With Mercury we are using a device that has to work nearly perfectly the first time or somebody is taking a one-way trip.
Walt Williams, Mercury Operations Director
Besides being older than the other six astronaut trainees, John Glenn had more combat experience. He had flown fifty-nine ground-support missions in the South Pacific during World War II and another sixty-three in Korea, where he shot down three MiGs in the last nine days of the war. Glenn was one hell of a pilot. He had been known to fly his plane up alongside another Marine’s, slip his wing under the other plane’s, and tap it gently. Ted Williams, the legendary baseball player who flew as Glenn’s wingman in Korea, once said, “The man is crazy.” The “Clean Marine,” as the press dubbed him, had settled down since then, and he wasn’t the engineer that Gus Grissom or Wally Schirra was, but he could still fly anything with wings better than almost anyone else.
He was also a master of the art of sniveling. The term was used among pilots to describe “maneuvering”—working yourself into a program or flight whether it was your job or not. In a sense, Glenn had sniveled his way into the Mercury program without even knowing he was doing it. One of the requirements was a college degree, which he didn’t have—after Pearl Harbor was hit, he had quit college to enlist—and Glenn was dropped from the pool of candidates. But a former Marine Corps officer showed NASA’s selection board Glenn’s academic records, which included a surplus of credits from night school and his technical flight-test reports. Convinced that Glenn had more than the equivalent of a college degree, the administrators put him back on the list.
But his latest attempt at sniveling had been a failure.
Since their selection, all seven of the astronauts had vied to pilot the first flight into space. They worked well as a team, but each man thought he was the best and should be the first one to go up. That confidence—not arrogance, but a hard-earned faith in his own abilities—was hardwired into every test pilot, especially these seven: “Maybe just a little arrogance,” Glenn would write later.
After the April 9, 1959, press conference to introduce the astronauts to the world, Glenn had decided to move to Langley AFB, where Mercury was located, and live there Monday through Friday so he could better focus on the program. While the other six commuted from their nearby homes, he returned to his family in Arlington, a hundred and eighty miles away, only on the weekends. To make up for his lack of engineering experience, he worked diligently to master the Mercury systems. He spent more time on the testing programs than the others, and his scores in most cases were slightly higher. He ran two miles before breakfast every day to lose twenty-five pounds and get himself into his best shape ever. As the oldest astronaut—thirty-seven at selection—Glenn felt he had to train harder than the others, and he did.
Although all of the Mercury Seven lived for competition, only one was as competitive as Glenn—Alan Shepard. As a kid, he’d been slow and scrawny, and he’d had to fight to keep up with others. He hadn’t lost any of that scrappiness. When he saw how Glenn charmed the press and the public and how his hard work impressed the NASA brass, he decided to beat Glenn at his own game. If Glenn ran two miles every morning, so would he. Shepard started lifting weights, and he even quit smoking for a while. Glenn may have been the smoothest at that first press conference, and his open, smiling freckled face was certainly more camera-friendly than Shepard’s snaggletoothed, slightly bug-eyed visage. But Shepard, despite a personal loathing for the media, strove to improve his relations with journalists, and soon he could work a press conference as well as Glenn. That competitive spirit carried into the classroom and every training exercise. No one studied more or worked harder than Shepard, and he was focused. “You tell him one time, and that was it,” recalled one engineer. “He was really sharp.” And he was not shy about his ambition. When a reporter asked him why he wanted to be the first man in space, his answer—“I want to be first because I want to be first”—was a marvel of tautology. Glenn was a fierce competitor, but Shepard was cutthroat. He would do anything to fly the first mission.
Shepard’s hard work paid off. Early in 1961, Bob Gilruth called the seven astronauts together in their shared Langley office and announced that Al Shepard—later nicknamed the Ice Commander for the colder side of his Janus-like personality—was to pilot the first flight. The second would go to Grissom and the third to Glenn, who would also back up the first two missions. Six men were disappointed, four of them more than the other two. But each of them walked over to Shepard, shook his hand, and congratulated him. Shepard struggled to keep a huge grin off his face.
The choices would be kept secret from the press and the public until just before the first mission. The media was told that one of these three would be picked for the first flight, which created some awkwardness between them and the other astronauts, whom the press dubbed “the Forgotten Four.” But the Clean Marine refused to accept his third-place finish. The next day, he wrote Gilruth a letter lobbying for a change—he felt he was the better choice. The Space Task Group director was unmoved and unpersuaded, and he ignored Glenn’s plea. Inconsolable, Glenn began to withdraw into himself. “He was real, real shook,” remembered an acquaintance. “It was the only thing Johnny ever lost in his life.” It wasn’t until his next-door neighbor, a close friend, told him his funk was hurting his family that he pulled out of it—somewhat. He swallowed his pride, shook off his disappointment or at least managed to hide it, and did the best job he could of backing up Shepard.
