the odd man out. One got the impression that he was not in the running. As far as Gordo himself was concerned, however, he sided with Gus and Deke and Al and Wally on most of the pertinent questions, from the business of medical experiments to life after hours.
(Wolfe 2008, 139)
In the eyes of the engineers assigned to Project Mercury the training of the astronauts would be the easy task on the list. Naturally you needed a man with the courage to ride on top of a rocket, and you were grateful that such men existed. Nevertheless, their training was not a very complicated business. The astronaut would have little to do in a Mercury flight except stand the strain, and the engineers had devised what psychologists referred to as “a graded series of exposures” to take care of that. No, the difficult, the challenging, the dramatic, the pioneering part of space flight,as the engineers saw it, was the technology.
(Wolfe 2008, 141)
The difference between pilot and passenger in any flying craft came down to one point:control. The boys were able to present some practical, workmanlike arguments on this score. Even if an astronaut were to be a redundant component, an observer and repairman, he should be able to override any of the Mercury vehicle’s automatic systems manually, if only to correct malfunctions. So went the argument. But there was another argument that could not be put into so many words, since one was forbidden to state the premise itself: the right stuff.
(Wolfe 2008, 147-148)
Chimpanzees were chosen as much for their intelligence as their physiological similarity to humans. They could be trained to do fairly complex manual tasks, on cue, particularly if one got hold of them when they were young. Once they were trained to do the tasks on the ground, it would be possible to give them the cues to do the same tasks during a space flight and see if the weightless condition impeded them. Early in the game the vets decided that rewards, mere positive reinforcement, would not be sufficient for the job at hand. The only sure-fire training technique was operant conditioning. The principle here was the avoidance of pain. Or, to put it another way, if the ape didn’t do the job right, he was punished with electric shocks in the soles of his feet.
The Holloman veterinarians, like most veterinarians, were compassionate men who were interested in relieving pain in animals and not in inflicting it upon them. But this was war! The chimpanzee program was an essential part of the battle for the high ground! It was no time for halfway measures! Ascongressmen told you every day, national survival was at stake! The veterinarians’ brief was to get the job done with the utmost speed and efficacy. There were several ways of training animals, but only operant conditioning, based on concepts developed by B. F. Skinner, seemed anywhere near foolproof. In any case, the “psychomotor stimulus plates” were attached to the beasts’ feet and they were strapped into chairs, and the process began… And when theapes did well, you gave them hugs and nuzzles, to be sure, first taking the precaution of making certain they weren’t in a mood to bite your goddamned nose off.
(Wolfe 2008, 154-155)
At that, Walker’s place looked like a little bit of heaven compared to Bob White‘s. But then, on the surface, Walker and White were different in every respect. White, who was a major, was the Air Force’s prime pilot for the X-15 project. He was the eternally correct and reserved Air Force blue-suiter. He didn’t drink. He exercised like a college athlete in training. He was religious. He was an usher in the Roman Catholic chapel of the base and never, but never, missed Mass. He was slender, black-haired, handsome, intelligent—even cultivated, if the truth were known. And he was terribly serious. He was not a beer-call fighter jock. Not many people picked out Bob White to just shoot the breeze with. White and his family lived on the base itself at 116 Thirteenth Street in a miserable grid of military housing plots known as the Wherry housing section. Or it had been known as Wherry at the outset. By 1960 it was usually referred to as Weary housing. Children grew up there thinking that Weary housing was the real name. Parked out front of White’s place was an unpainted Model A Ford. The Air Force, being the newest branch of the service, was strong on instant tradition. This old junker, the Ford, was bestowed, as an ironic sculpture of the Right Stuff, upon whomever was the number-one Air Force test pilot at Edwards. Scott Crossfield, the prime pilot for the manufacturer, North American, had completed the first phase of testing the X-15, checking out the power system and basic aerodynamics. White and Walker had been chosen to push the rocket plane to its outer limits, which were envisioned as speeds in excess of Mach 6, or about 4,000 miles per hour, and, more important, an altitude of 280,000 feet. Just where “space” began was a matter of definition that had never been fully resolved. But fifty miles up was generally accepted as the boundary line. There was very little atmosphere left at that altitude; in fact, once a ship reached 100,000 feet, there was not enough air remaining to provide aerodynamics. The X-15’s target of 280,000 feet was 53 miles up.
(Wolfe 2008, 158-159)
It was not the ultimate fiasco, however. The ultimate fiasco came later in the year when NASA put on a test at Cape Canaveral designed to show all the politicians that the Mercury capsule-and-rocket system was now almost ready for manned flight. They flew five hundred VIPs, including many congressmen and prominent Democrats, down to the Cape for the big event. The rocket, the Redstone, was not powerful enough to place the capsule into orbit, but it was supposed to take it up more than one hundred miles, fifty miles above the earth’s atmosphere, and then it would re-enter the atmosphere and splash down in the Atlantic by parachute about three hundred miles from the Cape, near Bermuda. Everything except an astronaut was on the launch pad. The dignitaries were all seated in grandstands, and the countdown was intoned over the public-address system:”Nine… eight… seven… six…” and so forth, and their “We have ignition!”… and the mighty belch of flames bursts out of the rocket in a tremendous show of power… The mighty white shaft rumbles and seems to bestir itself—and then seems to change its mind, its computerized central nervous system, about the whole thing, because the flames suddenly cut off, and the rocket settles back down on the pad, and there’s a little pop. Acap on the tip of the rocket comes off. It goes shooting up in the air, a tiny little thing with a needle nose. In fact, it’s the capsule’s escape tower. As the great crowd watches, stone silent and befuddled, it goes up to about 4,000 feet and descends under a parachute. It looks like a little party favor. It lands about four hundred yards away from the rocket on the torpid banks of the Banana River. Five hundred VIPs had come all the way to Florida, to this goddamned Low Rent sandspit, where bugs you couldn’t even see invaded your motel room and bit your ankles until they ran red onto the acrylic shag carpet—all the way to this rock-beach boondock they had come, to see the fires of Armageddon and hear the earth shake with the thunder—and instead they get this… this pop… and a cork pops out of a bottle of Spumante. It was the original Project Vanguard fiasco all over again, except that it was worse in a way. At least with Vanguard, back in December of 1957, the folks got lots of flames and explosion. It at least looked halfway like a catastrophe. Besides that, it was very early in the game, in the contest for the heavens. But this —it was ridiculous! It was pathetic!
(Wolfe 2008, 164-165)
Joe Walker was feeling good. InAugust he had pushed the X-15 just about as fast as the Little Engine could take it, to a new world speed record of Mach 3.31, or 2,196 miles per hour. After he landed it on Rogers Lake, he cut loose with a cowboy yell that startled everyone on the radio circuit: “Yippeeeee!” That was Joe Walker. A week later Bob White went up in the X15 and set a new altitude record of 136,500 feet, or slightly more than twenty-five miles. It had been a perfect flight. It was as much as you could expect from the Little Engine. The conditions had been almost precisely the conditions of spaceflight. Hetook the ship up in a ballistic arc, the same sort of arc the Mercury Redstone vehicle was supposed to go on… someday…He experienced five g’s during the rocket thrust on the way up. An astronaut in Mercury was supposed to experience six. He was weightless for two minutes as he came up over the top of the arc. An astronaut was supposed to be weightless for five minutes. At 136,500 feet the air was so thin, White had no aerodynamic control a tall. It was absolutely silent up there. He could see for hundreds of miles, from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
It was much like the Mercury flights were supposed to be—except that Bob White was a pilot from beginning to end! He was in control! He took the ship up and he brought it back down through the heavy atmosphere and he landed it at Edwards! He didn’t splash down in the water like a monkey in a bucket! Bob White’s picture wound up on the cover of Life. There was Justice, there was Logic, in the universe, after all. Bob White on the cover of Life! For a solid year Life had been the fraternity bulletin for the Mercury astronauts. But now even Henry Luce and that bunch had woken up to the truth. Perhaps they had been betting on the wrong horses! Right? Walker and White and Crossfield could afford a little jealousy now… toward one another for a change. People from the TV showThis Is Your Life had turned up at Edwards and were talking to everybody they could find who knew Joe Walker. This was one of the most popular shows on television, and it was run like a surprise party; the subject, in this case Walker, didn’t learn about it until the moment of the show itself, after a biography of him had been put together on film. Scott Crossfield had a book contract, to write his autobiography,and Time-Life was talking to Bob White about a contract like the astronauts’.
