The astronauts called the Gemini spacecraft the Gusmobile, and for good reason.
During Grissom’s Mercury mission, the hatch had blown open without warning, allowing the capsule to fill with water and sink to the bottom of the sea, and Grissom had taken the loss of the capsule hard. He and the rest of the Mercury Seven, as well as his NASA bosses, knew it wasn’t his fault, and an in-house investigation had concluded that he hadn’t initiated the firing of the hatch. But he knew there were people out there who thought he’d panicked and popped it on purpose. More than anything, Grissom wanted—needed—another flight so he could redeem himself.
But his chances weren’t looking good. It appeared that the Mercury program would be over before Grissom would make it into space again. With five others who had yet to fly, he was at the back of the line; not only that, but Al Shepard was already angling for another mission, and Gus wasn’t going to beat him out. After Grissom’s nominal flight—except for that last development—and the confirmation that a human could indeed survive weightlessness in space, NASA had canceled the two other suborbital flights originally planned. What would be the point? John Glenn, up next, would fly the first orbital flight. There would be more of those, but not six more.
Still, there might be another opportunity knocking. A new program was in the works.
In December 1961, Bob Gilruth had announced a new manned spaceflight program to bridge the gap between Mercury and Apollo—Mercury Mark II, a “two-man Mercury.” A month later, it was renamed Gemini, after the constellation of the twins, Castor and Pollux, appropriate for a two-man capsule. The program was necessary because when Apollo was first announced, no one at NASA knew exactly how the spacecraft would land on the moon or even what kind of spaceship it would be. At the time Kennedy made the man-on-the-moon speech, two main methods, or modes, were under consideration. One was termed Earth-orbit rendezvous (EOR); the other, direct ascent.
If you asked someone in the street how the journey would happen, he’d probably describe a large streamlined rocket with tail fins—not unlike von Braun’s V-2—that would blast off from Earth, fly the 239,000 miles to the moon, and, once it got close enough, turn around and use the rocket’s engine to brake and settle on the surface. The spaceship would return to the Earth in the same manner. That’s how it was done in movies like 1950’s Destination Moon and Rocketship X-M (which used actual stock footage of V-2 rocket launches) and in countless comic books and science fiction stories. But launching a single, self-contained spacecraft carrying enough fuel for liftoff from the moon and the return trip as well as life-support systems, a heat shield, and the many other necessities for such a journey would require a huge booster.
This direct-ascent method was favored early on by the Space Task Group, and von Braun’s rocket team was already designing the massive booster. The four-hundred-foot-tall Nova would cluster eight large engines in its first stage, and with two other stages, it would have a combined twelve million pounds of thrust to boost eighty tons into orbit. There would be other logistical problems—for instance, no one knew a surface that could bear that kind of weight or a pad that could survive the launch of such a behemoth. Nor could this beast be ready by the end of the decade.
The other mode, EOR, was just as complex. A large, spinning space station revolving around Earth would be the world’s first space construction site, and there, a smaller spacecraft would be assembled. Its components would be launched separately from Earth…or maybe the complete spacecraft would be launched by another of the large boosters von Braun’s team was developing, the Saturn V, and its propellants sent separately. No one was sure how it would be done, exactly, especially since any space construction would require—besides extremely large hard hats—techniques of rendezvous and docking that had never been attempted as well as the hazardous transfer of hypergolic liquid fuel, the kind that combusted when combined, from tanks to the spacecraft. And how would all these parts be connected? Screwed, bolted, nailed, clamped, welded, glued, soldered, or some other method? Max Faget was not a fan of EOR: “Every time you’d tell them what was wrong with one way of doing it, they’d tell you, well, they were going to do it the other way,” he remembered later. “As far as I know, those problems never got solved.” He and most of the Space Task Group were behind the direct-ascent mode. Von Braun supported EOR since it would involve his Saturn booster and was similar to plans he had laid out in his Collier’s articles.
Neither of these choices addressed the other end of the voyage—descending to, and then ascending from, the moon’s surface, which was probably solid…but might not be. After all, a respected Cornell scientist named Thomas Gold maintained that the moon’s surface was just a deep layer of dust, into which a spacecraft would disappear. And even if it was solid, how would the crew guide it down to the ground safely, even in one-sixth gravity? For the Nova, the ladder from the rocket would need to be at least as long as a football field; would an astronaut be able to safely clamber up and down that wearing a spacesuit, since even a small puncture in that suit could mean death? The more closely one examined the direct-ascent mode, the more problems one found.
