Man’s first trip into space will be a new human experience, to be highly desired by courageous and adventurous men, but fraught with hardships, difficulties and danger.
Time, April 20, 1959
By the time NASA’s Space Task Group was formed, in the fall of 1958, Max Faget had been thinking about the difficulties of manned spaceflight for a few years, often while standing on his head. One particular obsession of his was the danger of atmospheric reentry, in which the friction from plummeting into Earth’s thick atmosphere at ten thousand miles an hour or more would result in temperatures of about three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Meteorites were also on his mind.
Faget was a man whose brain worked somewhat differently than others’—though usually successfully—when fixed on a problem; it was a trait that apparently ran in the family. His father, a doctor, had helped develop the first practical treatment for leprosy; one of his great-grandfathers, a New Orleans physician, had discovered an accurate way to diagnose yellow fever. Young Max grew up in Louisiana building model airplanes and submarines with his older brother and reading science fiction novels and Astounding magazine, the first “hard SF” publication that insisted on stories with a solid grounding in science. A gymnast in college, wiry and about five six, Max had an elfin appearance (decades later, it would invite comparisons to the Yoda character from the Star Wars movies). After receiving his engineering degree from LSU in 1943, Faget spent almost three years as a junior naval officer aboard a submarine in the South Pacific, eventually serving as executive officer. He had a penchant for startling people in conference rooms, restaurants, almost anywhere, by leaping over chairs and sometimes standing on his head to improve blood circulation to his brain while continuing discussions with colleagues.
His roommate at LSU had been a chemical engineering major named Guy Thibodaux, a Cajun also from New Orleans. Neither ever made the honor roll or took to rote learning, and while other students were pulling all-nighters for exams, they played pool and watched movies. Before they went off to war—Faget with the navy, Thibodaux with the army—they made a vow that if they survived, they’d reunite and look for jobs together.
In the spring of 1946, Guy got a call from Faget, who was following up on that promise and had an idea about where they should apply. Max’s father had a 1941 Ford coupe that they could borrow. It had airplane tires—all that was available, since there was still a shortage of rubber—but it ran, so in June the two headed to the NACA’s Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia, where they walked in and applied for jobs wearing Hawaiian shirts, work pants, and sandals. The agency being what it was—somewhat eccentric in both hiring and methods, often finding employees at model-airplane contests—both were hired immediately. (It didn’t hurt that the man in charge of making the decision was also an LSU graduate.) Thibodaux was put to work in rocket propulsion and Faget in ramjets for Robert Gilruth’s newly created Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD). At a starting annual salary of $2,644, they were now working with the world’s leading experts on aerodynamics in the most exciting venture they could imagine—trying to break the sound barrier. Not bad for a couple of Louisiana Aggies without graduate degrees. Both of them advanced quickly in the loose, merit-based NACA hierarchy—a “classless society where every member of the team was an equal contributor to the success of NACA’s mission,” Thibodaux observed later—and Faget was soon Gilruth’s right-hand man in PARD. Only three years later, Thibodaux would be running his own section.
Faget had been working on supersonic aircraft, including the X-15, for years, and his unique ability to find the simplest solution to design problems often led to valuable breakthroughs. He understood, sooner than many of his colleagues, that there was no advantage to an aerodynamic shape in space, since there was no atmosphere—no air—to act on it or slow it down. With that in mind, he was excited about designing a craft that would operate in a vacuum, and he was even more excited when he and other Space Task Group members visited Huntsville just a few days after NASA started up. Faget, von Braun, and his engineers discussed working together to launch a manned capsule into space.
Faget and several others at the NACA—a small group that some at headquarters called the Space Cadets—had been wrestling with the thorny problem of reentry for a while. They’d been “bootlegging” a manned space program for at least a year before NASA was formed; they figured that since no one had told them not to do it, they might as well, even without official approval. They all agreed that space was where they were heading. The big question was: What shape should the spacecraft be? Initially, they chose a needle-nosed, streamlined spaceship—like the ones they’d read about in science fiction magazines and seen in space artist extraordinaire Chesley Bonestell’s illustrations—to offer as little air resistance as possible. Someone even suggested using the X-15 experimental plane, designed to fly up to the fringe of space—maybe they could send it to the moon. Faget knew that wouldn’t work. For one thing, after reaching Mach 6, the X-15 began suffering serious heat damage. Besides, its aerodynamic shape wouldn’t dissipate that enormous heat, and with no heat-resistant external surface, the plane would completely disintegrate when it reentered the atmosphere at extreme velocity.
So when two of Faget’s colleagues, Harvey Allen and Alfred Eggers, pointed out that meteors with rounded noses were aerodynamically stable and survived the searing heat of the plunge—they had been studying the concept for years—Faget and designer Caldwell Johnson came up with a blunt-nosed shape like a shuttlecock that would slow down the craft on reentry and create a shock wave that would deflect much of the blast-furnace heat away from and around it. A paper Faget presented in March 1958, “Preliminary Studies of Manned Satellites—Wingless Configuration, Non-Lifting,” introduced key features of a simple but workable spaceship. His co-workers at Langley weren’t convinced that a blunt design was a good idea, and neither were many others in NASA. The staff at Ames Research Center in California believed a craft with some lift would be better, and military flight surgeons argued a man would black out from the eight g’s expected in this craft during reentry. But the unassailable simplicity and logic of Faget’s arguments—and the fact that a ballistic craft could take only one path and thus its splashdown point could be easily predicted—eventually won them over, and his blunt body design was officially adopted.