(Wolfe 2008, 167-168)
One had only to imagine it… and it was easy to imagine by late 1960. All of them, astronauts, administrators, engineers, technicians, were suddenly in such trouble that a wagon-train phase began. Everyone, from top to bottom, began pulling together like pioneers besieged in the pass. It was now of supreme importance to push the Mercury-Redstone program forward before the new President and his science advisor, Wiesner, had time to go to work on NASA. The frantic hope was to complete some tests that would bring the program so close to the first manned flight that Kennedy could hardly afford to dismantle Project Mercury without letting them have at least one try. So everyone rode hell-for-leather for the top of the next hill, and never mind the ordinary precautions. The number of unmanned tests was cut down drastically. Tests were scheduled one on top of the other, so that the first manned flight might be scheduled within three months. They were ready to try things they would never have thought of doing before. Rather than prepare a new rocket for the next test, they used the one that had been left on the pad after the Popped Cork fiasco. After all, it hadn’t blown up; it had merely refused to leave the ground.
(Wolfe 2008, 170-171)
On January 19, the day before Kennedy’s inauguration, Gilruth again convened the seven of them in the astronaut office. He said that what he was about to tell them must be kept in strictest confidence. As they all knew, he said, the original plan had been to select the pilot for the first flight on the very eve of the flight itself. But he had thought better of that, because it now seemed clear that the prime pilot should have maximum access to the procedures trainer and other teaming facilities during the final weeks before the flight. So a decision had been made as to who was to be the prime pilot and as to which two men would be the backup pilots for the first flight. In due course, the press would be given the names of all three men, but the fact that the prime pilot had already been chosen would not be revealed. The press and the public would be told only that it would be one of these three men. All three men would go through the same training, and it would seem that the original plan was being adhered to, and the prime pilot would be spared the public pressure that would otherwise bear down on him.
This had been a very difficult decision, he said, because all seven of them had worked with such dedication, and he knew that any of them would make a capable pilot for the first flight. But it had been necessary to come to a decision. And the decision was that the prime pilot would be… Alan Shepard. The backup pilots would be JohnGlenn and Gus Grissom
The words hit Glenn like a ray. The cause, effect, and outrageous results thereof came to him in a flash, and he was stunned. Al was staring at the floor. Then Al looked up at him and the rest of them with his eyes gleaming, resisting the temptation to break into a grin of triumph. Yet Al had triumphed! It was unbelievable, and yet it was really happening. Glenn knew what he had to do and he made himself do it. He made himself smile the earnest-looking smile of the runner-up and congratulate Al and shake his hand. Now the other five were doing the same thing, coming up to Aland smiling earnest smiles and shaking his hand. It was a shocking thing, and yet it had happened—Glenn was absolutely sure of it. To get around the agony of having to designate someone to sit up on top of the first rocket —a peer vote! After he, Glenn, had spent twenty-one months doing everything humanly possible to impress Gilruth and the rest of the brass, it had been turned into a popularity contest among the boys.
(Wolfe 2008, 172-173)
The white-smock humans zapped the apes through their workouts right up to the last. On January 30, on the eve of the flight, they made the final selection. Originally the first astronaut was to have been chosen at this same stage. They chose a male chimpanzee as the prime flier and a female as the backup. The Air Force had bought the male from a supplier in the Cameroons, West Africa, eighteen months ago, when he was about two years old. All this time the animals had been known by numbers. He was test subject Number 61. On the day of the flight, however, his name was announced to the press as Ham. Ham was an acronym for Holloman Aerospace Medical Center.
(Wolfe 2008, 175)
The stresses the ape was reacting to were probably of quite another sort. Here he was, back in the compound where they had zapped him through his drills for a solid month. Just two years ago he had been captured in the jungles ofAfrica, separated fromhis mother, shipped in a cage to a goddamned desert in New Mexico, kept prisoner, prodded and shocked by a bunch of humans in whitesmocks, and here he was, back in a compound where they had been zapping himthrough their fucking drills forasolid month, and suddenly there was a whole new mob of humans on hand! Even worse than the white smocks! Louder! Crazier! Totally out of their gourds! Yammering, roaring, brawling, exploding lights beside their bug-eyed skulls! Suppose they threw him to theseassholes! Fuck this—
At some point in the madhouse scene out back of Hangar S, a photograph was taken in which Hamwas either grinning or had on a grimace that looked like a grin in the picture. Naturally, this was the picture that went out over the wire services and was printed in newspapers throughout America. Such was the response of the happy chimpanzee to being the first ape in outer space… A fat happy grin… Such was the perfection with which the Proper Gent observed the proprieties.
(Wolfe 2008, 178-179)
John Glenn found himself in a ridiculous situation. It was nothing less than a charade. He had to pretend to be in the running for the first flight—and then he would read in the newspapers that he was the front runner. Since he had always been the fair-haired boy of the seven, that was the way it kept coming out. He and Gus Grissom had to tag along with Shepard through the training grind to keep up the fiction that the decision had not yet been made. In fact, Shepard was now the king—and Al knew how to act like the king, His Majesty the Prime Pilot—and Glenn was just a spear carrier.
Yet the charade, which Gilruth himself insisted on, also offered Glenn one last chance. No more than a handful of people knew that Shepard had been chosen for the first flight. Therefore, it was not too late to change the decision, to rectify what Glenn viewed as the incredible and outrageous business of the peer vote. But if this meant going over someone’s head in one way or another… well, in the military it was a grave error, a serious breach of all that was holy, to go over the head of a superior unless (1) it was critical situation and you were in the right hand (2) your brashmove worked (i.e., those at the top backed you up). On the other hand, there was nothing in the Presbyterian faith, another code Glenn knew very well, that said you had to stand around shy and obedient while the Pharisees waffled and oscillated, making imaginary snowballs. And was not NASA a civilian agency? (God knew it was not run like the Marines.) Glenn seemed to favor the Presbyterian course. He began talking to people in the hierarchy,asking what they thought of the decision.
He did not argue that he should be the one who was chosen, or not in so many words. He argued that the choice could not be made from a narrow perspective. America’s first astronaut would not be merely a test pilot with a mission to carry out; he would be a historic representative ofAmerica, and his character would be viewed in that light. If he did not measure up to that test, it would be unfortunate not only for the space program but for the nation.
(Wolfe 2008, 180-181)
All three of them were taking part, but naturally Shepard, as prime pilot (no other word was used now), had precedence. And he took precedence. The little group in Hangar S now saw Al in both his varieties…and both were king, both the Icy Commander and Smilin’ Al. Usually he left the Icy Commander back in Langley and brought only Smilin’ Al to the Cape. But now he had both installed at the Cape. As the pressure built up, Al set a standard of coolness and competence that would be hard to top. In the medical examinations, in the heat-chamber sessions, in the altitude-chamber runs, he was as calm as ever. By now the White House had become extremely jittery—fearing what the debacle of a Dead Astronaut would do to American prestige— and so some dress rehearsals were conducted on the centrifuge at Johnsville, with Al and his two charade hands, Glenn and Grissom, taking part, and Al was imperturbable. Likewise, in the eleventh-hour simulations atop the rocket at the Cape. Al showed only one sign of stress: the cycles—Smilin’ Al/Icy Commander—nowcame one on top of the other, in the same place, and alternated so suddenly that the people around him couldn’t keep track. They learned a little more about the mysterious Al Shepard here in the eleventh hour. Smilin’ Al was a man who wanted very much to be liked, even loved, by those around him. He wanted not just their respect but also their affection. Now, inApril, on the eve of the great adventure, Smilin’ Al was more jovial and convivial than ever. He did his José Jiménez routine. His great grin spread wider and his great beer-call eyes beamed brighter than ever before. Smilin’ Al was crazy about a comedy routine that had been developed by a comedian named Bill Dana. It concerned the CowardlyAstronaut and was a great hit. Dana portrayed the Cowardly Astronaut as a stupid immigrant Mexican named Jose Jimenez, whose tongue wrapped around the English language like a taco. The idea was to interviewAstronaut Jimenezlike a news broadcaster.
(Wolfe 2008, 186)
The omnipotent Integral! NASA had really believed—and the astronauts had really believed—that somehow, in the religious surge of the mission, Shepard’s flight would be the first. But there was no putting one over on the Integral, was there! It was as if the Soviets’ Chief Designer, that invisible genius, was toying with them. Back in October 1957, just four months before the United States was supposed to launch the world’s first artificial earth satellite, the Chief Designer had launched Sputnik 1. In January 1959, just two months before NASA was scheduled to put the first artificial satellite into orbit around the sun, the Chief Designer launched Mechta 1 and did just that. But this one, Vostok 1, in April 1961, had been his pièce de résistance. Given the huge booster rockets at his disposal, he seemed to be able to play these little games with his adversaries at will. There was the eerie feeling that he would continue to let NASA struggle furiously to catch up—and then launch some startling new demonstration of just how far ahead he really was.
(Wolfe 2008, 188)
What must be going through the man’s mind? Him and his poor wife… Then the radio announcer would tell how Shepard’s wife, Louise, was following the countdown over television inside their home in Virginia Beach, Virginia. What a state the poor woman must be in! And so forth and so on. Brave lad! He hasn’t resigned yet!