But the Mercury-Redstone was still experiencing delays, and its plodding progress elicited criticism from several quarters. At the program’s first unmanned launch on November 21, 1960, Faget and the Seven had watched from an outside viewing area at the Cape. In the blockhouse, with its thick concrete walls and slot windows, von Braun joined several members of his German team and a mix of former army technicians and booster contractors as they prepared to launch. Save for a few brief holds to fix minor problems, the countdown went smoothly. When the clock reached zero, the booster lifted off amid heavy clouds of smoke. Everyone in the viewing area was impressed at how quickly the Redstone accelerated and disappeared. “My God, that was fast!” said Faget, but when the smoke cleared, the rocket was still there. It had risen about four inches from the launchpad, but then the engine had shut off, and the rocket had settled back unsteadily on its fins on the launch cradle. The only thing that had launched was the escape tower, which self-destructed four thousand feet in the air. Mechanics and technicians near the launchpad ran to hide under trucks and behind cars as debris rained to the ground as far away as a quarter of a mile from the viewing area.
In the blockhouse, the frantic Germans reverted to their native language as they tried to find out what happened. They communicated with a German booster engineer in the control center. Flight director Chris Kraft, a man with little patience for anything less than perfection, was not happy with how the first mission had gone; just about everyone had been working heavy overtime for months to get ready, and it certainly hadn’t been his team’s fault. He stormed over to the engineer, ripped his headphones out of the console jack, and yelled, “Talk to me, dammit!”
The cause of the misfire was soon found and fixed. But there was still plenty of work to do before the Mercury-Redstone was ready to carry a man into space. Amid growing concerns and pressure from government officials and the press, Gilruth insisted there wouldn’t be a manned flight until it was safe, but privately, he was worried. “If we get those first three guys back alive, we’re going to be damn lucky,” he told one of his engineers. A month later, on December 20, they finally achieved a successful unmanned mission.
On January 31, 1961, the final Mercury-Redstone suborbital flight carrying a primate, the charismatic young Ham, was launched. (The thirty-seven-pound chimpanzee’s original name was Chang; it was changed to Ham, an acronym for Holloman Aerospace Medical, and the name would be released only if he returned to Earth alive.) Ham was strapped into a Mercury capsule atop a Redstone rocket and launched into space. He survived despite several mishaps with the rocket and with Ham’s protocol; he experienced sixteen g’s, twice as many as expected, and instead of getting banana pellets when he pulled the correct levers of a psychomotor box in sequence with cueing lights, he received mild electrical shocks. This continued until splashdown, when water began leaking into the capsule. By the time the recovery copters fished the half-drowned chimp out of the sinking spacecraft, Ham was not in a good mood. But the life-support systems had worked fine, and the mission was deemed a success. Ham’s sixteen-and-a-half-minute whirl showed that manned spaceflight was possible and that pulse and respiration rates and blood pressure were not adversely affected by weightlessness or under heavy g’s.
The successful mission also meant that Ham, an immigrant from Cameroon, was the first hominid—and the first American—in space. A newspaper cartoon at the time portrayed a pair of apes walking away from a successful spaceflight. One says to the other: “I think we’re behind the Russians but slightly ahead of the Americans.” Which they were, thanks to Ham.
Ham’s human counterpart, Al Shepard, was also ready. He’d been ready for a while, spending many hours on the various procedure trainers and simulators. He’d flown a hundred and twenty simulated flights, working through every possible emergency and failure mode and learning to cope with them all. He’d also endured more time on the malevolent MASTIF, six hours and ten minutes, than anyone else. Glenn, too, was ready if need be—over the previous three months, he’d been Shepard’s training partner and shadow, and the two had achieved a mutual respect and even friendship, though Shepard still liked to tease Glenn by calling him “my backup.”
The two astronauts might have been prepared for the real thing, but Wernher von Braun’s team at Huntsville was not. Ham’s Mercury-Redstone had flown much higher and farther downrange than planned. Over the objections of Gilruth and most of his staff—including the astronauts—the conservative von Braun insisted on an additional unmanned flight. On March 24, 1961, it launched successfully, which officially made the Mercury-Redstone “man-rated.” But it pushed Shepard’s mission to early May.
By the end of February 1961, the Americans appeared to have drawn even with the Russians in the space race. After the program had repeatedly failed to attain its mission objectives, the schedule had slipped by a year, and the Mercury-Atlas program had undergone an exhaustive review over the past six months. Finally, three weeks after Ham’s Redstone flight, a successful Atlas flight on February 21 boosted not only the Mercury capsule but the spirits of everyone in the Space Task Group. Since Kennedy’s first days in office the previous month, rumors had swirled that the Mercury project—still considered a stunt by some in Washington—would be canceled or somehow handed over to the Pentagon. An in-depth examination of the program in April by a presidential committee had not improved morale. But the Atlas flight, combined with the Russian failures of one Sputnik in December 1960 and two more in February 1961, had NASA flying high and looking forward to putting the first man in space in just a few months.
On April 12, 1961, from a top secret cosmodrome on the desolate steppes of southern Kazakhstan, thirteen hundred miles southeast of Moscow, a young Soviet air force lieutenant named Yuri Gagarin was boosted into space. The cosmodrome’s name, Baikonur, was deliberately misleading for security reasons. A real mining town of Baikonur was two hundred miles to the northeast; the rocket complex was actually near Tyuratam, a small village with a convenient rail station. Despite the ruse, the United States had known of the complex since 1957, when an American U-2 spy plane had discovered it.
