Houston
THE SEARCH FOR A NEW HOME for NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center was carried out with all the subtlety of a political cavalry charge. Jeb Stuart could not have done better as Washington insiders manipulated their way through political thickets to lock up a site twenty-five miles south of Houston.
Bob Gilruth, as director of the old Space Task Group, would head the new center, and wanted nothing to do with the Houston site, or any other for that matter. He wanted everything to stay put at Langley, where there was no finer place on earth to sail than the Chesapeake Bay. He and most of the people in his group had been at Langley Field since the days of the old NACA, and he felt there was no logical reason to uproot all those engineers and technicians and move them halfway across the country.
But there just was not enough room at Langley to accommodate the massive expansion needed for Apollo—the ambitious program intended to land Americans on the moon. No room for the growing astronaut corps, for their training devices, for a huge control center to monitor humans en route to another world, for the laboratories that would examine the precious rocks to be gathered on the lunar surface, for the thousands of civil service and contract engineers, technicians, managers, and other personnel who would toil at the new center to make the dream come true.
“Tell me, Bob,” NASA administrator James Webb asked Gilruth, “what has Harry Byrd ever done for you?”
Webb’s question was right on the mark. Virginia’s Senator Byrd had never done much but criticize the space program. Webb was thinking of a site in California or Texas, two states with strong political figures that were strong supporters of the program.
So Gilruth dutifully set up a committee that scoured the country for a new site, settling on a few locations in both California and Texas, all of which were forwarded to Webb for final selection. Webb chose Mare Island in California and sent the recommendation on to Vice President Lyndon Johnson.
Webb hadn’t figured on the clout of two powerful Texas political figures. Albert Thomas of Houston was a key member of the House Appropriations subcommittee. As vice president of the United States, Johnson was chairman of President Kennedy’s National Space Council.
Thomas, who had that barren cow pasture in Houston in mind all the while, went to Johnson. They talked, and the vice president overruled Webb and said the site should be Houston, which had been on Gilruth’s short list.
Those supporting Houston argued that the area was perfect for NASA, since it had advantages of highway, rail, water, and air transportation. So did many other sites, and the argument of “land availability” faded miserably in the face of the recent NASA purchase of eighty-eight thousand acres of land immediately adjacent to Cape Canaveral. Indeed, this area of Merritt Island—mostly orange groves—was to become a huge industrial facility and the actual moon port from which humans would leave the earth on journeys deep into space.
Why not, then, consolidate everything there? It not only had everything Houston claimed as its advantages, but it would bestride an already existing support, launch, and tracking network of unparalleled skills.
Lyndon Johnson suggested to his subordinates that they understood little or nothing about the true art of astronautics, or the logistical foundation on which it must rest. Consider Cape Canaveral, he said with well-aimed political darts. It is a military facility. Its main purpose is to perfect the mightiest weapons of war. It is a forest of vertical giants that spell doom and horror for the entire world with Atlas and Titan and Polaris, with Thor and Jupiter, and the other secret weapons too horrible to reveal to the public. Missile testing is expanding swiftly at the Cape, he said. The range is crowded, the tracking network overburdened, the communications net and radio traffic so heavy that it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, for NASA to sustain clear communications channels during a long-duration manned space mission.
Launch NASA rockets from the Cape, but communicate with them from afar, preferably from a control center in Houston. A new center, Johnson’s allies concluded, must be at least 125 miles of clear and uncluttered distance from Cape Canaveral.
Well, let us see! The Florida contingent, no stranger to pork barrel politics, condemned Lyndon Johnson as a purveyor of untruths. If a new center must be established 125 miles from the Cape, why, they had the perfect site for NASA. Soon to be closed MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa was a superb facility, already built by taxpayer dollars and supported by citywide industrial, business, highway, rail, shipping, airport, and other necessities for any new location. It had large runways, communications networks linking its own command centers to the rest of the world, and it presented an ease of transport and communication with the launch center on the Florida east coast, just 150 miles away. Furthermore, the Air Force was closing its operations at MacDill, which opened, in effect, a huge, government dollar savings welcome for the new NASA group.
Lyndon Johnson knew better than to argue against saving the taxpayers a buck. He assembled his site selection team, explained the situation, and ordered them to come up with a bona fide reason why MacDill simply would not do.
Site requirements changed before a new dawn arrived. A Johnson committee submitted new guidelines that required the second NASA command center to be at least 250 miles from Cape Canaveral.
Johnson smiled. Scratch MacDill, and ring the cash register bells for Houston. At least he heard them ringing in his head. He was fiercely determined to land this plum in his home state. By the time congressional committees had narrowed down the possibilities to ten sites, seven were in Texas. Now the odds leaned in favor of the Stetson Twins. Congressman Albert Thomas galvanized his own forces and arranged the facts neatly for a predictable vote. Thomas just happened to be chairman of the House Independent Office Appropriations Committee, which controlled the funding for future NASA projects.