As for Shepard, what was going through his mind at that moment, and through much of his body, from his brain to his pelvic saddle, was a steadily increasing desire to urinate. It was no joke. He had been through 120 complete simulations of his flight, simulations that included the smallest details anyone could imagine: the early-morning wakeup by the official astronaut physician, Dr. William Douglas, the physical exam, the attaching of all the biosensors, the slipping of the thermometer tube up the rectum, the putting on of the suit, the hooking up of the oxygen tube and the communications lead, the ride out to the launch pad, the insertion, as it was known, into the capsule, the closing of the hatch, the works. They even went through the process of sucking the air out of the capsule with a hose and pressurizing the interior with pure oxygen. Then Shepard would go through yet more simulated rides and aborts, using the capsule itself as if it was a procedures trainer.
(Wolfe 2008, 191-192)
The problem was, there was nothing to urinate into. Since the flight would last only fifteen minutes, it had never occurred to anybody to include a urine receptacle. Some of the simulations had dragged on for so long the astronauts had ended up urinating in their pressure suits. It had been the only thing to do, short of spending hours removing the man from all his hookups and the capsule and the suit itself. The chief danger in introducing liquid into a pure-oxygen environment, such as that of the capsule and the pressure suit, was of causing an electrical short circuit that might start a fire. Luckily, the only wires that urine was likely to come in contact with inside the pressure suit were the low voltage leads to the biomedical sensors, and the procedure had seemed safe enough. There was even a sponge mechanism inside the suit for removing excess moisture, which ordinarily would come in the form of perspiration. Nevertheless, no one had seriously studied the possibility that on the day itself, the day of the first American manned space flight, the astronaut might end up on top of the rocket and stuffed into the capsule with his legs practically immobile for more than four hours…with his bladder to answer to. There was no way the astronaut could simply urinate into the lining of the pressure suit and have it go unnoticed. The suit had its own cooling system, and the temperature was monitored by interior thermometers, which led to consoles, and in front of these consoles were some by now highly keyed-up technicians whose sole mission was to stare at the dials and account for every fluctuation. If a nice steaming subdermal river of 98.6 degrees was introduced into the system with no warning, the Freon flow would suddenly increase—Freon was the gas used to cool the suit—and, well, God knew what would result. Would they hold up the whole production? Terrific. Then the No. 1 astronaut could explain, over a radio transmitter, while the nation waited, while the Russians girded themselves for round 2 of the battle of the heavens, that he had just peed in his pressuresuit.
(Wolfe 2008, 195)
At T minus 2 minutes and 40 seconds there was another hold. Now Shepard could hear engineers in the blockhouse agonizing over the fuel pressure in the Redstone, which was running high. Hecould sense what would be coming next. They were going to talk themselves into resetting the pressure valve inside the booster engine manually. That would mean postponing the launch for another two days at least. Hecould see it coming! They were going to scrub the whole thing, lest they hold themselves accountable for his hide if something went wrong! This was not a job for Smilin’ Al. It was time for the Icy Commander to arrive and take charge. So he got on the circuit and put the glacial edge on his voice,as only he could do it,and he said:
“All right, I’m cooler than you are. Why don’t you fix your little problem… and light this candle.”
Light the candle! he says. The words of Chuck Yeager himself! The voice of the rocket ace! Oddly enough, it seemed to do the trick. Realizing the astronaut’s irritation, they began wrapping up the process and declaring their systems “go.”It was nearly 9:30 a.m. by the time the countdown entered its last minute. Shepard’s periscope began automatically retracting inside the capsule, and he remembered that he had put in the gray filter to cut out the sunlight. If he didn’t remove it, he wouldn’t be able to see any colors in flight. So he started moving his left hand toward the periscope, but his left forearm hit the abort handle. Shit! That was all he needed now! Fortunately, he had barely brushed it. The abort handle was the equivalent of the ejection seat cinch ring in an airplane. If the astronaut sensed some catastrophe that the automatic system has not picked up, he could turn the handle and the escape tower rocket would fire and pull the capsule free of the Redstone rocket and bring it down by parachute. That was all he needed—the world waits for the first American spaceman, and Shepard gives them an exhibition of a little man popping up a few thousand feet in a thimble and floating down by parachute… Hecould see it all in a flash… Another Popped Cork fiasco…The hell with changing the filter. He would look at the world in black and white. Who cared? Don’t fuck up. That was the main thing.
(Wolfe 2008, 200-201)
Next to Gagarin’s orbital flight, Shepard’s little mortar lob to Bermuda, with its mere five minutes of weightlessness, was no great accomplishment. But that didn’t matter. The flight had unfolded like a drama, the first drama of single combat in American history. Shepard had been the tiny underdog, sitting on top of an American rocket—and our rockets always blow up—challenging the omnipotent Soviet Integral. The fact that the entire thing had been televised, starting a good two hours before the lift-off, had generated the most feverish suspense. And then he had gone through with it. He let the light the fuse. He hadn’t resigned. He hadn’t even panicked. He handled himself perfectly. He was as great a daredevil’s Lindbergh, and he was purer: he did it all for his country. Here was a man…with the right stuff. No one spoke the phrase—but every man could feel the rays from that righteous aura and that primal force, the power of physical courage and manly honor.
(Wolfe 2008, 215)
Bob Gilruth’s status rose sharply, too.After a solid year of flak and grief, Gilruth had finally earned the eminence of riding in one of the limousines in Shepard’s triumphal motorcade through Washington. James E. Webb was sitting next to him, and they were looking out at the thousands of people who were smiling and crying and waving and cheering and taking pictures. “If it hadn’t worked,”said Webb, “they’d be asking for your head.” As it was, Gilruth and Mercury and NASA were, all at once, names that stood for American technological competence. (Our boys no longer botch it and our rockets don’t blow up.)
None of this was lost on the President. His opinion of NASA had now swung around 180 degrees. Webb was aware of that. Three weeks before, after Gagarin’s flight, when Kennedy had summoned Webb and Dryden to the White House, the President had been in a funk. He was convinced that the entire world was judging the United States and his leadership in terms of the space race with the Soviets. He was muttering, “If somebody can just tell me how to catch up. Let’s find somebody—anybody… There’s nothing more important.” He kept saying, “We’ve got to catch up.” Catching up became an obsession. Finally, Dryden told him that it looked hopeless to try to catch up with the mighty Integral in anything that involved flights in earth orbit. The one possibility was to start a program to put a man on the moon within the next ten years. It would require a crash effort on the scale of the Manhattan Project of the Second World War and would cost anywhere from twenty to forty billion dollars. Kennedy found the figure appalling. Less than a week later, of course, the Bay of Pigs debacle had occurred, and now his “new frontier”looked more like a retreat on all fronts. Shepard’s successful flight was the first hopeful note Kennedy had enjoyed since then. For the first time he had some confidence in NASA. And the tremendous public response to Shepard as the patriotic daredevil, challenging the Soviets in the heavens, gave Kennedy an inspiration.
(Wolfe 2008, 216)
Congress was not about to quibble over expenses. NASA was given a $1.7 billion budget for the next year, and that was merely the start. It was made clear that NASA could have practically as much as if wanted. Shepard’s flight had made quite a hit. An amazing period of “budgetless financing” began. It was astonishing. Suddenly money was in the air. Businessmen of all sorts were trying to bestow it directly upon Shepard. Within a few months Leo DeOrsey, who was still the boys’ unpaid business manager, had counted up half a million dollars’ worth of proposals from companies who wanted Shepard to endorse products. One congressman, Frank Boykin of Alabama, wanted the government to give Shepard a house. Shepard turned it all down, but it did make one stop and think.
(Wolfe 2008, 217-218)
And so much for Joe Walker and the True Brothers! It was all right there in that scene, the new simple truth. Grissom didn’t even feel angry. There was nothing that Joe Walker could say or do—and nothing that even Chuck Yeager himself could say or do—that would change the new order. The astronaut was now at the apex of the pyramid. The rocket pilots were already…the old guys, the eternal remember-whens… Oh, it didn’t even have to besaid! It was in the air, and everyone knew it. Hell, when they started flying jets and rocket planes at Muroc, somewhere there must have been the old guys, the bitter old bastards, the remember-whens, who could just fly the hell out of a propeller plane and were still insisting that that was what it was all about. Flying wasn’t a competition like baseball or football. No, in flying any major advance in technology could change the rules. The Mercury rocket-capsule system—the word “system” was now on everybody’s lips—was the new cutting edge. No, Gus had no need to get excited any more over Joe Walker or anybody else at Edwards.
