Training
HEROES!
Deke Slayton shook his head in disbelief. “How the hell had seven guys suddenly become heroes without doing a damn thing?” he asked as the Mercury Seven were off from bright lights and accolades moving their families to their new homes and headquarters at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.
For the next two years they would train to be astronauts while engineers worked to develop and perfect the Mercury spacecraft they would ride into earth orbit. “And back again safely,” they reminded reporters at every turn.
Deke put it as candidly as he could. “None of us know a damn thing about being an astronaut,” he said. “Spaceflight is science fiction. We don’t yet have the big picture. We’ll learn together. We’ll fly together.”
Langley was their home base, but they traveled widely. They studied the Mercury spacecraft then under development at the McDonnell Aircraft plant in St. Louis, where each of them received a visual reminder that, as Deke put it, “the thing ain’t got no wings!” Then it was off to Convair at General Dynamics, where the intercontinental ballistic missile Atlas, still tricky and unproven, was being modified—its usual hydrogen bomb warhead replaced with the bell-shaped, blunt-edged Mercury. More important to the astronauts was the fact the Atlas was being man-rated, made as safe and reliable as humanly possible, with three or more redundant systems being built in to do the same job. If one system failed, another would take over and protect the astronaut. Finally, the Mercury Seven flew to the launch complex at Cape Canaveral on the east coast of Florida, where it would all happen.
The Cape Canaveral peninsula had been at the forefront of settlement in Florida in years past. Here, bear shared undeveloped land with alligator and deer, and Indians buried their dead on sacred grounds. Later, other men would come to hack out farmland. But taming the Cape was tougher than expected; snakes and an infuriating number of persistent mosquitoes had driven most of the humans away. Now, beneath the palmetto scrubland and sand, the rows of launch towers and blockhouses and hangars and offices were connected by thousands of invisible electrical arteries, a finely woven network of underground cables through which flashed the impulses of energy, vital messages, and electronic commands that would ignite the rockets and launch the Mercury Seven into space.
The astronauts had multiple roles to play. Among them was hand-holding. Members of Congress, government officials, and industry leaders came to Cape Canaveral with little knowledge of the technological challenges at hand, expecting that the dollars they had allocated would guarantee immediate success. Putting a man on the moon wouldn’t be quite that easy, and it would take time. The Mercury astronauts mixed with the powerful visitors, who were shocked when the first Atlas, topped with an unmanned Mercury spacecraft, was launched on a tail of fire into the clouds.
Where it promptly blew itself all to hell and beyond.
Congressmen looked at the astronauts as the Atlas tumbled to earth in flaming chunks. “You’re going to get on top one of those things?” they asked.
It wasn’t just the Atlas that failed to perform as expected. Charlie Chaplin couldn’t have provided a better script for one Mercury-Redstone launch when the astronauts and a visiting congressional delegation watched as the rocket ignited and failed to rise from its pad when an electrical problem shut off the Redstone’s engine. The visitors observed the escape tower rocket atop the Mercury capsule, the rocket needed to snatch the astronaut and spacecraft to safety, do its job. It ignited and raced into the sky over the cape, forgetting one very important thing. The Mercury spacecraft it was suppose to pull to safety. Instead, it left the Mercury sitting atop the Redstone on the pad. The sight of an out-of-control escape tower belching fire brought loudspeakers blaring warning for everyone to take cover immediately. It was a sight unprecedented in the new space age at Canaveral as astronauts, congressmen, generals, engineers, and reporters dived beneath bleachers and behind anything to gain cover from flames shooting above the launch pad. Then, while the huddled crowds watched, befuddled and amazed, the top of the capsule popped open, and the drogue parachute, the main parachute, then the reserve parachute, all unraveled and spilled down the side of the booster. The escape tower then crashed about four hundred yards from the pad after scooting to a height of four thousand feet.
“That was a hell of a mess,” said Flight Director Chris Kraft.
It was also the price tag for development. It has always been that way with fiery machines in need of maturing. Just part of the new school for astronauts.
Several months into the tests and training, a potentially sinister medical problem came knocking on Deke Slayton’s door.