After much refinement, endless wind-tunnel, spin-tunnel, heat, and drop tests, and trajectory work on primitive computers, the cone-shaped, blunt-bottomed Mercury capsule was finished. Faget added a thick ablative heat shield (the concept of which had been described in 1920 by rocket pioneer Robert Goddard and later fine-tuned by Eggers) made of an aluminum honeycomb and several layers of fiberglass. The outer layer of the shield would absorb some of the heat and burn away, or ablate, protecting the capsule itself during reentry. A pack of small rockets strapped to the bottom of the craft would also decrease its speed and massive g-forces during reentry. Faget and a couple of other aerodynamicists had determined the capsule would decelerate at eight g’s or so, which would be bearable if a man was on his back on a surface designed to help him withstand that force. So Faget and his colleagues fashioned (and patented) a fiberglass contoured survival couch that would do the job.
Now, if they could keep the weight down and secure the Mercury capsule to the nose of a rocket powerful enough to launch it into space (first just a simple ballistic arc beyond Earth’s atmosphere and then a larger booster that would reach the 17,500 miles per hour necessary to balance the Earth’s gravitational pull and maintain a stable orbit), it just might work. And, of course, if they could find a way to keep its occupant alive.
The craft that would convey the first American into space was nothing like any spaceship in the comic strips or the movies—or in the previous history of manned flight. Some dubbed it the “Flying Ashcan.” Since the underpowered Redstone’s payload capacity was limited, the capsule wouldn’t be very large—eleven feet long and six feet across at the wide end of the cone. And it would weigh only three thousand pounds; its shell would be constructed of thin but strong titanium covered with hundreds of heat-radiating shingles of equally strong alloys to resist the expected thirty-five-hundred-degree temperature of reentry. The crew compartment would be just big enough for one person. “You don’t climb into it. You put it on,” said John Glenn. The astronaut would sit on his personally shaped contour couch with his back to the heat shield, facing about a hundred and twenty switches, levers, buttons, and fuses a couple of feet in front of him. There was no computer; any trajectory or reentry calculations would be made by computers on the ground and transmitted by radio. The capsule’s path could not be changed, although its attitude—the direction it was pointed—could, both from the ground and by the astronaut, with eighteen small thruster jets powered by hydrogen peroxide that altered the three axes of up-down pitch, right-left yaw, and side-to-side roll.
After the basic plans were set, McDonnell Aircraft, producer of many of the country’s finest fighter planes, was chosen to build it. Its bid was far from the lowest, but the Mercury program had been placed on the Master Urgency List, meaning its administrators did not have to choose the lowest bidder.
It wasn’t much of a spacecraft, this hollow meteor, but it would get the job done—the job of putting a man into space and returning him to Earth alive—if the rocket it perched on did its job. Because NASA was required to use only rockets already in production, von Braun’s Redstone, designed for the battlefield, would be employed for the first flights, the suborbital ones that would be quick up-and-down trips. The kerosene-fueled Atlas, the new ICBM the air force was developing, would launch the Mercury into orbit on later missions, since it was the only one in the nation’s arsenal with the thrust capable of doing the job. But the recent history of the Redstone and Atlas boosters wasn’t encouraging. The Atlas, especially, had a nasty habit of exploding or malfunctioning in some other way. It had been designed to carry H-bombs, not humans, and its skin was so thin that a steel belly ring, like a large, jury-rigged hose clamp, would need to be fitted around its girth as a brace. But the rocket engineers and launchpad technicians, aided by newly hired safety and quality-assurance inspectors, committed themselves to doing all they could to keep their passengers from being blown to bits.
Some of the dangers of space travel were known. Many more were not.
A fragile human in the vacuum of space would die almost instantly. Even if he held his breath, it would take only seconds; the absence of external pressure would cause his lungs to rupture and send air into his bloodstream, resulting in a quick death when air bubbles lodged in his heart and brain. Even if his lungs didn’t rupture, the deoxygenation of the blood would result in the loss of consciousness in fifteen seconds or less. As the water in his body vaporized and his oxygen disappeared, the moisture on his tongue, in his eyes, and elsewhere would begin to boil and bubble; his skin and the tissue beneath it would start to swell and turn bluish purple; and the gases in—and possibly the contents of—his stomach, bowels, sinuses, and other body cavities would release rapidly. His heart would continue to beat for a minute and a half or so. If pressure and oxygen were restored before then, the astronaut might survive.
And what effects would weightlessness have on a man? No one knew exactly, but several possibilities were postulated. Gravity, many experts asserted, was necessary for some body organs to function. Without it, eyeballs might explode or vision might blur, the heart might stop beating, esophageal muscles might constrict, the digestive system might shut down, the vestibular system of the inner ear might malfunction and cause extreme dizziness and nausea, or sleepiness might occur. The brain might simply cease to function.
And could an astronaut survive the fierce gravitational forces of acceleration and deceleration during liftoff and reentry and remain conscious without suffering any lasting damage? What would be the effects of space radiation unfiltered by the Earth’s atmosphere? Perhaps it would burn retinas and skin, mutate DNA, sterilize gonads. A burst of deadly radiation from a solar flare might kill an astronaut. And heaven help him if he had a bout of space-sickness while wearing a pressurized spacesuit and helmet. Without gravity, the vomit would remain near his mouth and nose; there would be no way to wipe it away, and with every breath he would inhale more until he drowned—hardly a heroic death.