Charles Donlon, deputy director of the Space Task Group, shook his head in wonderment as he admitted to an interviewer, “It’s as though you went through a maze, knowing all the time what door you were going to come out.”
NASA insisted that at least a thousand acres be made available, free of restrictions, and preferably donated to NASA to control costs to the taxpayers. That requirement was parlayed with all the skill of a pool hustler cleaning up from the locals in a small Texas town.
LBJ’s friends at Humble Oil owned many thousands of acres of pastureland and offered the thousand acres. The company had little use for the land, which had proved worthless as an oil producer. Humble donated the thousand acres not to NASA but to Houston’s Rice University, with the proviso that the school must transfer the land to the space agency on a ninety-nine-year lease.
Before long, a new sound could be heard in the area of Clear Lake, the nearest town, and this was the brisk rubbing together of palms in eager anticipation of a fiscal windfall. With the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) as anchor, the surrounding acreage soon resounded with the clanking of bulldozers and road graders and cement mixers and truck convoys rolling in and out of the area. The keys were the supporting businesses for the mass of people NASA was moving to MSC. The MSC staff, as well as supporting businesses, new medical facilities, schools, utilities, and the general fabric of a new community, created in astonishingly quick time huge flatlands of thriving suburbs with literally tens of thousands of people clamoring to buy new homes and sign leases on new apartments.
Many friends of Lyndon Johnson and Albert Thomas made a hell of a lot of money when Houston was selected. Those already wealthy smiled as their coffers bulged with new funds, and no one was really surprised when very close friends of LBJ at Brown & Root speared the huge contract to build the Manned Spacecraft Center.
All other factors notwithstanding, Houston was it. Seven hundred engineers and their families loaded up boxes, baggage, and their vehicles for the long transport from the favorable environs of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay to the flat Texas ranch land, to be the epicenter of the new space effort.
NASA had boosted its image by stretching the last Mercury flight to its limit in May 1963, when Gordon Cooper sped around the planet for more than thirty-four hours. But no amount of praise for Gordo’s superb performance could persuade the public that America was catching up. The numbers spoke for themselves and, while NASA was busy building the Manned Spacecraft Center, the Russians were hammering into space and demonstrating they were the faster learners in the public relations business.
On June 14, just one month after Cooper emerged from his harrowing reentry, the Russians hurled Vostok V—Hawk—into orbit with Lieutenant Colonel Valery F. Bykovsky. The cosmonaut would remain in orbit just over 119 hours, a number that staggered the space gazing, awed public.
But even Bykovsky’s flight was pushed off the headlines two days later when Vostok VI—Sea Gull—ripped away from its Baikonur pad. Bykovsky, still in orbit, was looking down at the launch complex when the Soviet booster sent the Sea Gull on its way into orbit with a woman on board.
Valentina V. Tereshkova was the first woman to enter this previously all-male domain, and she remained in space nearly seventy-one hours.
With the Russians darting and speeding about the heavens, the word in Washington went urgently to President Kennedy: “For God’s sake, do something!”
On November 16, 1963, John Kennedy followed the requests of his staff and appeared at Cape Canaveral for a firsthand look at the Air Force launch center, as well as at the huge moon port under construction at adjacent Merritt Island.
Kennedy questioned Dr. Wernher von Braun, who showed with obvious pride the huge Saturn I rocket booster being readied for its first “all-up” test flight. First kicked off its pad in October 1961 for initial launch, Saturn I, with 1.3 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, would be capable of hurling thirty-eight-thousand-pound payloads into earth orbit.
That would draw America even with the boost capability of the Soviet Union.
Kennedy left von Braun and climbed into a helicopter with astronauts Gus Grissom and Gordon Cooper, who with unabashed excitement and pride pointed out the key features of the growing moon port, where one day a monster called Saturn V would stand on its launch pad. Here the name Apollo was gaining substance with every passing day.
John F. Kennedy did not live to see Americans sail across space to the moon. Six days after he viewed the launch areas for Project Apollo, the president of the United States fell to an assassin’s bullet during a Dallas motorcade.
Shocked and stunned, America slowed to a stop. With the nation wracked by emotional loss, workers at Cape Canaveral joined in mourning for the passing of a man who had placed America on its course to the moon.
By the end of 1963, a shroud of uncertainty seemed draped over American space projects. NASA’s key supporter was dead. A strange lassitude infected both the American and Russian manned projects. With the last flights of Mercury and Vostok, human orbital flights would not take place again for more than a year. It was time for review, study, reorganization, and striking new commitments for the future.
Lyndon Johnson and Jim Webb refused to drink from the poisoned well of inactivity and remained committed to America’s progress in space.
The moon! The moon was the goal. Easier said than done, of course, but at least now, with hard experience behind them, NASA leaders and engineers were defining the critical technical problems to be addressed and overcome.
All future spaceships must be able to do more than roll around a point on reentry and waggle small and large blunt ends while sailing along an unchangeable orbital trajectory. That was fine for Project Mercury in its limited role of determining if humans could live and work in space. But now it was painfully clear that maneuverability in space was the new Holy Grail to be achieved.