Gus seemed like a pretty relaxed man all the way around. He would get a little irritated at the engineering sessions he sat in on during the last couple of weeks before the flight and would give them a few gus-gruff growls if they seemed to want to tinker with this and that at the last minute, but that seemed to be sheer eagerness to get on with the flight. There was even a bit of the old boondock Edwards broomstick-and-baling wire spirit about the whole thing. Just two nights before the flight it dawned on one of the doctors that they had never made provisions for a urine receptacle for Gus, to avoid the sort of thing Shepard had experienced. That was a hell of a note. They figured they could make do with an ordinary rubber condom for the receptacle. But what would hold it in place and keep it from coming off? Dee O’Hara, the nurse, helped out. She drove into Cocoa Beach and bought a panty girdle, and they rigged that up with the condom. The goddamned girdle gave you a hell of a tight grip on the groin, but Gus figured he could get by with it. All in all, he seemed pretty loose, a test pilot of the old school. He even had a foretaste of the mental atmosphere of the real thing, just as Shepard had. On July 19 he was inserted into the capsule, and the hatch was sealed, when the flight was canceled because of bad weather. The flight finally took place on July 21. Judging by his pulse rate and respiration, which was transmitted via his body sensors, Gus was more nervous than Shepard during the countdown. These rates, taken by themselves, didn’t mean a great deal, however, and no one would have thought twice about it except for what happened at the end of the flight. The flight itself was very nearly a duplicate of Shepard’s, except that Grissom’s capsule had a window, not just a periscope, giving him a much better view of the world, and he had a more sophisticated hand controller. His pulse stayed up around 150 throughout the five minutes he was weightless—Shepard’s pulse had never reached 140, not even during lift-off—and went up to 171 during the firing of the retro-rockets before the re-entry through the earth’s atmosphere. The informal consensus among the program’s doctors was that if an astronaut’s pulse rate went above 180, the mission should be aborted. The capsule splashed down almost precisely on target, just as Shepard’s had, within three miles of the recovery ship, the carrier Randolph. The capsule hit the water, then keeled over on one side, just as Shepard’s had, and took its own sweet time righting itself. Grissom thought he heard a gurgling noise inside the capsule—as had Shepard—and began looking for water seeping in, but didn’t see any. The recovery helicopter, designated Hunt Club 1, was over the capsule within less than two minutes. Grissom was still in the seat, resting on his back, as he had been at the outset of the flight, and the capsule was bobbing around in the water.
(Wolfe 2008, 223-224)
As the helicopter pilot, Lewis, looked down on the capsule, it shaped up as a routine retrieval, such as he and his co-pilot, Lieutenant John Reinhard, had practiced many times. Reinhard had a pole with a hook on it, like a shepherd’s crook, that he was going to slip through a loop at the neck of the capsule. The crook was attached to a cable. The helicopter could hoist up to 4,000 pounds in this fashion; the capsule weighed about 2,400 pounds. Lewis had swung out and was making a low pass toward the capsule when suddenly he saw the capsule’s side hatch go flying off into the water. But Grissomwasn’t supposed to blow the hatch until he told him he had hooked on! And Grissom—there was Grissom scrambling out of the hatch and plopping into the water without even looking up at him. Grissom was swimming like mad. Water was pouring into the capsule through the hatch and the damned thing was sinking! Lewis wasn’t worried about Grissom, because he had practiced water egress with the astronauts many times and he knew their pressure suits were more buoyant than any life preserver. They even seemed to enjoy playing around in the water in the suits. So he gunned the helicopter down to the level of the water to try to snare the capsule. By now only the neck of the thing is visible above the water. Reinhard goes to work with the shepherd’s crook, leaning out of the helicopter, desperately trying to hook on. He finally hooks on, as the capsule disappears under the water and starts sinking like a brick. Lewis is now down so low all three wheels of the helicopter are in the water. The helicopter is like a fat man squatting over a tree stump, trying to pull it out of the ground. Full of water, as it is, the capsule weighs 5,000 pounds, 1,000 over the helicopter’s capacity. Lewis already has a red-light warning of impending engine failure—so he signals for a second helicopter, which is already nearby, to pick up Grissom. He finally pulls the capsule up out of the water, but he can’t make the helicopter move forward toward the carrier. He’s just hanging there in the air like a hummingbird. Red lights are lighting up all over the panel. He’sabout to lose the ship as well as the capsule. So he cuts the capsule loose. It drops and disappears forever. The water is three miles deep at that point.
They turn away finally. Grissom is still in the water. He’s waving. He seems to be saying, “I’m okay.” The second helicopter is moving in to lower the horsecollar.
In fact, Gus’s waves were saying, “I’m drowning!—you bastards—I’m drowning!”
As soon as Gus scrambled out of the hatch, he had begun swimming for his life. The goddamned capsule’s going under! His suit caught momentarily on some sort of strap outside the capsule, probably leading to the dye canister. It was like a parachute!—it would pull him under!—He’d drown! The drowning man… No question about it… By this point he was neither an astronaut nor a pilot. He was the drowning man. Get away from the death capsule!—that was the idea. Then he calmed down a little. He was swimming around in the ocean under the roar of the helicopter blades. He wasn’t sinking, after all. The pressure suit kept him bobbing in the water, as high as his armpits. He looked up. The horse collar was hanging out of the helicopter. The horse collar that gets him out of this! But they were pulling away from him!—they were going to the capsule! He could see the man named Reinhard leaning out of the helicopter trying to snag the loop of the capsule. Only the neck of the capsule was out of the water. Hestarted swimming back to the capsule. It was hard swimming in the pressure suit, but it kept him up. He bobbed right up to his armpits when he stopped swimming. Littleswells kept breaking over his head and he swallowed some water. He felt out of control. He was floundering around in the middle of the ocean. He looked up again and there was another helicopter. He kept waving and waving, but nobody seemed to pay any attention. And now he wasn’t bobbing up so high any more. The pressure suit was losing its buoyancy. It was getting heavier… starting to drag him down… The suit had a rubber diaphragm that rolled up around his neck like a turtleneck sweater to keep the water from seeping down inside the suit. It didn’t fit tight enough…air was escaping… No!—it was the oxygen inlet valve! He had completely forgotten! The valve allowed oxygen into his suit while he was in flight. He had unhooked the tube but forgotten to close the valve. The oxygen was bubbling out down there somewhere… the suit was becoming dead weight, pulling him down… Hereached down and closed the valve underwater… But now his head kept going under and he had to fight to get to the surface and then the swells broke over his head and he swallowed more water and he’d look up at the helicopters and wave and they’d just wave back—the bastards!—how could they not know! In the window of one of the helicopters was a man with a camera, merrily taking pictures of him—they were waving and taking snapshots! The stupid bastards! They were going crazy over the goddamned capsule and he was drowning before their very eyes… He kept going under. He’d fight his way back up and swallow some more water and wave. But that drove him back under. The suit—he seemed to be packed in two hundred pounds of wet clay… The dimes!—and all that other shit! Christ, the dimesand those goddamned trinkets! Down therein his knee pocket… He’d had the bright idea of carrying a hundred one-dollar bills on the flight as souvenirs, but he didn’t have a spare hundred dollars to his name—so he decided on two rolls of fifty dimeseach—and he had put in three one-dollar bills for good measure and a whole bunch of little models of the capsule—and now this big junkheap of travel sentiment stuffed in his knee pocket was taking him under… Dimes!… Silver deadweight!
(Wolfe 2008, 225-227)
A couple of hours later, at the formal debriefing on Grand Bahama Island, Grissom was much calmer, although he looked exhausted and drawn. He was grim. He was a very unhappy man. His pulse was still up to 90. Normally, at rest, it was 68 or 69. He kept saying, “I didn’t touch it, I was just lying there—and it blew.”
According to Gus, here was what happened. Once he knew the helicopters were nearby, he felt secure in the capsule and therefore asked for five minutes to finish getting unhooked and record his switch positions. While the capsule was still descending under the parachute, he had opened his face plate and disconnected the visor seal hose. Once the capsule was in the water, he disconnected the oxygen hose to his helmet, unfastened the helmet from the pressure suit, undid his chest strap, lap belt, shoulder harness, and knee straps, disconnected the wire leading to the biomedical sensors, and rolled the rubber neck dam up around his neck. His pressure suit was still attached to the capsule by the oxygen inlet hose, which he needed for cooling the suit, and his helmet still had its radio wiring leads hooked up; but all he had to do was take the helmet off and he would be free of the wires. Then—all in keeping with the checklist—he removed the emergency knife that was clamped onto the hatch and put it in the survival kit, which was a canvas bag about two feet long containing an inflatable life raft, shark repellant, a desalination rig, food, a signal light, and so on. Before leaving the capsule via the hatch, as Gus recounted it, he had one more chore to perform. He was supposed to take out a chart and a grease pencil and mark the positions of all the switches on the instrument panel. Since he still had on his pressure-suit gloves, making it hard to grip the grease pencil, this took him three or four minutes. Then he armed the explosive hatch by removing the cover from the detonator, which was a button about three inches in diameter, and removed the safety pin, which was like the safety catch on a revolver. Once the cover and pin were removed, five pounds of pressure on the detonator button would blow the bolts and propel the hatch out into the water. Now he radioed Lewis in the helicopter to come in and hook on. He unhooked the oxygen hose to his pressure suit and settled back on these at and waited for Lewis to tell him he had hooked on to the capsule. Once he got the word from Lewis, he would blow the hatch. While he was lying there, he said, he started wondering if there were some way he could retrieve the knife from the survival kit before he blew the hatch and left the capsule. He figured it would make a terrific souvenir. This thought was running idly through his mind, he said, when he heard a dull thud. He knew immediately that it was the hatch blowing. In the next instant he was looking straight out the hatchway at the brilliant blue sky over the ocean, and water was pouring in. There was not even time to grapple for the survival kit. He took his helmet off and grabbed the right side of the instrument panel and thrust his head through the hatchway and wriggled out.