These fears and others consumed the medical community. And if the physiological dangers weren’t enough, there were the psychological ones as well. An astronaut in a confined space for an extended period might become depressed and take his life. He might even succumb to what some psychologists called the breakaway phenomenon (a sense of being completely cut off from everyone on the planet) and decide not to return to Earth. Others suggested that the spaceman might faint or even die of fright during the flight. Some thought that he might go berserk.
There were other worries: meteors large enough to puncture a spacecraft’s hull, extreme noise or vibration strong enough to rip a man’s organs loose. All possibilities were carefully considered and researched. The prime concern of each mission would always be the safety of the astronaut, and toward that end, each system was refined to a point never before seen in any machine, vehicular or otherwise, from the planning and designing stages to production, training, and monitoring. The engineers gave the old term redundancy new meaning. Virtually every system—electrical, environmental, navigation, and so on—was backed up two and sometimes three times. The oxygen system, for example: If an astronaut’s suit failed him in flight, he could open his faceplate and breathe the cabin’s pressurized air, which was 100 percent oxygen (unlike the Earth’s atmosphere, which is 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, and 1 percent other gases). If that failed, an emergency supply of oxygen—about eighty minutes of breathing time—was available; that would keep him alive long enough to finish an orbit and make an emergency reentry. If all three systems failed, he would be dead within minutes.
And though a mission might last only fifteen minutes, wherever possible, every unit was tested ten to a hundred times longer than that, until its reliability could be statistically measured and predicted to the nth degree. As von Braun described it:
A methodology was created to assess each part with a demonstrated reliability figure, such as 0.9999998. Total rocket reliability would then be the product of all these parts’ reliabilities and had to remain above the figure of 0.990, or 99 percent.
Reliability of each part and redundancy in each system became central to NASA’s culture. But not every system could be backed up, and no matter how well components were made or how rigorously they were tested, they occasionally failed, and 99 percent is not complete reliability.
The astronauts were supposed to be little more than passengers in a fully automated system; in this grand experiment, they were glorified guinea pigs or, at most, the final backup in emergencies. But after the press conference, the seven test pilots became national celebrities, and they realized they could use their celebrity to effect change in the program’s hardware and in their role in the mission. Since the men couldn’t be replaced without national embarrassment, their popularity gave them the power to make demands. The capsule was designed to fly without a man—at least at first—but the seven test pilots did their damnedest to change that.
In May 1959, the astronauts visited the McDonnell plant in San Diego to inspect a mock-up Mercury capsule that was radically different from any craft they had ever flown. Deke Slayton stated the obvious: “The thing ain’t got no wings!” They were surprised to find that there was no front window, just two small portholes that were too far away from the astronaut to be useful. Pilots needed a front window—at least, they had since Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic without one and had to use a periscope to see around his extra-large fuel tank—and after they insisted, one was added, though it wouldn’t be available for the first mission. Another problem was the door—there wasn’t one, or not one that could be opened from the inside, since the hatch would be welded shut after the astronaut wedged himself into the capsule. That was fine for the structural integrity of the spacecraft but not for the man inside, especially if he wanted to egress quickly. So the hatch was redesigned with explosive bolts that allowed the astronaut to open it should that become necessary. There were other design problems the astronauts noted—the instrument panel and switch accessibility, for instance—that led to major changes. But the Seven didn’t agree on everything. For example, Deke Slayton didn’t like the three-axis attitude-control stick, which enabled a pilot to manage yaw, pitch, and roll with one hand. Slayton lobbied for an aircraft’s stick-and-rudder foot pedals, but the other astronauts didn’t join him, so the hand controller stayed.
Weight issues, and the brevity of the first few flights, dictated a meager reserve-fuel capacity. No one expected that to be a problem.
One factor dominated all spacecraft-design decisions and always would: the unforgiving equation involving weight, gravity, and thrust. The Atlas, which would be used for orbital missions, was over four times more powerful than the Redstone, but it would not be available for manned use for some time. The Redstone’s limited thrust of eighty thousand pounds dictated that the capsule be small and relatively light. Every pound, every ounce, was important.
The Mercury Seven began training, and so did another group of American spacefarers. They underwent similar tests, and they would face the same mortal dangers, though they hadn’t volunteered.
The job of astronaut was hazardous, but it was safer than the job of astrochimp. In the earliest days of space exploration, other life-forms had been hurled into the void atop primitive boosters: rabbits, mice, fruit flies, and so on. But as it became increasingly clear that Homo sapiens would at some point journey into space, nonhuman simians quickly became the standard passengers. (In Russia, dogs preceded humans, since they were frequent medical-research subjects and easier to work with than chimps.) Many nonhuman spacefarers had to give their lives for their hominid cousins before a spacecraft was officially “man-rated”—that is, deemed safe to transport a human into space and back to Earth.
The army had been investigating the biological effects of space travel on primates since April 1948, when a small rhesus named Albert was rocketed thirty-nine miles into the atmosphere in a capsule aboard one of von Braun’s V-2s; his oxygen supply failed, and he suffocated. The next year, in June 1949, another rhesus, Albert II, rode a rocket eighty-three miles into the stratosphere—technically becoming the first Earthling in space—and survived, at least long enough to die on impact after a parachute failure. In September 1949, Albert III, a cynomolgus monkey, died when his V-2 exploded at thirty-five thousand feet, and in December, Albert IV, another rhesus, perished on impact after another parachute failure, which was also what happened to Albert V in April 1951.