At least these two methods allowed the spaceship’s occupants to return from their journey. One plan, conceived at Lockheed and advocated by Bell Aerospace as late as June 1962, didn’t. Two engineers there—one with the title of head of human factors—claimed that America could beat the Russians to the moon only if an astronaut was sent there on a one-way trip. After all, it was already technically possible to get a man to the moon; getting him back safely to Earth was the issue. After landing in a modified Mercury spacecraft, the astronaut would stay there, with oxygen, food, and supplies, and live in a pressurized hut drop-shipped earlier. More supplies would continue to be delivered. It would probably take at least a year and twenty-two cargo rockets to get a one-man moon base up and running—and several more years before NASA figured out how to bring him back.
There is no evidence that NASA ever actually considered this suggestion.
But there was another option.
John Houbolt wasn’t the first one to come up with the idea of lunar-orbit rendezvous (LOR). A self-educated Russian mechanic named Yuri Kondratyuk had suggested it in 1917 and so had an Englishman, Harry E. Ross, in 1948. Houbolt wasn’t even the first engineer at Langley, NASA’s revered research center, to suggest LOR; two others, Clint Brown and Bill Michael, had published a paper on the subject in May 1960 suggesting that a small “bug” with two astronauts leave a “mother ship” orbiting the moon, take them down to the lunar surface, and then return them. A team from Chance Vought Astronautics, a respected name in the aircraft business, also presented the idea of modular spacecraft at Langley around the same time. But this was before President Kennedy’s May 1961 directive, when a lunar landing became a priority, and no one at NASA thought much of LOR—in fact, researchers laughed at the idea.
As a boy in Joliet, Illinois, Houbolt had entered his creations in model-airplane competitions like so many other future NACA engineers. Once he’d even jumped out of a hayloft with an umbrella. He had a pilot’s license, and he had never wanted to be anything but an aeronautical engineer. Houbolt’s job as associate chief of the dynamic-loads division had nothing to do with the manned space program. But he also chaired a committee assigned to study rendezvous as it pertained to space stations. At one meeting in August 1960, the subject of a moon landing came up. He began researching the various approaches that used rendezvous techniques and became fascinated by the concept.
He wasn’t the only one. Bob Gilruth and others at NASA realized early on that orbital operation techniques such as rendezvous and docking would be needed at some point and thus should be developed. Toward that end, the Mercury follow-up program—initially called Mercury Mark II, since it would involve an improved Mercury capsule—began to take shape. Canadian James Chamberlin, the former chief designer of the canceled Arrow fighter jet, was assigned to work on it. The program was sold to Congress on the basis of its capability to intercept, inspect, and repair satellites and to support a space station, still a strong possibility at the time.
By the time Chamberlin’s team got finished with its design plans, the Gemini would be a complete makeover of the Mercury in countless ways. First and foremost, it would be an operational spacecraft with enough power, through larger and more rocket thrusters, for its pilot to fly it in the vacuum and microgravity of space; he could not only alter its attitude through yaw, pitch, and roll but also change direction and speed in all three axes (up/down, forward/backward, and left/right). It would also be a much more easily serviced craft. Almost all its service components, previously crammed into the small Mercury cabin, would now be attached to the craft’s outside or in the detachable adapter-module shroud that looked like nothing so much as a hoop skirt on Mercury’s big sister.
Other researchers at Langley besides Houbolt had been studying rendezvous since 1959; by May 1960, there were eleven separate studies under way on the subject. It was becoming abundantly clear that rendezvous maneuvers would play an important part in any kind of space operations, whether it was LOR, EOR, or direct ascent. Within that cadre of researchers, the prematurely gray, forty-one-year-old Houbolt became known as “the rendezvous man.” He was brilliant—he had taught the Mercury Seven course on navigation—and at some point in the summer of 1960, after much study of rendezvous as it applied to a lunar landing, he had an epiphany. He realized how much LOR would simplify all the parts of the process up and down the line, from development and testing to manufacturing and flight planning and operations. “I vowed to dedicate myself to the task” of pushing the concept, he said later.
Houbolt was by nature reserved and reticent, but from that moment, he took to advocating for LOR like a Baptist preacher spreading the Gospel. He began converting people, first a few NASA folks and then others, convincing them of its advantages—and the benefits of rendezvous in general—in countless briefings, lectures, presentations, and one-on-one talks. But the initial reaction from the Space Task Group was less than enthusiastic.