In a type of spherical spacecraft called Vostok (“East”), Gagarin not only traveled beyond Earth’s atmosphere but orbited the planet. The sphere shape was chosen for its inherent dynamic stability, though that required it to be completely covered with an ablative heat shield. The stocky Gagarin was the son of a peasant farmer and of pure Russian stock—the better to trumpet the superiority of the ordinary socialist worker. Another reason he was picked was his height; the five-foot-two pilot could eject safely through the hatch, the cover of which would be blown clear of the spaceship just two seconds before ejection.
Gagarin had been chosen from a half a dozen cosmonaut candidates. He was less than four years out of flight school and had only two hundred and thirty flight hours under his belt, and he was a passenger in every sense of the word during his 108-minute ride; the entire mission was controlled from the ground and automatically. There were manual controls, but the numeric code to unlock them was placed onboard in an envelope to be opened only in an emergency, since Gagarin’s superiors weren’t sure how a human would react to extended weightlessness. He didn’t need the instructions, but because his capsule came down over land, Gagarin ejected at about twenty thousand feet and parachuted the rest of the way, a detail that would remain hidden until 1971. (The French organization that judged and maintained world aeronautical records required a pilot to land with his craft for the flight to be considered official, and the group did certify the flight.) And as with all previous Soviet rocket launches, the flight was kept secret until after the fact, when it was announced triumphantly. Major Gagarin—he was promoted even before his capsule landed—would soon embark on a worldwide publicity tour of non-aligned nations to help persuade them to hitch their wagons to the superior Soviet star.
America’s reputation was further damaged by the response of Colonel John “Shorty” Powers, Mercury’s press officer, when he was awakened in the middle of the night by a reporter calling for a response to the Gagarin flight. “We don’t know anything about it,” Powers snapped. “We’re all asleep down here!” Everyone at NASA had been working long hours, most of them without a day off, but Powers’s groggy response gave the wrong idea when it was paraphrased in a headline the next day: “Soviets Send Man into Space. Spokesman Says U.S. Asleep.”
The manned mission shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Over the previous eleven months, the USSR had released details of five orbital flights, all carrying some kind of biological specimens ranging from mice to guinea pigs to dogs—and, on the final two, mannequins. To anyone paying attention, the Soviets’ goal was obvious.
The United States officially congratulated the Soviet Union, but Shepard and the other astronauts were furious. Not only had they been beaten into space, but Gagarin’s flight was an extraordinary propaganda coup, producing roughly the same effect on the world and on the American public as Sputnik had. It was another momentous first for the USSR—not only the first man in space, but the first to orbit the Earth. NASA was several flights away from that—at least a year. But the Russians had already set their sights much higher. One of their leading scientists was quoted as saying that the flight “completes halfway the effort of sending man to the moon,” and Gagarin echoed that. Who knew what Soviet space “first” would occur next?
No one in the free world did. The Soviet program, completely military, operated behind a veil of secrecy. Information about it was maddeningly meager, since little of it was conducted out in the open, and few details were released—and when they were, it was only after a successful flight. Occasional rumors made their way through the Iron Curtain, sometimes through so many informants that the final intelligence was highly questionable. Not even the Russian people knew much about their space program or could say where it was located, and few outside the program knew who headed it. His name was Sergei Korolev, and his position corresponded roughly with von Braun’s. The Soviets feared assassination attempts from the West, and so Korolev and his most valuable assistants were kept anonymous. He was referred to only as Chief Designer in press stories. The U.S. intelligence community knew little more; a few fragmentary conversations intercepted when he called his office from his car had yielded nothing substantive.
Korolev’s route to becoming Chief Designer had been a rough one. Born in 1907, he had been a brilliant young aviation and rocket engineer; he had founded the premier Soviet rocketry group in 1931 and seen it taken over by the military in 1933. He continued his work with rockets, specializing in design, but in 1938 he was found guilty of trumped-up charges of treason and disruptive activities. After severe beatings and torture, he was persuaded to confess and sentenced to ten years of hard labor—a victim of Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge. He spent six years in the Soviet prison system, including a stint in a Siberian labor camp, where starvation almost killed him and scurvy resulted in most of his teeth falling out. But when World War II began and missile development became a national priority, he was released with the rest of the unexecuted rocket specialists and commissioned a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet army; his country needed his expertise. In 1945 he was sent to Germany to evaluate the V-2 work done by von Braun’s rocket team. The Soviets co-opted those rocketeers who hadn’t aligned themselves with the United States. The Germans moved to the USSR, but after five years, the Soviets had learned all they could from them, and they sent them packing. A few years later, Korolev was appointed to lead the Soviet space program. Like von Braun, he had a genius for management and strategy and a knack for inspiring his people to believe they could do anything if they worked hard enough.
In 1953, soon after Nikita Khrushchev came to power after Joseph Stalin’s fatal stroke in March, Korolev met him to discuss his space plans. For all Khrushchev’s outward rusticity, he was intellectually curious, and Korolev secured his support—as long as it didn’t interfere with priority number one: the safety of the Soviet people. The success of Sputnik had further solidified Khrushchev’s power.
The Sputniks and Lunas might not have put bread on a single Russian table or provided a car to any Russian family. But the Soviet people gloried in their space triumphs and, in the words of one Russian rocket designer, “felt proud and were thrilled to be citizens of the country that was blazing the trail for the human race into the cosmos.”