Deke and the other astronauts were making routine runs in the NASA centrifuge, an enclosed cockpit at the far end of a giant metal arm that rotates fast enough to mash a man’s brains down into his throat. The centrifuge generates the forces a pilot feels in high-gravity maneuvers, such as very tight turns or sharp pullouts from a dive, increasing the gravity forces, or g-forces, on the man being slung around at the end of the centrifuge arm. If he’s pulling a 5g load, then suddenly he weighs five times his normal weight.
The idea was to see how long a pilot could hang in there before so much blood was drained from his brain that he would pass out. Deke was a whiz at it. Technicians called the centrifuge the “County Fair Killer,” and Deke handled g-loads that amazed even those running the machine.
But on the test that Slayton would never forget, the flight surgeon, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Douglas, was fastening sensors to Deke’s skin.
Suddenly Douglas stopped short.
“What is it, Bill?” Deke asked instantly.
“Not sure. What I think I’m getting is an irregular heartbeat.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Don’t sweat it,” Douglas said. “Could be the equipment.”
Douglas rechecked the sensors, adjusted the monitoring equipment, and called for a centrifuge run at 3g. Slowly the flight surgeon felt his heart sink.
Deke’s irregular heartbeat wasn’t in the equipment. It was in Deke’s chest.
Douglas ordered the centrifuge to a halt. One look at the doctor’s face and Deke had the bad news. Something was wrong. And Deke knew the score. If the medical tests showed any cardiac irregularity, it could be the end, right then. He would be grounded.
“We’ll get back to you, Deke,” Douglas told him.
Deke nodded.
A day passed. Then another. Still no answers.
Marge Slayton saw Deke’s jaw stiffen as he fought for patience. Immediately he quit smoking. He knocked off the coffee. He ran like a man possessed. Every day he pounded pavement, running along nature trails and dodging trees as he raced through the woods. He was challenging his own heart.
It didn’t help. The irregular beat would last for two, sometimes three, days, and then it would vanish from the medical tests. But no one was accepting a sudden cessation. The medical boys had plenty of time. Sure enough, an average of ten days after the irregularity slipped away, it came back.
How was this possible? Deke was in great shape. Physically his body was as close to perfection as the human body could be.
He knew, hating it, that his heart was like a rough-running engine. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow. It wouldn’t give in and he wouldn’t give in, and now and then, like a dark shadow gaining mass in his chest, he could sense it. Mean, nasty, hateful.
The mystery was that no one knew just what was happening inside Deke’s body. Dr. Douglas spared no effort to find out. He called in several of the leading cardiologists in the country to examine Deke. They were baffled.
Deke wanted to chew nails.
The top specialists lacked answers, but their report left no doubt about how NASA should proceed. “Despite the irregularity, it is our opinion that this condition in no way affects the performance of astronaut Slayton. It is also our opinion that he should be accepted for space flight operations.”
Bill Douglas gave Deke the word, and the word was good, and Deke let out a war whoop of joy.
NASA accepted the doctors’ reports that Deke was healthy, and they subjected him to more rigorous and demanding tests with every passing day. He was slammed into deep pools in a sealed spacecraft so that he could become proficient in unhooking his harnesses, opening the hatch, swimming to the surface, and activating his escape-and-survival systems. All such tests were part of the routine of two years of training. What the astronauts experienced in centrifuge runs and weightless runs on board a specially equipped aircraft called the “vomit comet,” all paled alongside what the astronauts felt was the most punishing test of all, a “god-awful, unforgivable exercise” in Deke’s words.
Or survival training in the wild, as NASA called it. Men preparing for flight at eighteen thousand miles an hour more than a hundred miles above the earth were “dumped” in deserts, atop rugged mountains, in Panamanian jungles and other remote sites, and left to fend for themselves. NASA generously equipped each man with a small portion of water, his survival gear, and his wits. A sense of humor and a strong stomach willing to accept lizards, snakes, insects, and whatever else could be gleaned from the inhospitable surroundings were also essential.
The astronauts almost preferred the wilds to the frenzy of reporters who were after one thing above all: the inside word. The scoop. Newspaper and television editors and directors did everything but arm their media reps to get the one story they all wanted to release.
Who would be the first American to be launched into space? That was the name they sought.
But they weren’t sure which source to track for the inside story. So they went after everybody in NASA who might have the answer and who could be persuaded to give them the biggest news break of their careers.
But all their efforts failed. What the press did not know was that the issue of who was to be the first in space would ultimately be settled in a way the astronauts never expected.
It was the old story of the unexpected coming out of left field.