Thus was born Project Gemini, with a four-ton, two-man spacecraft that must move through space with unexcelled freedom and reliability so that it might deliberately plunge into the problems the future Apollo would face, and provide the answers for the manned moon vessels still taking shape on the drawing boards.
Specifically, the astronaut twins of Project Gemini were to perfect all the key techniques for reaching the moon—rendezvous and docking with another spacecraft, long-duration flight, and walking in space.
Two unmanned Gemini spacecraft boosted into orbit atop their Titan II boosters and flew very successful missions. NASA considered the new ship ready for its maiden voyage with a manned crew and scheduled it for early spring in 1965.
Deke Slayton considered who would be the best man for the critical, first all-up Gemini test flight, and without hesitation he selected Alan Shepard once more to command and lead the way. His copilot would be Tom Stafford, who thus became the first man of the second group of astronauts to receive a flight assignment. Deke followed the same pattern for the backup crew, selecting Gus Grissom as command pilot and John Young, from Stafford’s group, as his copilot. It was time to work the new kids on the block into the flight scheme.
Preparations went smoothly for six weeks, when Alan Shepard awoke one morning feeling nauseated.
Alan met with Deke Slayton to report on what he encountered. He laid it out straight. “All of a sudden, Deke, I fell. I was so dizzy! The room was spinning around and suddenly I’m on the floor. I got up holding onto the wall, and right away I got so sick I vomited. I thought, Jesus what the hell did I have to drink last night? It must have been one hell of a hoorah, but, well, that just wasn’t the case.”
For several days Shepard felt fine and worked with precision. The dizziness episode was apparently behind him until the fifth day when he again experienced head spinning and vomiting.
Once again the room whirled madly. He heard and felt an awful ringing in his left ear. It went away.
Then it came back, several times. Alan knew something was terribly, dangerously wrong. He checked in with the flight surgeons.
“You’ve got a serious problem with your left inner ear,” a doctor told him after a thorough examination. “You have what is called Ménière’s syndrome.”
“What’s that?”
“Certain people who are hyper, driven, motivated, highly competitive, will occasionally develop this problem,” the doctor responded. “Fluid pressure builds up in your inner ear, and it makes the semicircular canals, the motion detectors, extremely sensitive. This results in disorientation, dizziness, and nausea. You’ve been experiencing all of this. You also have glaucoma, an elevated pressure in your eyeballs. That’s just another indication that as an individual you’re highly hyper.”
Alan listened patiently to the diagnosis and suddenly found his patience wanting. “Don’t give me that crap!” he said angrily. “I’m just a fighter pilot . . . ” He lapsed into an angrier silence, aware immediately that what he had just heard could lose him his Gemini command.
He was right. A panel of NASA medics yanked his wings, and suddenly he found himself in the bleachers with Deke instead of on the playing field.
“Look, Alan,” a doctor said warmly, “there is no known cure for this condition, but there’s a chance, about twenty percent, that what you’ve got will dissipate, you know, cure itself. And with the medication we’ve prescribed for you, the odds get better.”
“How much better?”
“Some.”
“How much, dammit!”
“Slightly better.”
A dispirited Alan sat down with Deke for a heart-to-heart. “Deke, what the hell do I do? Should I just hang it up? Quit? I’ve got to fly again, Deke! Hell man, I’ve got to go to the moon. You’ve been grounded for more than two years. What are your odds? What are mine?”
Deke didn’t answer immediately. The man before him was his friend, his fellow pilot—dammit, the first American in space—and he knew the pain coursing through Alan Shepard. Finally, Deke spoke slowly: “Listen to me, Al. I’ve talked with the medics. They say you’ve got a chance, a real chance, to come back. They tell me your odds are a hell of a lot better than mine. So until you get your medical situation straightened out, stick around. I’ve got a job for you.
“You can keep up with your medication while you back me up. I’m moving up to a new job as Chief of Flight Crew Operations. That job includes oversight of the Astronaut Office. I need a man to directly supervise that office, to replace me and work with me. That keeps you right in the heart of the operation and gives me the best man there is to support me. How about it?”
Shepard chewed on his lower lip. It sounded great, but—
“Christ, Deke, I don’t know how good I’d be changing diapers and feeding astronauts. You’ve handled it like a pro. But me? I’m a different story. It would be awfully tough to take a crew down to the Cape, pat them on the ass, and watch them fly. It’s the sort of thing that can tear a guy up inside.”
“So? So it’ll be tough. So get tough,” Deke growled. “I don’t think we’re through with being grounded. Hell, I know I’m not. I intend to make it into space. I’m sure as hell keeping my foot in the door, and yours should be right there next to mine.”
Shepard grinned. “If the job keeps the door open—yep, I’m your man,” he said shoving his foot alongside Deke’s.
It would take years. Many years.
But Alan and Deke would do it.