“I had the cap off and the safety pin out,” Gus said, “but I don’t think that I hit the button. The capsule was rocking around a little, but there weren’t any loose items in the capsule, so I don’t see how could have hit it, but possibly I did.”
(Wolfe 2008, 229-230)
Absolutely befuddled, John calls Annie. Annie is inside their house in Arlington with a few of the wives, a few friends, and Loudon Wainwright, the writer from Life, watching the countdown and, finally, the cancellation on television. Outside is the bedlam of the reporters baying for scraps of information about the ordeal of Annie Glenn—and resenting the fact that Life has exclusive access to the poignant drama. A few blocks away, on a quaint Arlington side street, in a limousine, waits Lyndon Johnson, Vice-President of the United States. Kennedy had appointed Johnson his special overseer for the space program. It was the sort of meaningless job that Presidents give Vice-Presidents, but it had a symbolic significance now that Kennedy was presenting manned space flight as the very vanguard of his New Frontier (version number two). Johnson, like many men who have had the job of Vice-president before him, has begun suffering from publicity deprivation. He decides he wants to go inside the Glenn household and console Annie Glenn over the ordeal, the excruciating pressure of the five-hour wait and the frustrating cancellation. To make this sympathy call all the more memorable, Johnson decides it would be nice if he brought in NBCTV, CBS-TV, and ABC-TV along with him, in the form of a pool crew that will feed the touching scene to all three networks and out to the millions. The only rub —the only rub, to Johnson’s way of thinking—is that he wants the Life reporter, Wainwright, to get out of the house, because his presence will antagonize the rest of the print reporters who can’t get in, and they will not think kindly of the Vice-President.
What he does not realize is that the only ordeal that Annie Glenn has been going through has been over the possibility that she was going to have to step outside at some point and spend sixty seconds or so stammering a few phrases. And now… various functionaries and secret-service personnel are calling on the telephone and banging on the door to inform her that the VicePresident is already in Arlington, in a White House limousine, waiting to pull up and charge in and pour ten minutes of hideous Texas soul all over her on nationwide TV. Short of the rocket blowing up under John, this is the worst thing she can imagine occurring in the entire American space program. At first Annie is trying to deal with it gracefully by saying that she can’t possibly ask Life to leave, not only because of the contract, but because of their good personal relationship. Wainwright, being no fool, doesn’t particularly care to get caught in the middle like this and so he offers to bow out, to leave. But Annie is not about to give up her Life shield at this point. Her mind is made up. She’s getting angry. She tells Wainwright: “You’re not leaving this house!” Her anger does wonders for her stutter. It flattens it right out temporarily. She’s practically ordering him to stay. Annie’s stutter often makes people underestimate her, and Johnson’s people didn’t realize that she was a Presbyterian pioneer wife living in full vitality in the twentieth century. She could deal with any five of them with just a few amps from the wrath of God when she was angry. Finally, they’re getting the picture. She’s too much for them. So they start trying to bend arms at NASA to get someone to order her to play ball. But it has to be done very rapidly. Johnson is sitting out there a few blocks away in his limousine, fuming and swearing and making life hell for everyone within earshot, wondering, in so many words, why the fuck there isn’t anybody on his staffwho can dealwith a housewife, f’r chrissake,and his staff is leaning on NASA,and NASA is bucking the problem up the chain, until in a matter of minutes it’sat the top,and the delegation is trooping into Hangar S to confront theastronaut himself.
So there’s John, with half his mesh underlining hanging off his body and biosensor wires sprouting from out of his thoracic cage… there’s John, covered with sweat, drawn, deflated, beginning to feel very tired after waiting for five hours for a hundred tons of liquid oxygen and RP-1 kerosene to explode under his back… and the hierarchy ofNASAhas one thing on its mind: keeping Lyndon Johnson happy. So John puts in the call to Annie, and he tells her: “Look, if you don’t want the Vice-President or the TV networks or anybody else to come into the house, then that’s it as far as I’m concerned, they are not coming in—and I will back you up all the way, one hundred percent, and you tell them that. I don’t want Johnson or any of the rest of them to put so much as one toe inside our house!”
That was all that Annie needed, and she simply became a wall. She wouldn’t even discuss the matter any further, and there was no question any longer about Johnson getting in. Johnson, of course, was furious. You could hear him bellowing and yelling over half of Arlington, Virginia. He was talking about his aides. Pansies! Cows! Gladiolas! Webb could scarcely believe what was going on. The astronaut and his wife had shut the door in the Vice-President’s face. Webb had a few words with Glenn. Glenn wouldn’t back down an inch. He indicated that Webb was way out of line.
(Wolfe 2008, 249-251)
He was over the middle of the Pacific, about halfway betweenAustralia and Mexico, when the sun began to come up behind him. This was just thirty-five minutes after the sun went down. Since he was traveling backward, he couldn’t see the sunrise through the window. He had to use the periscope. First he could see the blue band at the horizon becoming brighter and brighter. Then the sun itself began to slide up over the edge. It was a brilliant red—not terribly different from what he had seen at sunrise on earth, except that it was rising faster and its outlines were sharper.
“It’s blinding through the scope on clear,” said Glenn. “I’m going to the dark filter to watch it come on up.”
And then—needles! A tremendous layer of them—Air Force communications experiment that went amok…Thousands of tiny needles gleaming in the sun outside the capsule… But they couldn’t be needles, because they were luminescent—they were like snowflakes—
“This is Friendship 7,” he said. “I’ll try to describe what I’m in here. I am in a big mass of some very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they’re luminescent. I never saw anything like it. They’re round, a little. They’re coming by the capsule, and they look like little stars. A whole shower of them coming by. They swirl around the capsule and go in front of the window and they’re all brilliantly lighted. They probably average maybe seven or eight feet apart, but I can see the mall down below me also.”
“Roger, Friendship 7.” This was the capcom on Canton Island out in the Pacific. “Can you hear any impact with the capsule? Over.”
“Negative, negative. They’re very slow. They’re not going away from me more than maybe three or four miles per hour.”
They swirled about his capsule like tiny weightless diamonds, little bijoux—no, they were more like fireflies. They had that lazy but erratic motion, and when he focused on one it would seem to be lit up, but the light would go out and he would lose track of it, and then it would light up again. That was like fireflies, too. There used to be thousands of fireflies in the summers, when he was growing up. These things were like fireflies, but they obviously couldn’t be any sort of organism… unless all the astronomers and all the satellite recording mechanisms had been fundamentally wrong… They were undoubtedly particles of some sort, particles that caught the sunlight at a certain angle. They were beautiful, but were they coming from the capsule? That could mean trouble. They must have been coming from the capsule, because they traveled along with him, in the same trajectory, at the same speed. But wait a minute. Some of them were far off, far below… there might be an entire field of them… a minute cosmos… something never seen before! And yet the capcom on Canton Island didn’t seem particularly interested. And then he sailed out of range of Canton and would have to wait to be picked up by the capcom at Guaymas, on the west coast of Mexico. And when the Guaymas capcom picked him up, he didn’t seem to know what he was talking about.
“This is Friendship 7,” said Glenn. “Just as the sun came up, there were some brilliantly lighted particles that looked luminous that were swirling around the capsule. I don’t have any in sight right now. I did have a couple just a moment ago, when I made the transmission over to you. Over.”
“Roger, Friendship 7.”
And that was it. “Roger, Friendship 7.” Silence. They didn’t particularly care.
(Wolfe 2008, 260-261)
“Friendship 7,” said the capcom. “We have been reading an indication on the ground of segment 5—1, which is Landing Bag Deploy. We suspect this is an erroneous signal. However, Cape would like you to check this by putting the landing-bag switch in auto position, and seeing if you get a light. Do you concur with this? Over.”
It slowly dawned on him… Have been reading… For how long?… Quite a little surprise.And they hadn’t told him! They’d held it back! I am a pilot and they refuse to tell me things they know about the condition of the craft! The insult was worse than the danger! If the landing bag had deployed—and there was no way he could look out and see it, not even with the periscope, because it would be directly behind him—if it had deployed, then the heat shield must be loose and might come off during there-entry. If the heat shield came off, he would burn up inside the capsule like a steak. If he put the landing-bag switch in the automatic control position, then a green light should come on if the bag was deployed. Then he would know. Slowly it dawned! … That was why they kept asking him if the switch were in the off position!—they didn’t want him to learn the awful truth too quickly! Might as well let him complete his three orbits—then we’ll let him find out about the bad news!