Not until September 1951 did a primate launched into space survive the impact. A rhesus named Albert VI and eleven mice shipmates reached an altitude of forty-five miles and returned safely, though Albert VI died two hours later, as did two of the mice, from overheating in the sealed capsule while waiting for their recovery team. Eight months later, two cynomolgus monkeys named Patricia and Mike survived a quick jaunt fifteen miles into the atmosphere.
By that time, two Russian dogs had survived suborbital flights and returned to Earth safely. The Soviets flew so many animals that one orbital launch, in August 1960, carried two dogs, a rabbit, forty-two mice, two rats, many flies, and several plants and fungi. (One NASA engineer called it “the herd shot ’round the world.”) They all survived the journey.
After the Mercury project became official, monkeys continued to be sent into space in capsules atop various rockets, and most survived; in May 1959, aboard a Jupiter, Able, a rhesus monkey, and Baker, a squirrel monkey, penetrated three hundred miles into space and survived thirty-eight g’s during deceleration. The Mercury capsule and its planned booster, von Braun’s Redstone, would be next.
A few days after their April 1959 press conference, America’s human astronauts reported for training to Langley Research Center—a large, ordinary-looking World War I–era building they shared with the Space Task Group. They were given a single large office to use; seven steel desks and chairs were wedged into it in a U shape. Their nineteen-year-old secretary sat at a desk outside. Most of her job consisted of handling their mail, a task that would soon become overwhelming due to the sheer volume of it.
For the rest of 1959, the men took crash courses in everything space-related. These were airplane pilots who knew little about rockets and missiles. They received graduate-level instruction from scientists and engineers on astronomy, meteorology, geography, aviation biology, physiology, rocketry, and more. None of their teachers had ever taught astronauts before, so the lectures were wide-ranging, though the basic format drew heavily from traditional flight training and test-pilot methods. They spent endless hours becoming familiar with every phase of their spacecraft’s planned flight and every one of its systems. Because the actual vehicles had not yet been built, the astronauts had to settle for reviewing design drawings and blueprints. Eventually the Mercury Seven would employ simulators, but since no one knew what the controls of their spacecraft would look like, they couldn’t practice flying it, so most of their early training was environmental rather than procedural.
Scientists attempted to familiarize the men with various conditions of spaceflight, such as weightlessness, heat, pressure, acceleration and deceleration forces—in short, every aspect of what an astronaut might experience during a ride on a rocket into space. Training sessions involved heat and pressure chambers and many hours riding the unforgiving centrifuge, in which they endured as many as sixteen g’s and learned techniques to build up their tolerance. Another training rig was a gimbaled, caged whirligig with the ominous acronym MASTIF (Multiple-Axis Space Test Inertia Facility). It consisted of three cages made of aluminum tubes, one inside the other and each hinged to the next, that rotated independently and on different axes. This fiendish device could spin a man at thirty revolutions a minute in three axes, and testing had determined a human tolerance of about thirty seconds, beyond which even the most experienced pilot would toss his cookies. A red “chicken switch” button set off a loud klaxon that told technicians to kill the machine. One ride on the MASTIF was enough for the Seven—“You even felt like getting sick if you just stood there and watched another astronaut take his turn,” said Gus Grissom. Then there was the Slow Rotating Room, designed to accustom its occupants to a spinning spacecraft. Finally, they spent valuable time learning to deal with weightlessness while flying in a zero-gravity-inducing ballistic parabola in an F-100 trainer. C-130 and C-135 cargo planes could do the trick for thirty seconds, allowing them to float and do flips in the much larger cabin cleared out for just that purpose. Those sessions, at least, were pain-free and enjoyable.
The men were expected to keep themselves in top physical shape but were not told how to do it, so each one decided on his own regimen. John Glenn ran every morning—he felt he had to, to combat a weight problem. Scott Carpenter lifted barbells and exercised on a trampoline. Wally Schirra and Gus Grissom played a lot of handball, and the others joined in now and then, with Alan Shepard emerging as the best player. A quick, strenuous game of handball would become the favorite workout of the astronaut corps.
Although NASA employed a team of physicians, a twenty-three-year-old air force nurse named Dee O’Hara was assigned to monitor their health, at first only when they visited Cape Canaveral for a mission, then later on a regular basis. Initially she was intimidated by them—they had become major celebrities, and there were few women in the world of spaceflight—but the astronauts put her at ease right away, and they soon came to trust the always cheerful and very capable O’Hara. Before a flight, she was the only one they would allow to draw their blood. Pilots as a rule avoided doctors—physicians had the power to ground a pilot for any one of a seemingly endless list of reasons—but O’Hara made a deal with the astronauts: if one of them came to her with a medical problem, she would keep it private unless it compromised a mission.
Since there was no guarantee that a spacecraft would end up where it was supposed to when it returned, they also took water-, jungle-, and desert-survival courses in far-flung parts of the world. The survival trips made for great photo ops for Life magazine, which had negotiated a five-hundred-thousand-dollar deal with NASA for exclusive magazine and book rights to the stories of the seven men and their families. The money would be split among them equally over the next three or four years—the length of time the program was estimated to last. This was a boon to the men, who were each being paid only a standard officer’s salary, and would enable them to buy or build houses later.