At a press conference right after Gagarin’s flight, President Kennedy told the nation that America would not try to match the Soviets in space but would instead choose “other areas where we can be first and which will bring more long-range benefits to mankind.” But this second, much-ballyhooed defeat in the space race did not sit well with the president—or his military advisers. Beyond the question of prestige, it meant that the enemy might soon be able to intercept the increasing numbers of American spy satellites that had begun flyovers of the USSR the previous year.
Glenn, the press favorite, spoke candidly about the flight and put the best face possible on it. “They just beat the pants off us, that’s all, and there’s no use kidding ourselves about that,” he told reporters. “But now that the space age has begun, there’s going to be plenty of work for everybody.” He and the other astronauts extended their personal congratulations to the Soviet program. In private, they were disappointed, none more so than Shepard. His suborbital flight had originally been scheduled for three weeks before Gagarin’s, but von Braun’s cautious approach had prevailed. Now he would be second, and that was a place the ultracompetitive Al Shepard hated. He consoled himself with the fact that he’d still be the first American in space, if you didn’t count Ham. As the May 2 launch drew near and hundreds of newspeople invaded the Cape Canaveral area, spirits at NASA were buoyed—a cancellation at this point would be a fiasco.
Shepard was expected to experience six g’s during launch and between twelve and fourteen upon reentry. A man sitting in a can atop a powerful rocket built to carry a warhead to the battlefield—despite Gagarin’s survival, those rigors, combined with the unknown hazards of weightlessness, convinced some physicians consulted by NASA that “subjecting a human body to such stresses is practically equivalent to sending the astronaut on a suicide mission,” wrote Walt Williams, Mercury’s operations director, and that opinion was shared by many Americans. A tragedy would shatter national morale and might jeopardize the entire program, but Bob Gilruth and his Space Task Group were guardedly optimistic.
Bad weather scrubbed the mission, and it was postponed to May 4, then to May 5. The night before, Shepard and Glenn slept in bunk beds in the Cape’s crew quarters on the second floor of Hangar S, three miles from the launch site. While they were sleeping, technicians began loading the propellants—kerosene in the lower tank, the pale blue, cryogenic liquid oxygen, kept below its boiling point of negative 297 degrees F, in the upper. When the tanks were full, to prevent them from bursting, the Redstone began venting plumes of liquid-oxygen vapor that swirled around the rocket. Other members of the pad crew filled the capsule’s thruster jets with hydrogen peroxide.
In the spartan crew quarters, flight surgeon Bill Douglas woke the astronauts at about one a.m. to shower and shave. Then a cursory medical examination was made by nurse Dee O’Hara, who helped attach six biomedical sensors to Shepard. At 3:30 a.m., after a breakfast of bacon-wrapped steak and eggs with orange juice and coffee, Shepard was helped into his aluminum-coated pressure suit (a modified version of the high-altitude suit worn by navy pilots) by suit technician Joe Schmitt, a tall, quiet former aircraft mechanic who had been with the NACA since World War II. At 5:20 a.m., Glenn—who for almost two hours had been checking over every one of the capsule’s 165 switches, dials, and meters—helped shoehorn Shepard into the tight confines of Freedom 7, the name Shepard had chosen for his Mercury capsule. Glenn wished him luck, reached in, shook his gloved hand, said, “Happy landings, Commander,” and watched as the hatch was closed at 6:10 a.m. The launch was scheduled for 7:20, but it was delayed due to cloudy weather, then later because of a faulty computer.
The capsule would be blasted about a hundred miles into space, reach five thousand miles per hour, then fall back to Earth in a curving ballistic trajectory several hundred miles downrange. The flight was expected to last fifteen minutes, so no one thought a urine-collection system was necessary. But after Shepard had been sitting on the launchpad for more than three hours, the orange juice and coffee he had consumed made its presence felt. On the radio he asked Gordon Cooper, assigned as his voice contact in the nearby blockhouse, to check if he could get out and urinate. Cooper got back to him a few minutes later. “No,” Cooper said, and then, imitating von Braun’s clipped German accent: “Ze astronaut shall stay in ze nose cone.” Shepard warned them that he would go in his suit if he could not get out for a minute—since he was on his back, the liquid would follow gravity and seep into his long cotton underwear. But that might mean a short circuit in his suit’s biomedical sensors, and Mercury Control refused again. Shepard suggested they turn off the power to his suit. They did. He relieved himself. The liquid was eventually absorbed and mostly evaporated in the 100 percent pure oxygen atmosphere.
A short while later, there was another delay—the pressure in the liquid-oxygen fuel system was too high. While technicians tried to turn some of the valves by remote control, an impatient Shepard snapped, to no one in particular, “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?” For some reason, that seemed to do the trick. The countdown soon resumed, and it was not interrupted again. As it hit the two-minute mark, flight director Chris Kraft asked each position in Mercury Control for a go/no-go opinion on whether to proceed. This would become standard operating procedure on every mission for every important decision, and only when all systems were go would the flight continue. Each flight controller and doctor asked replied, “Go, Flight,” using the shortened version of Kraft’s job title. He gave the okay to continue. The atmosphere in the room was tense, and Kraft himself, sporting a small Mercury lapel pin he would wear during every flight, was shaking so hard that his microphone fell off. The Redstone was nicknamed “Ol’ Reliable” for its dependability, but anything could happen with a rocket. Fortunately, Max Faget had designed a fourteen-foot rocket-powered escape tower that was painted bright red and sat atop the black capsule, and it would lift the capsule far enough away, it was hoped, to protect the astronaut from a fireballing rocket explosion.