On top of that, they now wanted him to fool around with the switch. That’s stupid! It might very well be that the bag had not deployed but there was an electrical malfunction somewhere in the circuit and fooling with the automatic switch might then cause it to deploy. But he stopped short of saying anything. Presumably they had taken all that into account. There was no way he could say it without falling into the dread nervous chatter.
“Okay,” said Glenn. “If that’s what they recommend, we’ll go ahead and try it. Are you ready for it now?”
“Yes, when you’re ready.”
“Roger.”
He reached forward and flipped the switch. Well… this wash—
No light. Heimmediately switched it back to off.
“Negative,” he said. “In automatic position did not get a light and I’m back in off position now. Over.”
“Roger, that’s fine. In this case, we’ll go ahead, and the re-entry sequence will be normal.”
The retro-rockets would be fired over California, and by the time the retro-rockets brought him down out of his orbitand through the atmosphere, he would be over the Atlantic near Bermuda. That was the plan. Wally Sohirra was the capcom in California. Less than a minute before he was supposed to fire the retrorockets, by pushing a switch, he heard Wally saying: “John, leave your retropack on through your pass over Texas. Do you read?”
“Roger.”
But why? The retropack wrapped around the edges of the heat shield and held the retro-rockets. Once the rockets were fired, the retropack was supposed to be jettisoned. They were back to the heat shield again, with no explanation. But he had to concentrate on firing the retro-rockets.
Next to the launch this was the most dangerous part of the flight. If the capsule’s angle of attack was too shallow, you might skip off the top of the earth’s atmosphere and stay in orbit for days, until long after your oxygen had run out. You wouldn’t have any more rockets to slow you down. If the angle were too steep, the heat from the friction of going through the atmosphere would be so intense you would burn up inside the capsule, and a couple of minutes later the whole thing would disintegrate, heat shield or no heat shield. But the main thing was not to think about it in quite those terms. The field of consciousness is very small, said Saint-Exupéry. What do I do next? It was the moment of the test pilot at last. Oh, yes! I’ve been here before! And I am immune! I don’t get into corners I can’t get out of! One thing at a time! He could be a true flight test hero and try to line the capsule up all by himself by using the manual controls with the horizon as his reference—or he could make one more attempt to use the automatic controls. Please, dear God… don’t let me foul up! What would the Lord answer? (Try the automatic, you ninny.) He released and reset the gyros. He put the controls on automatic. The answer to your prayers, John! Now the dials gibed with what he saw out the window and through the periscope. The automatic controls worked perfectly in pitch and roll. The yaw was still off, so he corrected that with the manualcontrols. The capsule kept pivoting to the right and he kept nudging it back. The ALFA trainer! One thing at a time! It was just like the ALFA trainer… no sense of forward motion at all… As long as he concentrated on the instrument panel and didn’t look at the earth sliding by beneath him, he had no sense at all of going 17,500 miles an hour… or even five miles an hour… The humming little kitchen… He sat up in his chair squirting his hand thruster, with his eyes pinned on the dials… Real life, a crucial moment —against the eternal good beige setting of the simulation. One thing at a time!
(Wolfe 2008, 288-270)
Oh, pretty good. It wasn’t Yeager, but it wasn’t bad. He was inside of one and a half tons of non aerodynamic metal. He was a hundred thousand feet up, dropping toward the ocean like an enormous cannonball. The capsule had no aerodynamic qualities whatsoever at this altitude. It was rocking terribly. Out the window he could see a wild white contrail snaked out against the blackness of the sky. He was dropping at a thousand feet per second. The last critical moment of the flight was coming up. Either the parachute deployed and took hold or it didn’t. The rocking had intensified. The retropack! Part of the retropack must still be attached and the drag of it is trying to flip the capsule… Hecouldn’t wait any longer. The parachute was supposed to deploy automatically, but he couldn’t wait any longer. Rocking… He reached up to fire the parachute manually—but it fired on its own, automatically, first the drogue and then the main parachute. He swung under it in a huge arc. The heat was ferocious, but the chute held. It snapped him back into the seat. Through the window the sky was blue. It was the same day all over again. It was early in the afternoon on a sunny day out in the Atlantic near Bermuda. Even the landing-bag light was green. There was nothing even wrong with the landing bag. There had been nothing wrong with the heat shield. There was nothing wrong with his rate of descent, forty feet per second. He could hear the rescue ship chattering away over the radio. They were only twenty minutes away from where he would hit, only six miles. He was once again lying on his back in the human holster. Out the window the sky was no longer black. The capsule swayed under the parachute, and over this way he looked up and saw clouds and over that way blue sky. He was very, very hot. But he knew the feeling. All those endless hours in the heat chambers—it wouldn’t kill you. He was coming down into the water only 300 miles from where he started. It was the same day, merely five hours later. A balmy day out in the Atlantic near Bermuda. The sun had moved just seventy-five degrees in the sky. It was 2:45 in the afternoon. Nothing to do but get all these wires and hoses disconnected. He had done it. He began to let the thought loose in his mind. He must be very close to the water. The capsule hit the water. It drove him down into his seat again, on his back. It was quite a jolt. It was hot in here. Even with the suit fans still running, the heat was terrific. Over the radio they kept telling him not to try to leave the capsule. The rescue ship was almost there. They weren’t going to try the helicopter deal again, except in an emergency. He wasn’t about to attempt a water egress. He wasn’t about to hit the hatch detonator. The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to the dear Lord could not be clearer. He had done it.
(Wolfe 2008, 274-275)
Something quite extraordinary was building up. It was a wave and a half, and the other six and their wives were more surprised than anybody else. It was ironic. They had all assumed thatAl Shepard was the big winner. Al had won out in the competition for the first flight.Al had been invited to the White House to receive a medal, whereas Gus had gotten his about eight steps from the palmetto grass, because Al was the certified number one man in this thing and had taken the first flight. But even before John got back to the Cape from Grand Bahama Island, there was a note of worshipful swooning in the air that indicated that Al had not made the first flight, after all. He had merely made the first suborbital flight, which now looked like nothing at all. He was now more like Slick Goodlin to John’s Chuck Yeager. Slick Goodlin had, technically, made the first flight of the X-1. But it wasYeager who made the flight that counted, the flight in which they first tried to push the bird supersonic. As Slick Goodlin to John’s Chuck Yeager—what was Al supposed to do, cheer about it? And Betty Grissom—who never even got a parade down the poor dim dowdy main street of Mitchell, Indiana—was she supposed to be tickled pink about the Glenns, who were going to be paraded up and down every high road in the United States? But there was precious little time to brood. Once John’s plane touched down at Patrick on February 23, the wave became so big it simply carried everyone along with it. The fellows and the wives and the children were all out at Patrick, waiting for John’s plane, and the VicePresident was on hand, along with about two hundred reporters. Johnson was right up there at the head of the mob with Annie and the two children. He had gotten next to her at last. Johnson was right beside her now, out at Patrick, oozing protocol all over her and craning and straining his huge swollen head around, straining to get at John and pour Texas all over him. The plane arrives and John disembarks, a tremendous cheer goes up, a cry from the throat, from the diaphragm, from the solar plexus, and they bringAnnie and the two children forward… the holy icons… the Wife and the Children… the Solid Backing on the Home Front…and John is too much! He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handkerchief and dabs his eye, wipes away a tear! And some little guy fromNASAstretched out his hand and took the used handkerchief… so that it could be preserved in the Smithsonian! (With this handkerchiefAstronaut JohnH. Glenn, Jr., wiped away a tear upon being reunited with his wife after his historic earth-orbital flight.) From that moment on, Al and Gus were also-rans, minor leaguers. And they didn’t even have time to fume! The events, day by day, were becoming like something elemental, like a huge change in the weather, a shift in the templates, the Flood, the Last Day, the True Brother Entering Heaven…
(Wolfe 2008, 276-277)
Despite the tide of cheers and tears that had already started in Washington, none of them knew what to expect in New York. Like most military people, including those in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, they didn’t really consider NewYork part of the United States. It was like a free port, a stateless city, an international protectorate, Danzig in the Polish corridor, Beirut the crossroads of the Middle East, Trieste, Zurich, Macao, Hong Kong. Whatever ideals the military stood for, New York City did not. It was a foreign city full of a strange race of curiously tiny malformed gray people. And so forth and so on. What they saw when they got there bowled them over. The crowds were not only waiting in the airport, which was not surprising—a little publicity was all it took to get a mob of gawkers to an airport—but they were also lining the godforsaken highway into the city, through the borough of Queens, or whatever it was, out in the freezing cold in the most rancid broken-down industrial terrain you have ever seen, a decaying landscape that seemed to belong to another century—they were out there along the highway, anywhere they could squeeze in, and… they were crying!—crying as the black cars roared by!