The Mercury Seven began to spend increasingly longer periods at the production plants contracted to build various components of the Mercury project, not only to attend design briefings and inspect and critique production for improvement, but also to inspire craftsmen and technicians there to the highest levels of workmanship. Grissom, perhaps the most introverted of the Mercury Seven and certainly the most tight-lipped, was present at a gathering of eighteen thousand employees at the Convair plant in San Diego, California, where the Atlas rocket was under construction, and he was asked to say something to the crowd. He walked up to the microphone and said, “Well—do good work!” and then turned and sat down. The workers roared their approval and adopted the phrase as their mission statement. Posters of Grissom captioned with his brief statement were produced, and a huge banner with the words was hung above the plant’s work bay.
Each astronaut was also assigned a specific area of responsibility. Glenn was given cockpit layout, Schirra the pressure suit, and so on. Each would regularly brief the other six on developments in his specialty.
The Seven had barely begun training when they were flown down to Cape Canaveral on May 18 to see their first missile launch—an Atlas, similar to the one that would eventually boost one of them into orbit. A minute after the rocket lifted off and just after it began to nose over toward the horizon, it exploded into a million pieces. It was the fifth straight Atlas failure. The astronauts looked at one another, and Shepard said to Glenn, “Well, I’m glad they got that one out of the way.” In December, only one-third of U.S. satellite-launch attempts reached orbit. That was a fine average in baseball but not encouraging in the field of manned spaceflight.
As a result, the astronauts were less than optimistic about their chances. At a December press conference they were asked about the odds of their coming through alive. Oklahoma-born Gordon Cooper, the youngest one at thirty-two, answered first. “Well,” he drawled, “as the engineers say, barring any unforeseen circumstances, I’d say we’ve got one hundred percent chance of success.” Alan Shepard added, “We might lose the first guy, but the second, third, or fourth would make it.”
In July 1960, when another Atlas exploded soon after liftoff, that booster’s failure rate reached 45 percent. Since the rocket had not met its mission objectives, an exhaustive review of the entire Mercury-Atlas program was undertaken. The Mercury-Redstone program continued, though that too was experiencing delays, which made for bad press. Despite the criticism and the fact that not a single mission had been carried out yet, Gilruth began wondering what would follow Mercury. No one knew for sure. He thought the program might be a dead end, phased out after its three-year goal was achieved. His Space Task Group had some grandiose plans, but nothing had been approved. For now, they all threw themselves into the formidable job ahead of them.
On the other side of the globe, the Russians hadn’t sent a man into space yet, but they continued to earn headlines with various firsts. In September 1959, the space probe Luna 2 was deliberately crashed into the moon, becoming the first man-made object placed there, however violently. Three weeks later, on October 4, another probe, Luna 3, flew around the moon and sent back the first photographs of its far side. The United States was still a distant second in the prestige department, even though outside the Soviet Union, little information about the Russian space program was available. But its director—known only as the Chief Designer to the Russian public and the West—took note of the announcement of the Mercury Seven astronauts and began preparations for his own corps of spacemen.
In mid-November of 1959, von Braun’s old mentor Hermann Oberth, who was now in the United States working as a technical consultant on the Atlas rocket, claimed to have intelligence reports that the Soviets had launched a manned spacecraft in 1958 that crashed, killing the pilot. In December, an Italian news agency announced unconfirmed reports from “most reliable sources” that four Russian cosmonauts, including one woman, had died in spaceflight. A few Soviet academicians promised a manned flight to the moon in the not-too-distant future. That seemed unlikely, but what would come next was anyone’s guess.
Early in January 1961, six chimpanzees and their medical teams and handlers were moved from Holloman Aerospace Medical Center in New Mexico to Cape Canaveral. These Mercury Six primates—four females and two males—were ready, though perhaps not willing, to risk their lives for the sake of American prestige. Over the next several weeks, for hours each day, they were strapped onto small contour couches in mock-ups of the Mercury capsule, and they became accustomed to it and to the timed tasks involving a panel of red, white, and blue lights and two levers that they had been training with at Holloman. Two of them, Chang and Enos, even experienced brief spells of weightlessness on the cargo planes and trained on the centrifuge.
The astronauts had to put up with a lot from their fellow test pilots. Part of the problem was that the men would be flying a capsule requiring little actual piloting, since it would be controlled almost entirely by automatic electronic signals. “Backing up his onboard systems and taking over in the event of malfunction”—that was how one NASA official described the job of astronaut. It sounded far removed from the stick-and-rudder work they prided themselves on, and they had to endure ribbing from other test pilots, who pointed out that they would ride the rocket, not pilot it. “Man in a can,” a popular phrase bandied about, became “Spam in a can.”
The most vociferous critic of the program was America’s best-known test pilot, Chuck Yeager, the man who had broken the sound barrier in an X-1 experimental plane in 1947 and would soon take command of the air force’s test-pilot school at Edwards AFB. He was heard to say that the astronauts were going to have to sweep the monkey shit out of the capsule before they rode it into space. Yeager hadn’t attended college, thus making him ineligible for the program, which might have colored his opinion, and there very well might have been a degree of envy on the part of Yeager and other test pilots over the attention—and the Life magazine money, a hefty twenty-four thousand dollars a year each—the Mercury Seven were receiving. But even the folks at MIT, selected by NASA to develop the capsule’s guidance, navigation, and control systems, cracked jokes about the monkeys: “After the chimp, the chump.” The astronaut trainees tried to shrug off the ridicule, but it rankled. In October 1959, at the annual meeting of the exclusive Society of Experimental Test Pilots, Deke Slayton gave a speech specifically intended to, in his words, “defuse some of this Spam bullshit.” He made the case that experimental test pilots were necessary in spaceflight, since the likelihood of a failure or an emergency would require their experience, knowledge, and quick reactions. The audience gave him a standing ovation.