The pad rescue team—amphibious vehicles, armored tanks, helicopters, asbestos-suited firemen, divers, and boats—were all at full alert and ready to rush to Shepard’s aid if need be. Douglas, the astronauts’ personal physician, sat in an idling helicopter a safe distance from the launchpad with a medical pack strapped to his back. Next to the chopper was a small one-patient hospital. Farther afield, the navy’s recovery fleet—an aircraft carrier, eight destroyers, a radar tracking ship, Marine copters, and pararescue and frogmen teams—was deployed in the anticipated recovery zone, in the Atlantic Ocean five hundred miles southeast of Cape Canaveral.
As a last line of security, just in case the main and reserve parachutes failed, Bob Gilruth had insisted that a personal-chute chest pack be placed on a shelf inside the crowded cockpit, the idea being that before he crashed into the Earth at an obscene speed, Shepard might somehow disentangle himself from several harnesses, hook on the chest pack, open the hatch, and maneuver himself out of the capsule while avoiding the dysfunctional parachutes above him. It was a situation that a circus contortionist might be better able to handle.
Forty-five million Americans—about 25 percent of the country’s population—watched the launch of the black-and-white Redstone booster on a black-and-white live television broadcast, carried on each of the three nationwide networks. The president’s chief science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, had suggested that the launch be held in secret, like the Soviets’, to prevent a potential national embarrassment occurring in front of the entire world, but Kennedy had nixed the idea. America’s space program would operate, at least for the most part, out in the open. At the White House, Kennedy and his wife, the vice president, and a few advisers followed the launch on a small TV. At 9:32 a.m., more than three hours after the capsule’s hatch had been sealed, the countdown reached zero and liftoff commenced.
“Freedom Seven is still go!” Shepard said a few seconds later, and viewers across the nation shouted and screamed, “Go! Go! Go!” as one of their countrymen sat in a small capsule at the tip of a slender rocket that spewed out white-hot flame that then changed to a blinding yellow, and the Redstone slowly and loudly roared straight up into the sky. It shot higher and higher and vanished behind a large cloud, then reappeared, a white contrail behind it, and finally disappeared from sight completely. A thin white trail arced down behind the rocket, an indication that the red escape tower had jettisoned, meaning enough speed and altitude had been achieved by Freedom 7 that it wouldn’t be needed. In the reinforced-concrete blockhouse some two hundred and fifty yards from the launchpad, where the rocket’s launch and functioning were controlled, the only guest permitted that day allowed himself a small sigh of relief. His Redstone had done its job, and Wernher von Braun knew the most critical part of the flight was over.
Two miles away, in the Mercury Mission Control building, Kraft and fifteen other men sat at three banks of consoles in a square space not much larger than an average college classroom, about sixty feet by sixty feet. Each console position was supplemented by a group of experts on that particular system, all of them sitting in another room, and they would be consulted if a problem arose. On a large animated world map on the wall of the main room, the location and status of every tracking station and navy recovery ship were displayed, and the path of the spacecraft was plotted by a toylike plastic replica of the capsule that would move on wire tracks, powered by servos emitting a steady whine. Above the map, several clocks showed various times: Greenwich mean time, countdown, elapsed time, time to retrofire, and so on. Data derived from telemetry was displayed on boards on each side of the map. The individual consoles featured black-and-white TV monitors, analog meters and displays, and the occasional rotary phone. Kraft and his team—each wearing the uniform he had decided on, a short-sleeved white shirt with a thin tie—followed every facet of the flight, including Shepard’s biomedical readings and the status of the life-support systems. A doctor in the first row could call for an abort, at least in the first few seconds, if the astronaut’s life became endangered. Near him sat Deke Slayton, capsule communicator (CapCom), the primary contact between Mercury Control and Shepard, with Glenn and Grissom on either side. The idea was that another astronaut—and the CapCom was always an astronaut, usually a backup to that particular mission—would best understand the situation in both the capsule and on the ground and would be able to pass on information clearly. The Mercury Seven also felt that one of their own could argue with anyone who wanted to abort the mission—for instance, if a doctor decided a random biomedical reading looked suspicious and pronounced the astronaut in medical distress.
In Mercury Control, Shepard’s calm voice could be heard loud and clear as he reported at every phase of the flight and detailed his body’s responses to acceleration, weightlessness, and deceleration and his craft’s responses to the forces acting on it. A couple of minutes after liftoff, the spacecraft separated from the spent Redstone booster. Shepard took over manual control of the small thruster jets and changed, one axis at a time, yaw, pitch, and roll—the direction the capsule was pointing, its attitude. And at the top of his trajectory, he peered into the viewer in the center of his instrument panel—a periscope extended several inches out into space—and marveled at the breathtaking sixteen-hundred-mile-wide panorama of the Earth below him. “What a beautiful view,” he said, and he went on to describe the cloud cover over the Florida coast.