People were crying, right out in the open, as soon as they laid eyes on John, and perhaps the rest of them, too. They were all swept up in the wave now. The wave was too enormous for fine distinctions. When they reached the city proper, Manhattan, and came in off the expressway, the FDR Drive, there were people hanging over the railings, twenty or thirty feet up above the ramp, and they were crying and waving little flags and pouring their hearts out.
And that was just the beginning. The parade started in lower Manhattan and headed up Broadway. Each astronaut was in an open limousine. John led the lineup, ofcourse, with Lyndon Johnson, Vice-President, in the seat beside him. It was cold as hell, seventeen degrees, but the streets were mobbed. There must have been millions of people out there, packed from the curbings clear back to the storefronts, and there were people hanging out of all the windows, particularly along lower Broadway, where the buildings were older and they could open the windows, and they were filling the air with shreds of paper, every piece of paper they could get their hands on.
Sometimes the pieces of paper would flutter right in front of your face—and you could see that they were tearing up their telephone books, just ripping the pages out and tearing them to bits and throwing them out the window as homage, as garlands, rose petals—and it was so touching! This horrible rat-gray city was suddenly touching, warm! You wanted to protect these poor souls who loved you so much! Huge waves of emotion rolled over you. You couldn’t hear yourself talk, but there was nothing you could have said, anyway. All you could do was let these incredible waves roll over you. Out in the middle of the intersections were the policemen, the policemen they had all heard about or read about, NewYork’s Finest, big tough-looking men in blue greatcoats—and they were crying! They were right out in the intersections in front of everybody, bawling away—tears streaming down their faces, saluting, then cupping their hands and yelling amazing things to John and the rest of them—”We love you, Johnny!”—and then bawling some more, just letting it pour out. The NewYork cops!
And what was it that had moved them all so deeply? It was not a subject that you could discuss, but the seven of them knew what it was, and so did most of their wives. Or they knew about part of it. They knew it had to do with the presence, the aura, the radiation of the right stuff , the same vital force of manhood that had made millions vibrate and resonate thirty-five years before to Lindbergh—except that in this case it was heightened by Cold War patriotism, the greatest surge of patriotism since the Second World War. Neither the term nor the concept of the single-combat warrior did they know about, but the sheer patriotism of that moment—even in New York, the Danzig corridor!— was impossible to miss. We pay homage to you! You have fought back against the Russians in the heavens! There was something pure and rare about it. Patriotism! Oh, yes! Here you saw it in a million-footed form, before your very eyes! Most of the seven had been around the Kennedys at one time or another, with Jack or with Bobby, and knew the way a crowd reacted to them—but it was something different from this. Around the Kennedys you sawafan’s hysteria, involving a lot of shrieking and clutching, with people reaching out to grab souvenirs and swooning and squealing, as if the Kennedys were movie stars who happened to be in power. But what the multitudes showed JohnGlenn and the rest of them on that day was something else. They anointed them with the primordial tears that the right stuff commanded.
(Wolfe 2008, 278-280)
Scott had flown on May 24, three months. after John. Deke Slayton had been scheduled to take the flight, but then NASA made it known that Deke had a medical problem: idiopathic atrial fibrillation. This was a condition in which the electrical firing sequence of the heart went out of sync occasionally, causing an irregular pulse and a slight lowering of the pumping capacity of the organ. Idiopathic meant that the causes were unknown. The condition had been discovered, said NASA, during centrifuge runs inAugust 1959. Slayton had been examined at the Philadelphia Navy Hospital and theAir Force’s School of Aviation Medicine San Antonio, where the verdict—or so Slayton was told—was that the condition was a minor anomaly and not serious enough to cost him his job as astronaut. But, in fact, one of the Air Force doctors at San Antonio, a highly regarded cardiologist, had written a letter to Webb recommending that Slayton not be assigned to a flight, since a trial fibrillation, idiopathic or not, did reduce the efficiency of the heart to some degree.
(Wolfe 2008, 292-293)
Deke had plenty to be thankful to Shepard for. One day Al had gotten the other boys together and said, “Listen, we’ve got to do something for Deke. We’ve got to do something to give him back his pride.” Shepherd’s suggestion was that Deke be made a sort of chief of the astronauts, with an office and a title and official duties. They all went for the idea and took it to Gilruth, and in no time Deke had the title “Coordinator of Astronaut Activities.”There may have been people at NASA who figured this would be a supernumerary make-work job for the fallen astronaut; if so, they underestimated Deke. He was a far shrewder and more determined individual than his Wisconsin tundra manner let on. The job gave him something to channel his tremendous thwarted energy into. The NASA hierarchy was still a political vacuum, and Deke set about filling it… with a vengeance, as it were. Soon Deke was a power within NASA, a man to be reckoned with, and his motivation never varied: the more powerful he became, the better his chances of reversing the decision that prevented him from flying. Justice, simple operational justice… in the name of the right stuff.
(Wolfe 2008, 303-304)
That became the verdict on Schirra’s performance: “A textbook flight.” He had done everything on the checklist. He had turned in a hundred percent performance. He had successfully proved that a man could ride around the earth six times and barely turn a hand or move a muscle and hardly use an ounce of fuel or expend an extra heartbeat and never, not for a moment, surrender to psychological stress, and ride the ship down to a designated drop in the vastness of the ocean. Sigma, summa, Q.E.D.:Operational!
Wally came back to celebrations in Houston and Florida and a big Wally Schirra day in his hometown of Oradell, New Jersey. The next day he went to the White House for congratulations by President Kennedy, and the President presented him with the Distinguished Service Medal. It all turned out to be rather brief and unceremonious, however, and something of a disappointment. A little chat, a few grins, a few photographs with the Chief Executive in the Oval Office, and that was it. The date was October 16. In time Wally would learn that Kennedy had just seen photographic evidence, from U-2 flights, that the Soviets had set up missile bases in Cuba. The President had kept his appointment with the astronaut only to maintain appearances, to prevent word from getting out about the critical situation that was developing.
(Wolfe 2008, 310-311)
Nevertheless, Conrad had made it this time, and that was the main thing. That was all that any really competitive military pilot upon the great ziggurat could focus on any more: becoming an astronaut. By now, only three years later, any such session as he and Wally Schirraand Alan Shepard and JimLovelland the others had gone through at the Marriott motel in February of 1959… it was hard to believe it could have ever taken place. Remember Wally that night? Wally!… adding up the pros and cons and agonizing over what the space program might do to his chances of commanding a squadron of F-4Hs! And now Wally—the same Wally with whom they had gone waterskiing on Chesapeake Bay, with whom they had weathered that bad string at Pax River, the old affable prankster himself—now Wally stood at the very apex of the great invisible pyramid of flying. For the seven Mercury astronauts had become the True Brotherhood. They were so dazzling you couldn’t even see the erstwhile True Brethren ofEdwards Air Force Baseany longer.
In April, when NASA announced it was accepting applications for a second group of astronauts, both Conrad and JimLovell had looked like good bets this time around, since they had been among the thirty-one finalists in the original selection process. Conrad was stationed at Mira-mar, California, requalifying for a phase of the Navy fighter jock’s training he had already been through, which was night carrier landings. There was a good reason why night carrier landings required requalifying time; even, as in Conrad’s case, after training as a test pilot at Patuxent. Night landings were a routine part of carrier operations—and perhaps the best of all examples of how a man’s accumulated good works did him no good whatsoever at each new step up the great pyramid, of how each new step was an absolute test, and of how each bright new day’s absolutes—chosen or damned—were built into the routine.
(Wolfe 2008, 313-314)
Not that the Original Seven’s nation eminence altered the true and secret nature of things, however. The self- esteem of the fighter jock knew no limits, and the members of Group II were no exceptions to this rule. As soon as they were selected, the boys began looking around and comparing themselves—the Next Nine—with the Original Seven. Here was Neil Armstrong, who had flown the X-15. (What Mercury astronaut had done anything like that?) Here was John Young, who held two world speed-to-climb records. (What Mercury astronaut, other than Glenn, could claim any such distinction?) Here were Frank Borman, TomStafford, and Jim McDivitt, who had been flight test instructors at Edwards. (What Mercury astronaut had ever qualified for that, except for Slayton?) The Next Nine were really rolling now. The Original Seven were chosen to withstand stress, period. Look at Carpenter! Look at Cooper! Oh, the Next Nine felt very good about themselves. Nevertheless, the exalted status of the Original Seven was a fact. Once the initial euphoria of being chosen as an astronaut had subsided, Conrad and the others realized that now, for all their righteous stuff, they occupied a somewhat humiliating position in the corps of astronauts. They were like plebes, rookies, fraternity pledges. Gus Grissom had a nice grim ingratiating gruff Gus way of telling them—if their paths had to cross here and there—not to get big ideas, not to go around calling themselves astronauts. “You’re not an astronaut,” he would say, “you’re a trainee. You’re not an astronaut until you go up.” He said it without a trace of a smile. The Next Ninespent their time going to classes, like nine freshmen, like nine primary flight training candidates at Pensacola, which was bad enough, and doing scutwork for the Holy Seven, which was worse.