But the apes made everything worse. Other test pilots sneered at the primates preceding the astronauts in the capsule. If a monkey could do it, they opined, it couldn’t be much of a challenge. Did Charles Lindbergh have a monkey fly the Spirit of St. Louis first? The Mercury Seven were used to flying experimental planes before the kinks had been worked out. The increased hazards involved in a space venture made no difference to them—in their minds, they believed they had risked far greater dangers, not only during test flights but also in wartime combat missions. They understood that the simian experiments were necessary, but they didn’t like it. They would gladly have flown the risky monkey missions themselves, the dangers be damned.
But given the complexities and inherent dangers of spaceflight, the complex calculations necessary for navigation and trajectory, the massive rocket thrust needed for liftoff, the precise in-flight adjustments required, and the perils of reentry, the creators of Mercury had known from the beginning that the spacecraft would be controlled by a group of engineers on the ground who could monitor its many systems. The pilot would be secondary to the engineer, at least for the time being. And the chimp flights would continue.
In the summer of 1960, the astronauts started using a more sophisticated simulator, the Mercury Procedures Trainer, which provided a reasonable facsimile of actual flight in the spacecraft. The trainer featured an exact replica of the cockpit and instrumentation that used state-of-the-art computers to simulate every conceivable in-flight emergency situation—275 separate systems failures, to be exact. To further mimic an actual flight, the astronauts trained in their pressure suits until they could do entire missions with their eyes closed and still not miss flicking the right switch or pushing the right button. Eventually they began practicing in the capsule itself, each spending endless hours on his back strapped onto the contour couch Faget’s team had designed specifically for his body to help him withstand the expected fearsome pressures of liftoff and then reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere. And since there was no urine-collection device in the pressure suit—the first few missions weren’t expected to last more than a quarter of an hour or so, and it hadn’t been deemed necessary—they learned to just let go if necessary and allow their thick underclothing to absorb it.
As the space race became increasingly public and competitive, so did Gilruth’s Space Task Group’s search for engineers, the people who would take the calculations and theories of scientists and turn them into reality. In the summer of 1960, the Space Task Group had seven hundred employees. Two years later, that number would grow to over two thousand. At the same time, NASA was setting up recruitment offices in major cities that would help swell the ranks to sixteen thousand.
Such aggressive efforts were necessary if the Americans were to have any hope of competing with the Russians. At the time, there was such an engineer shortage in America that on one Sunday in 1958, the New York Times ran 728 want ads for engineers and scientists, and most of the ads were for multiple openings. Across the board, these missile, aircraft, and electronics companies lured new grads with good salaries, bonuses, and various amenities.
But it was hard to beat the appeal of NASA, whose message, sometimes in these exact words, was “We’re going to the moon. Want to come along?” NASA recruited on college campuses, by word of mouth, and through referrals and ads in trade journals like Aviation Week and Missiles and Rockets. “Destination Moon!” shouted one such ad, and another began “You can be sure to play an important part in the exploration of space when you join NASA.” Few engineers could resist this siren call. For a generation of young men raised on Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon; the smart, hard science fiction that began appearing in the forties; the sci-fi films of the fifties; and, of course, the writings and appearances of von Braun in books, magazines, and TV, it was nearly impossible to walk away from NASA. But even without the lure of romance, in the old-fashioned sense of adventure, the attraction was immense. The pay there was decent, around five thousand dollars for a young man with an aeronautical engineering degree. That was less than the private industry paid but still a good starting salary for a young, single college grad, especially a small-town boy from a midwestern school, as so many of them were, kids whose families didn’t have much money and who had had to work hard to afford college. But more important, the program promised to be the largest engineering project since the Panama Canal, and a successful flight to the moon would be the greatest technological achievement in history.
It didn’t take the kids fresh out of college long to figure out the culture of NASA, which was sink-or-swim—the ones who didn’t blend in or who didn’t learn fast enough were there one day and gone the next.
Early on, the engineers ran into the astronauts quite often. One young man had been miserably pursuing his master’s degree when he noticed a NASA recruiting booth in the library. He signed up, quit school, and, four months later, after background checks, was told to report to Cape Canaveral. At the end of his first day, one of his co-workers drove him over to see a simulator, and the new hire was invited to take a spin. He did. When he climbed out, everyone was gone except Gus Grissom, who offered him a ride back to the main building. They jumped in Grissom’s new blue Corvette and roared off half a mile up a gravel road at eighty-five miles an hour. Then the astronaut veered onto a two-lane paved road and floored it to a hundred and twenty. He turned to the engineer with a grin and said, “Are you having a good time?” Then he entered the freeway and pushed it to a hundred and forty. Just having fun with the new guy.