As Freedom 7 began its ballistic arc back to Earth, he tipped his craft into position for reentry—bell-side down, so the ablative shield could burn away as it protected the capsule from the deadly heat caused by hurtling through the thickening atmosphere at more than four thousand miles an hour. The three retro-rockets strapped onto the heat shield fired and reduced the capsule’s velocity enough to allow gravity to take over. In just one minute, the capsule slowed to 341 miles per hour, and as the massive deceleration of eleven g’s slammed Shepard into his contour couch, his voice became a strained grunt: “Okay…okay…okay…”
The small drogue parachute opened up at twenty-one thousand feet to stabilize the capsule; a few seconds later, the red-and-white main chute unfurled at ten thousand feet; and fifteen minutes and twenty-two seconds after liftoff, the gently swaying Freedom 7 and its hardy human splashed down safely in the Atlantic Ocean, 302 miles downrange from Cape Canaveral.
The spacecraft had risen to an altitude of only 116 miles and descended immediately after, and Shepard was weightless for just five minutes, but he had performed flawlessly. After a perfect recovery, he stepped out of a copter onto the deck of the carrier Lake Champlain, unharmed and in high spirits. A few minutes later, Shepard was brought to the flag bridge for an unexpected phone call. It was President Kennedy, another navy man, congratulating Shepard on his flight. Kennedy’s pleasure at this success would help create a sea change in the American public’s formerly apathetic attitude toward the Mercury program. Now, it seemed, they got it. Bob Gilruth and everyone in his Space Task Group breathed easier. The fact that Shepard hadn’t died was not insignificant. No one knew what would come after it, but Mercury would continue.
Though the disdainful Khrushchev compared it to a “flea jump,” Shepard’s successful flight was a soothing balm to the nation’s injured pride. And most of NASA’s medical community, previously unsure whether a human could survive the known and unknown stresses of spaceflight, relaxed a little, although the apparent safety of Gagarin’s flight had also allayed some of their fears. Perhaps man could function in space after all.
At a press conference soon after the mission, before hundreds of reporters, Shepard was smooth as silk. And he admitted to nothing more than some “apprehension” during the flight. No one would ever get Alan Shepard to say he was scared.
An American had penetrated the darkness of space in a rocket. And he had done it in full view of the world, live on TV, unlike the Russians. Surely that counted for something in the propaganda war. Outside the United States, it apparently didn’t count for much. A poll taken after Shepard’s flight showed that 41 percent of Western Europeans believed the Soviet Union was the stronger military power, compared to only 19 percent who believed it was the United States, and more of them thought the USSR was significantly ahead of the U.S. in overall scientific achievement.
Unlike Gagarin, Shepard had been able to adjust his craft’s attitude by using the small thruster jets on its exterior, and the press made much of the fact that he had “driven” the spaceship, the first man to do so. Not everyone considered that flying, since there was no way to power Freedom 7. (Some pointed out that the astronaut exerted about the same amount of control over his craft as a glider pilot, though that wasn’t quite true—a pilot could change a glider’s trajectory.) Still, to the American public, it was enough, at least for now.
The president needed some good news. He’d been in office for two months, and he and the U.S. had just experienced an embarrassment as profound as any in the country’s history.
The island of Cuba lies ninety miles off the southern tip of Florida. There, in 1959, a young, inspirational revolutionary named Fidel Castro had finally succeeded in leading a group of disaffected countrymen to oust dictator (and U.S. ally) Fulgencio Batista. As Castro quietly became a dictator himself and assumed military and political control, his country became increasingly communistic and drifted toward Russia’s sphere of influence. As a result, Cuba’s relations with the United States quickly deteriorated.
President Eisenhower had approved a covert plan for the CIA to train and arm a small army of Cuban exiles with the goal of overthrowing Castro’s Communist government. The original plan called for guerrilla infiltration operations to gradually win over Cuban hearts and minds. But near the end of Eisenhower’s administration, the plan grew larger, and eventually it called for them to land in the Bahía de Cochinos—the Bay of Pigs—and support the amphibious assault with heavy bomber and fighter cover. The Cuban people, the Americans were sure, would rise and join this Free Cuba cadre, and if the rebels could secure a beachhead for seventy-two hours, during which period a free Cuban government would be established, other nations in the hemisphere might recognize the new government and send aid. America’s role in the invasion would be kept secret, to avoid the appearance of meddling in Latin American affairs. Despite Kennedy’s personal misgivings, his aides advised him to approve the plan, and he gave the go-ahead less than two months after taking office.
On April 17—thirteen months after the plan’s inception and only five days after Gagarin’s orbital flight—fourteen hundred insurgents launched from Guatemala and Nicaragua on five small freighters and landed at the swampy Bay of Pigs. They waded ashore and fought courageously but after three days were overwhelmed by Castro’s defensive forces. At the last moment, Kennedy canceled a vital early-morning air strike and any further support. The rebel brigade’s fifteen B-26 bombers were effective at first but were soon disposed of by the small Cuban air force of two B-26s and five smaller fighter-bombers; these also disabled two invasion ships filled with much-needed supplies and ammo. Other supply ships were ordered to leave the scene.