(Wolfe 2008, 316-317)
It was John Glenn who had realized from the first that Project Mercury was like a new branch of the armed services, despite its civilian coloration. It would have simplified matters tremendously if NASA had given everybody formal rankings and had done with it. That way people such as Webb would have known where they actually stood. The seven Mercury astronauts could have been designated Single-Combat General, a category with the honors and privileges of five-star general but with none of the duties and obligations of command. After his flight John Glenn, then, would have been promoted to Galactic Single-Combat General, a category ranking slightly above the Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Services and slightly below the Commander-in-Chief. Webb, as NASA administrator, would have been a two-star general and would have known the protocol for dealing with GSC General Glenn. Newly inducted astronauts, such as Conrad, Lovell, and Young, could have been ranked as majors, with rapid promotion promised in the event of the successful completion off lights.
(Wolfe 2008, 318)
Early in the morning of May 15, while it was still dark, Gordo was inserted into the little human holster atop the rocket. As usual there was a long hold before the liftoff. The doctors monitoring the biomedical telemetry began noticing something very odd. In fact, they couldn’t believe it. Every objective reading of the calibrations and printouts indicated… the astronaut had gone to sleep! The man was up there stacking Z’s on top of a rocket loaded with 200,000 pounds of liquid oxygen and RP-1!
(Wolfe 2008, 324)
To tell the truth, the brass had gone slightly bananas over this business of producing astronauts. They had even set up a “charm school” in Washington for the leading candidates. The best of the young test pilots from Edwards and Wright-Patterson flew to Washington and were given a course in how to impress the NASA selection panels in Houston. And it was dead serious! They listened to pep talks by Air Force generals, including General Curtis LeMay himself. They went through drills on how to talk on their feet—and that was the more sensible, credible part of the course. From there it got right down to the level of cotillion etiquette. They were told what to wear to the interviews with the engineers and the astronauts. They were to wear knee-length socks, so that when they sat down and crossed their legs no bare flesh would show between the top of the socks and bottom of the pant cuffs. They were told that to drink at the social get togethers in Houston: they should drink alcohol, in keeping with the pilot code of Flying & Drinking, but in the form of a tall highball,either bourbon or Scotch,and only one. They were told how to put their hands on their hips (if they must). The thumbs should be to the rear and the fingers forward. Only women and interior decorators put the thumbs forward and the fingers back.
And the men went through it all willingly! Without a snigger! The brass’s passion for the astronaut business was nothing compared to that of the young pilots themselves. Edwards had always been the precise location on the map of the apex of the pyramid of the right stuff itself. And now it was just another step on the way up. These boys were coming through Chuck Yeager’s prep school so they could get a ticket to Houston.
(Wolfe 2008, 333)
Joe Walker’s backup pilot in the X-15 project, Neil Armstrong, was typical of the new breed. Alot of people couldn’t figure out Armstrong. He had a close blond crew cut and small pale-blue eyes and scarcely a line or a feature in his face that you could remember. His expression hardly ever changed. You’d ask him a question, and he would just stare at you with those pale-blue eyes of his, and you’d start to ask the question again, figuring he hadn’t understood,and—click—out of his mouth would come forth a sequence of long, quiet, perfectly formed, precisely thought-out sentences, full of anisotropic functions and multiple-encounter trajectories, or whatever else was called for. It was as if his hesitations were just data punch-in intervals for his computer. Armstrong had been preparing for an X-15 launch from the Smith’s Ranch dry-lake bed last year whenYeager, who was director of flight test operations, told him the lake bed was still too muddy from the rains. Armstrong said the meteorological data, considering the wind and temperature factors, indicated the surface would be satisfactory. Yeager received a call from NASA asking him if he would take a small plane over to the lake bed and make a ground inspection. “Hell, no,”said Yeager. “I’ve been flying over these lakes for fifteen years, and I know it’s muddy. I’m not going to be responsible for disabling an Air Force plane.” Well, would he fly a NASAplane up there? Hell, no, said Yeager; he didn’t want that on his record, either. It was finally arranged that he would fly up there backseat, withArmstrong at the controls and therefore responsible for the mission. As soon as they touched down, Yeager could tell that the mud was going to suck up the landing gears like a couple of fence posts, which it did. Now they were hopelessly mired in the muck, and a range of hills blocked radio contact with the base. “Well, Neil,”said Yeager, “in a few hours it’ll be dark, and the temperature’s going down to zero, and we’re two guys standing out here in the mud wearing windbreakers. Got any good ideas?” Armstrong stared at him, and the computer interval began, and it ended, and nothing came out. A rescue team from the base, alerted by the loss of radio contact, retrieved them before nightfall—and brought back the story, which entertained the old timers for a few days.
(Wolfe 2008, 336)
All of that Yeager could accept. On the great pyramid there was no steady state. Sixteen years ago, when he came to Muroc, he was only twenty-four, and few other test pilots had ever heard of him, and most people in aviation thought “the sound barrier”was as solid as a wall. Once he flew Mach 1, however, it was a whole new ball game. And now there were cosmonauts and astronauts, and it was a whole new ball game once again. A man could do a pretty good job of being philosophical about it. What finally got to Yeager, however, was the Ed Dwight case.
It had been early this year that Yeager got word from the brass that the President, John F. Kennedy, was determined that NASA have at least one Negro astronaut in their lineup. The whole process was to take place organically, however, as if in the natural order of things. Kennedy was leaning on the Defense Department, Defense was leaning on the Air Force brass, and they tossed the potato to Yeager. The pilot who had been singled out was an Air Force captain named Ed Dwight. He was to go through ARPS and be selected by NASA. The clouds developed soon enough. Dwight was enrolled in the basic flight test course along with twenty-five other candidates. Only the top eleven students could enter ARPS’s six-month space-flight course, which had limited facilities, and Dwight did not rank among the top eleven. Yeager didn’t see how he could jump him over other young tigers, all of them desperate to become astronauts. Every week, it seemed like, a detachment of Civil Rights Division lawyers would turn up from Washington, from the Justice Department, which was headed by the President’s brother Bobby. The lawyers squinted in the desert sunlight and asked a great many questions about the progress and treatment of Ed Dwight and took notes. Yeager kept saying he didn’t see how he could simply jump Dwight over these other men. And the lawyers would come back the next week and squint some more and take some more notes. There were days when ARPS seemed like the Ed Dwight case with a few classrooms and some military hardware appended. A compromise was finally struck in which Dwight would be admitted to the space-flight course, but only if every man who ranked above him was also admitted. That was how it came to pass that the next class had fourteen students instead of eleven and included Captain Dwight. Meantime, the White House, apparently, was signaling to the Negro press that Dwight was going to be “the first Negro astronaut,” and he was being invited to make public appearances. He was being set up for a fall, because the chances of NASA accepting him as an astronaut appeared remote in any event.
The whole thing was baffling. On the upper reaches of the great ziggurat the subject of race had never been introduced before. The unspoken premise was that you either had the right stuff or you didn’t, and no other variables mattered. When thesevenMercury astronauts had been chosen in 1959, the fact that they were all white and all Protestant seemed to be interpreted as wholly benign evidence of their Small-Town American virtues. But by now, four years later, Kennedy, who had been supported by a coalition of minority groups in the 1960 election, had begun to raise the question of race as a matter of public policy in many areas. The phrase “white Protestant” took on a different meaning, so that it was now possible to regard the astronauts as some sort of cadre of whites of northern European racial background. In fact, this had nothing to do, per se, with their being astronauts. It was typical of career military officers generally. Throughout the world, for that matter, career officers came from “native” or “old settler” stock. Even in Israel, which had existed for barely a generation as an independent nation and was dominated politically by immigrants from Eastern Europe, the officer corps was made up overwhelmingly of”realIsraelis”—men born or raised from an early age in the pre-war Jewish settlements of the old Palestine. The other common denominator of the astronauts was that they were all first or only sons; yet not even this had any special significance, for studies soon showed that first or only sons dominated many occupations, including scholarly ones. (In an age when the average number of children per family was barely more than two, the odds were two out of three that any male would be a first or only son.) None of which was going to mollify the White House, however, because the astronaut, the single-combat warrior, had become a creature with greater political significance than any other type of pilot in history.
(Wolfe 2008, 338-340)
References
Wolfe, Tom. 2008. The Right Stuff. N.p.: Picador.
ISBN 978-0-312-42756-6
Benjamin’s Book Journal 
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