As America’s seven instant heroes took a crash course in the brand-new job of astronaut, other areas of the program worked through various problems and difficulties. After more than a year of political infighting between the air force and the army—the latter reluctant to give up its Germans, who had been anointed great patriots after the successful Explorer launch—and of lobbying by NASA administrator T. Keith Glennan, the genteel former president of the highly regarded Case Institute of Technology, Eisenhower finally approved the Redstone Arsenal’s transfer. Von Braun would be director, of course, and though his administrative heads were American-born, all of his sixteen technical department leaders had worked with him since Peenemünde except for one who had been a Luftwaffe pilot during the war. Many of the German specialists had been wooed by private industries, most of them defense-oriented, but they were happy at Huntsville and intensely loyal to von Braun, their savior. He had rescued them from almost certain death and brought them to the promised land to prosper and devote their lives to their truest love—rocketry. They all felt the same way he did about spaceflight. “We’d really like to go to the moon instead of aiming at puny targets two hundred miles away,” one said, off the record.
Von Braun had initially considered NASA a “baby agency” that wouldn’t be around for long, and he seemed to be favoring the air force as his next employer. “All I really want is a rich uncle,” he told a colleague. The air force was not yielding the high ground easily. Why shouldn’t it handle the exploration of space, which was after all just an extension of the airspace it already had dominion over? Von Braun’s army team at Huntsville had been working on design studies for a super-booster since the spring of 1957, six months before Sputnik was launched. Von Braun was sure of America’s future among the stars and confident there would be a need for a rocket powerful enough to launch heavy payloads—astronauts, probes, space-station components, and so forth—into space. Sputnik’s launch had gotten those plans funded in August of 1958. But when Saturn’s rising costs led to rumors of the project’s cancellation and the likely loss of 75 percent of the Redstone Arsenal’s jobs, NASA suddenly became a much more attractive home. Von Braun had come around, and when Eisenhower finally approved the transfer of his team and its facilities, he was convinced it was the right decision and that NASA would be well financed. Von Braun breathed easier in January of 1960, when his Saturn became a national priority and Eisenhower reluctantly agreed to a large increase in the booster’s budget.
On July 1, 1960, the Redstone Arsenal was renamed the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, after the chief of staff of the army under Roosevelt and Truman. Finally, von Braun and his rocketeers would be free of military supervision—in his words, they’d be working on “spaceflight for spaceflight’s sake.” Although some at NASA were cool to von Braun—Chris Kraft despised his “Teutonic arrogance” and his celebrity, and the two had almost come to blows at a party—Gilruth was glad to have him, or at least have his rocketry expertise. Privately, he told Kraft, “He doesn’t care what flag he fights for.” (After a few clashes early on, as each man jockeyed for more control within NASA, von Braun and Kraft worked well together and came to respect each other. But Gilruth never quite accepted the former SS member; after a few drinks, he would complain about “our damned Nazi.”)
The astronauts, for their part, overlooked their former enemy’s equivocal allegiance. Impressed with his passion for manned spaceflight and won over by his charisma, they had bonded with von Braun on a visit to Huntsville just a few months after their selection. He had only recently given up a longtime desire to voyage into space himself, and he took a liking to these men who would go in his place.
As the space program evolved, the astronauts endured long workdays, and much of their time was spent on the road. They frequently traveled and trained together, except for the week or so each month that they devoted to keeping up with their specific areas of responsibility. It was a busy schedule, and it would get even busier, for politicians, contractors, businessmen, and just about everyone else wanted to be seen with them, so the astronauts tried to oblige. Sometimes that meant accommodating a congressman or business leader supportive of the program; at the request of a Missouri senator, Scott Carpenter once appeared at a supermarket opening in St. Louis. The astronauts quickly became popular guest speakers for civic groups, and NASA’s public relations department was eager to get the word out, so they developed a schedule: they would take turns, each astronaut spending a week at a time giving the same old speech and answering the same questions.
But “wine, women, and song” was part of the test-pilot credo, so the men managed to make time for after-hours carousing and, often, companionship, and since they were household names and oozed testosterone, they had no problem finding companions. John Glenn, married since 1943 to pretty, dark-haired Annie Castor, whom he had known since they were toddlers in the same playpen, resisted those temptations, but most of the others didn’t. And when a local car dealer offered them all new Corvettes at ridiculously low lease prices, Glenn declined and opted for a station wagon instead. Over the next few years, stories of Shepard, Grissom, and Cooper racing their sports cars on the two-lane roads around Cape Canaveral, up and down Highway A1A, and through the small burg of Cocoa Beach, became legendary. (So did tales of their romantic entanglements.) When people saw a square-jawed guy in his mid-thirties wearing a short-sleeved Ban-Lon knit shirt and aviator sunglasses zoom past them going way above the speed limit, they knew they’d just gotten a glimpse of Cape royalty.
Before the air force began using the Cape as a missile-testing range in 1950, Cocoa Beach had been a sleepy little town with a few bars and restaurants. Even by 1959, the first year of the Mercury program, there were only a few decent-size motels in Cocoa Beach, and the Seven would often stay at the ninety-nine-room Starlite. It featured a coffee shop, a restaurant, and the space-themed Starlite Lounge, a far cry from the austere crew quarters and bunk beds on the second floor of the Cape’s Hangar S, the structure originally built for Vanguard that had been transferred to the Space Task Group. The Starlite’s manager, a gregarious Auschwitz survivor named Henri Landwirth, befriended the astronauts and went out of his way to indulge them and their friends. (When Bob Gilruth stayed there for the early launches, Landwirth made sure there was a pitcher of Beefeater martinis in his room at the end of the day.)