The result was a fiasco of epic proportions. Hundreds of insurgents were killed or executed, and the remaining rebels, many of them without food and ammunition, surrendered three days after the landing. Some of those captured revealed America’s complicity in the invasion, which was viewed as warmongering. The worldwide criticism of the United States and its young president was intense, as was the country’s humiliation. When Khrushchev had telegrammed Kennedy expressing alarm at American involvement in Cuban politics, the president had told him that the U.S. was only supporting the one hundred thousand Cubans trying to resist the Castro regime. Few were convinced by his argument. Kennedy’s standing with the American people, and his country’s standing among the community of nations, would never be lower.
Shepard’s successful flight, brief as it was, restored some of America’s pride, and Kennedy took note of that and of the strong positive response to the mission. He decided he was not satisfied with a snail’s-pace space race with the Russians, whose booster rockets were clearly more powerful than America’s. That was a decidedly different attitude than his earlier one. Three weeks before Gagarin’s triumph, Kennedy had heard arguments from NASA for a $308 million budget. The Bureau of the Budget agreed to only $50 million. The president’s decision to increase that to $126 million—none of it for the Apollo program—hadn’t exactly been a vote of confidence. It had seemed as if U.S. space exploration would come to an end once the U.S. caught up to the Soviets in the space race. The Mercury cost overruns and delays had soured a good many government officials and representatives of the American public on the space program, and there was nothing to indicate that enough of them would commit to a long-term, monstrously expensive project with little immediate and appreciable benefits to their constituents. Apollo, at this point little more than plans, schematics, and dreams, might be stillborn.
But on April 14, two days after Gagarin’s triumphant flight, Kennedy had hosted a meeting at the White House that included his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, and a few advisers. Also present was the tough Washington insider that the president, with help from the vice president, had chosen as NASA’s new administrator: a thick-necked, barrel-chested, square-jawed bulldog with a Southern drawl and a steel-trap mind.
James Webb, born in a small North Carolina town and the son of a school superintendent, was a former Marine aviator. He had begun working the halls and back rooms of government in 1932 as secretary to a U.S. congressman while earning his law degree. After World War II, he had served as director of the Bureau of the Budget, then undersecretary of state. Tough, savvy, and a resourceful negotiator—“the fastest mouth in the South,” some called him, though he could also be an attentive listener—he had become a political operator nonpareil.
When Kennedy called Webb to the White House to offer him the post, he had been working in the private sector for almost a decade. Webb told the president that he wasn’t the right man for the job: “You need a scientist or an engineer,” he said. He also knew that many others had turned the job down (seventeen, Lyndon Johnson would remember later), since no one knew how long the nascent agency would be around or how much support it would receive from the new administration. But Kennedy would have none of it. He knew Webb’s reputation, and he wanted someone who understood policy. Webb couldn’t see a way to refuse his president. He agreed to take the job.
Within a few months, Webb stood up to the air force on a major matter of space policy, faced down the Bureau of the Budget director, and, in a House Space Committee hearing, became involved in a shouting match with a congressman while defending NASA’s budget. Over the next eight years, the energetic Webb would use his considerable charm, experience, negotiation skills, and knack for translating complex space terms and concepts into understandable English to lobby for the fantastic amounts of money NASA needed from Congress—and the freedom to operate with minimal interference. And he was not a yes-man, as Kennedy would soon find out.
At the April 14 meeting, the president, exasperated and tired of being asked why the U.S. was second to Russia in space, asked the room, “What can we do? How can we catch up?”
While stumping for the presidency, Kennedy had used space only as an issue on which to criticize the Republicans. In his inaugural address, he had suggested that the two superpowers “explore the stars” together, and ten days later, he had asked the Soviet Union to join with the U.S. in several space ventures involving weather prediction, communications satellites, and space probes. Nothing would come of his peace overtures. But the success of Gagarin’s flight and its extraordinary worldwide acclaim hadn’t been lost on him. He had also noted the enthusiasm with which the country had embraced the astronauts and the jubilation with which Americans had greeted Shepard’s suborbital flight. Maybe there was political hay to be made from space after all. Certainly, after his disastrous first hundred days, Kennedy needed a boost. And despite Freedom 7’s success, the Mercury program continued to fall behind schedule. More space triumphs might be long in coming and trivial compared to the Soviets’ accomplishments.
Lyndon Johnson, the farm boy from the Texas Hill Country who, through massive ambition and keen politicking skills, had become the most powerful man in the Senate before assuming the vice presidency, was also Washington’s foremost advocate of the space program and had been for some time. He had called for research into a space program as early as 1949, to no avail. Upon assuming office and to give Johnson something to do, Kennedy had named him chairman of the National Space Council, a body created a few years earlier to help coordinate the nation’s space efforts. Now Johnson was in the middle of everything, making phone calls, prodding Webb and others at NASA, marshaling all the forces he could with his well-known and none-too-subtle powers of persuasion. When Kennedy asked him what they could do to get ahead of the Russians, a few possibilities were mentioned. One was landing a man on the moon. Johnson told Kennedy that yes, it was possible, and he asked the president for a memorandum containing his thoughts and questions. He got it the next day, April 20, 1961, a one-pager asking Johnson to be in charge of “making an overall survey of where we stand in space.” There were several questions about the program. The first was the most important:
Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man. Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?