The motel quickly became Astronaut Central, attracting reporters, women, and anyone who wanted to get a glimpse of genuine American heroes before one of them got blown to bits atop a military rocket. Landwirth would later refer to the festive goings-on as “a giant fraternity party.” The fact that he hired the most attractive waitresses he could find and that women hung around the large pool by day and the lounge by night hoping to meet an astronaut didn’t hurt the Starlite’s popularity. But late in 1959, when new owners began making big changes at the motel, Landwirth resigned and helped open a Holiday Inn nearby. All of the astronauts said they’d follow him to his new place of business, on one condition—that he would guarantee them rooms if they were in town. He agreed, so Astronaut Central, along with just about everyone associated with the Mercury project, moved to the Holiday Inn.
Glenn was older and perhaps more mature than the rest of the Mercury Seven, and he was worried that one big slipup would endanger the entire program, which still had more than its share of doubters in the government. Some scientists and congressmen insisted that human space exploration was too expensive and that using robots and machines would be safer, cheaper, and more effective. Any ammunition against the astronauts—the sullying of their public image, perhaps—might be used to cancel the Mercury project, which would sound the death knell for the advancement of manned flights. But most of the astronauts dismissed Glenn’s worries. Only Carpenter sided with Glenn, as he did on most subjects. It wasn’t long before the Mercury Seven became, at least away from the public eye, the Mercury Five and Two.
Things came to a head in December 1960, when Glenn was awakened by a two a.m. phone call in San Diego. It was a NASA public affairs spokesman begging for his help in convincing a West Coast paper not to publish compromising photos involving another astronaut. Glenn succeeded in doing that by appealing to the newspaper staff’s patriotism. Back at Langley, Glenn called a closed-door meeting of the Mercury Seven and read his comrades the riot act. He said the next screwup could blow it for all of them. The program meant too much to the country, he told them, “to see it jeopardized by anyone who couldn’t keep his pants zipped.”
All the men except Carpenter told Glenn to mind his own business.
Dwight Eisenhower had his reasons for never warming to the idea of manned space exploration. In addition to the enormous costs projected, which would prevent him from balancing the budget, he was leery of the potential military involvement. Till the end of his administration, he was adamant that there was no need for a space race or something as far-fetched as a moon program. He hadn’t expected much out of NASA, and he wanted to spend as little on it as possible. Toward that end, he cut the agency’s budget; the money available would barely support Mercury, and nothing beyond. Only a last-minute intercession by Glennan and his deputy administrator Hugh Dryden kept Eisenhower from announcing in his final State of the Union address that the nation would be abandoning manned space exploration after the Mercury program’s first orbital flight. In the closing months of 1960, Eisenhower withheld funds needed for feasibility studies on a Mercury follow-up program and for further work on the upper stages of von Braun’s Saturn booster. The future of manned spaceflight, so dependent on funding, looked bleak, particularly if the Republicans won the upcoming election.
In November 1960, Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard M. Nixon, lost a closely contested presidential race to a young, charismatic senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. A World War II hero, Kennedy, among his many other accomplishments, had written (albeit with significant help from his speechwriter Theodore Sorensen) a bestseller entitled Profiles in Courage, a book about decisive moments in American history.
One of the campaign issues that redounded to John F. Kennedy’s advantage and may have decided the election was the ginned-up “missile gap.” In truth, there was no such thing—or if there was, it was actually in America’s favor—but Kennedy’s repeated use of the term persuaded much of the electorate that the Eisenhower administration was weak on defense and that Nixon would be too. American launch failures after Sputnik, exaggerated public claims by the Soviets of their missile capabilities, and inflated U.S. Air Force estimates of the number of Russian weapons seemed to strengthen the assertion. After Kennedy’s election, the term missile gap, and the concept, faded away.
At the time, Kennedy wasn’t much interested in space, but his vice president, Lyndon Johnson—who had been instrumental in the creation of NASA—was, and Kennedy put him in charge of the space program.
NASA’s aim was to get a man into orbit as soon as possible. After that, as far as the public knew, plans were vague. But by January 1960, the higher-ups at NASA had concluded that the long-term goal after Mercury should be getting a man on the moon—or at least in an orbit around it. Even before the agency’s formation, Gilruth’s Space Task Group had focused on what should follow Mercury, and all of NASA’s field centers had begun research toward that goal. But they had been unable to proceed without executive approval, and Eisenhower’s aim to balance the budget precluded any such frivolous expenses. As a result, the plans were limited to feasibility and design studies. Then, on July 29, 1960, NASA announced an ambitious program involving a three-man spaceship very different from Mercury. This new spacecraft was to be larger, more powerful, and maneuverable, capable of circling the Earth and perhaps flying around the moon; it was seen as an intermediate step toward the establishment of a permanent manned space station above the Earth that “should lead ultimately toward manned landings on the moon and the planets.” When it was made public, the idea wasn’t much more than a vague concept, without capital or contracts. And if the president didn’t release the funds needed to develop something of substance, it would remain that way.
Still, a name had been chosen for the as-yet-undesigned spacecraft’s project. Abe Silverstein, head of the Office of Space Flight Programs, had come up with Mercury a year earlier, and he took it upon himself to name this project also. Like most of the names for American space projects, it would come from the world of mythology, and after scouring lists of ancient deities, Silverstein settled on one. At lunch with Gilruth, Faget, and Charles Donlan, Gilruth’s deputy director, he tried it out on them. They all liked it, so the program was officially named for the Greek god of music, medicine, and knowledge, a deity often identified with Helios, whose horse-drawn chariot transported the sun across the sky: Apollo.