Johnson and Webb spent the next several days consulting with NASA officials, scientists, top military brass, politicians, and even a few prominent businessmen on the feasibility of putting a man on the moon. When some of them expressed reservations, Johnson said, “Would you rather have us be a second-rate nation or should we spend a little money?” As the vice president polled these leaders, he also developed support for—and commitment to—the project. Webb was initially resistant to the idea but slowly came around as he watched Johnson work his contacts.
Von Braun, who had dreamed of personally exploring the heavens since childhood and had been jailed by the Gestapo for just mentioning space exploration, jumped on this idea like a Doberman on a burglar. In a nine-page detailed memo, he told Johnson that they had an excellent chance of beating the USSR to the moon.
Johnson delivered his evaluation a week after receiving the president’s memo. The gist of it was that it was conceivable that the United States could circumnavigate the moon and possibly land a man on it by 1966 or 1967. The report set forth broad guidelines on how to get there and stressed the importance of manned spaceflight to national prestige.
Kennedy began talking to some of the men Johnson had consulted. Bob Gilruth told him it could be done—as a matter of fact, for two years he, Max Faget, and a few others at NASA had been researching how to put a man on the moon. The advantage of a moon-landing goal, he explained, was that it leveled the playing field for both countries, since neither had begun serious development of the massive boosters needed to lift a large craft into space. They’d both be starting from scratch, and he felt confident the United States could win that particular race. And no one needed to point out to the president the prestige that the winner would earn.
On May 8, 1961, at a ceremony held in the sun-dappled Rose Garden, the president presented Shepard with the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. Afterward, Kennedy and the Mercury Seven retired to the Oval Office. Sitting in his rocking chair, Kennedy listened as Shepard talked of his flight, and he asked several questions about the mission, the men’s training, and the program. He even hinted at plans for a moon landing. The seven astronauts looked at one another, and Shepard said, “I’m ready.”
Kennedy, it appeared, had made his decision.
About three weeks later, Kennedy gave a speech to a joint session of Congress on “urgent national needs,” and he made a bold statement: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” He emphasized the necessity of “a major national commitment of scientific and technical manpower, materiel, and facilities…a degree of dedication, organization, and discipline which have not always characterized our research and development efforts.”
Seven hundred miles away, in the main conference room at the Marshall Space Flight Center, von Braun and his board listened raptly to the president’s address. When they heard his moon-landing directive, they cheered, and some yelled “Ja!” and “Let’s go!”
At the time, the USSR had already landed Luna 2 on the moon, sent Luna 3 around it, and orbited a man around the Earth. The United States had a total of fifteen minutes and twenty-two seconds of manned-spaceflight experience. What the space program didn’t have was the massive rocket needed to get to the moon, the spacecraft to convey the astronauts, or even a definite idea of how to navigate there and back. “Here we were struggling to get a 2,500-pound capsule up, and this thing [that Kennedy] just assigned us was going to require getting 250,000 pounds into earth orbit,” remembered one core member of the Space Task Group.
A London bookmaker immediately set the odds at a thousand to one against a moon landing on Kennedy’s ambitious schedule.
Gilruth and Webb were on a plane over the Midwest at the time of Kennedy’s speech, and they asked the pilot to patch the broadcast through the radio. Though Gilruth had discussed the possibility of a moon landing with the president and was impressed with his quick grasp of spaceflight fundamentals, he was aghast when he heard the challenge—only then did he fully realize the scope of what was proposed and understand the task ahead of him as director of the Space Task Group. He couldn’t believe Kennedy had actually gone through with it. “The concepts of manned spaceflight were only three years old, and voyaging in space over such vast distances was still a dream,” he would write later:
Rendezvous, docking, prolonged weightlessness, radiation, and the meteoroid hazard all involved problems of unknown dimensions. We would need giant new rockets burning high-energy hydrogen; a breakthrough in reliability; new methods of staging and handling; and the ability to launch on time, since going to the moon required the accurate hitting of launch windows.
It could be done. But the president’s challenge was a formidable one (and it could have been even tougher; an early draft of Kennedy’s speech had given a target date of 1967, prompting Webb to ask the White House to change the time frame to the end of the decade). As the normally taciturn Gus Grissom put it, “It’s as if somebody had said, ‘Let’s build New York City overnight.’”
It would be an undertaking of enormous dimensions, and it required a new organization mode: a strong headquarters supervising several centers that would mobilize American industry and know-how to tackle a multitude of don’t-know-how matters. A massive rocket engine was already in development by von Braun’s Huntsville team, but a complex spacecraft, one with all the necessary features, would take years to design, develop, build, and test before it was man-rated. The sheer scale of the project would mean new factories, new testing and training facilities, new transport methods, and new systems of all kinds, from communications to environmental to others barely imagined.
The gauntlet was picked up with enthusiasm by the rest of Gilruth’s Space Task Group. Faget and others had long been touting a moon landing as the follow-up program to Mercury. Both houses of Congress quickly approved massive increases in funding for the ambitious program—$1.67 billion for the 1962 budget alone, enough to get a strong start on Apollo—so NASA now had the money, the official approval, and a specific goal. Thus began one of the largest peacetime projects in U.S. history.
But first there were important—and dangerous—baby steps to be taken.