Houbolt gave a presentation in December 1960 at NASA’s Washington, DC, headquarters, and most of the Space Task Group’s top managers were there. When he pointed out the weight savings of LOR—a reduction by a factor of 2 to 2.5—the normally soft-spoken Max Faget stood up. “His figures lie,” he said heatedly. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” There was some truth to Faget’s claim—in his early calculations, Houbolt had underestimated the weight required, using an inadequate guidance system and a tiny, unpressurized, and unrealistically light lunar lander, not much more than an open platform and a rocket engine under the seat that “looked very much like a motorcycle,” observed one NASA engineer. Nonetheless, in the gentlemanly world of science, it was a shocking display of vehemence. Von Braun shook his head and said, “No, that’s no good.” After the meeting concluded, Faget stood out in the hallway and told anyone who would listen about the flaws in Houbolt’s claims. Houbolt merely suggested that Faget and others who were skeptical should first take a look at his study.
Arguments as to the most viable lunar-landing mode continued through 1961. For much of that time, LOR was the long shot; most favored was EOR. Many at NASA, Bob Gilruth included, agreed with Faget. Houbolt couldn’t even get the Space Task Group to study his scheme. The year wore on, but Houbolt refused to give up. He continued to give rendezvous talks at NASA headquarters, usually to unreceptive audiences. Some of this was due to politics; von Braun’s team in Huntsville preferred either direct ascent or EOR. The former would require their monster Nova booster, and the latter two or three big Saturns per launch—double the work for them, since LOR would utilize only one Saturn per mission. (And because no one knew what rockets would be needed or wanted after Apollo, that meant double the job security.)
One variation on EOR would employ von Braun’s long-cherished space station idea. Even those at Houbolt’s home, Langley, thought LOR too complex and risky, and Time magazine opined that “at first glance [it] seems like a bizarre product of far-out science fiction.” If a crisis occurred in low Earth orbit during the EOR process, the spacecraft could most likely return home quickly—but what if there was a life-threatening problem near the moon, 239,000 miles away, during LOR? There would be no chance of rescue. The thought of astronaut corpses circling the moon indefinitely kept many people at NASA awake at night. Most at Langley preferred the direct-ascent method.
As various NASA study committees passed on LOR, a frustrated Houbolt decided to make a leap of faith. Risking his job, he went above the heads of his direct superiors and wrote a three-page letter pleading his case to NASA deputy administrator Robert Seamans. On May 25, soon after hearing Kennedy’s moon speech, Seamans appointed another committee to assess the various lunar-landing modes. Houbolt was heartened; surely this group would give LOR proper consideration.
After examining several concepts, the committee’s final rating placed LOR a distant third. The committee members thought it too risky, and even absurd, to send a lone astronaut (the plan at the time) down to the lunar surface in a small module and hope that he could successfully launch and rendezvous with a larger spacecraft orbiting the moon.
One more task force was immediately formed to focus on EOR. Its chair refused to even let Houbolt discuss LOR. At another meeting that included three hundred potential Apollo contractors and several Space Task Group members, Houbolt tried again. Faget and several others told him to forget LOR.
The lunar-orbit-rendezvous method finally gained some traction a month later, during another committee meeting, when direct ascent’s Nova began losing steam as a viable option. Houbolt gave an impressive presentation to the group, then a well-received one to the Space Task Group, and its members started to come around. One of the first was Chamberlin, who spoke positively about LOR to Gilruth. By then he had been tapped by Faget to design the Mercury follow-up craft and was heavily involved in Gemini concepts, and he realized that the necessary rendezvous and docking experience were attainable in the new program.
It still wasn’t enough. In November 1961, Houbolt sent another letter to Seamans—this one a nine-page epic in which he described himself as “a voice in the wilderness.” Seamans’s first reaction was less than sympathetic. “I’m sick of getting mail from this guy,” he remembered thinking. “I thought of picking up the phone and calling Tommy Thompson, Houbolt’s superior at Langley, and telling Tommy to turn him off. Then I thought, ‘But he might be right.’” Instead of upbraiding Houbolt, he took the letter to Brainerd Holmes, who was directing the manned-spaceflight program at the time. Holmes read it and grimaced, but he said he’d give LOR renewed consideration.
He did. The Space Task Group finally began taking the “bug approach” seriously. Eventually, after several more reports and presentations and on closer inspection of the insurmountable difficulties of both direct ascent and EOR, everyone saw that the data provided undeniable evidence: LOR was the most sensible way to land on the moon. Even Faget became convinced, especially since direct ascent’s problems of “eyeballing that thing down to the moon didn’t have a satisfactory answer,” he said later. By early 1962, the Space Task Group threw its weight behind Houbolt’s vision.
The last holdout against LOR was the Marshall Space Flight Center. But on June 7, 1962, at the end of a daylong meeting at Huntsville that included a six-hour session on Marshall’s recommendations for EOR, von Braun shocked everyone, including his Marshall associates, by announcing his support for LOR. After an earlier presentation by Houbolt, von Braun had asked him to send several papers on the mode; those had helped make up his mind. At the meeting, von Braun presented a detailed listing of the deficiencies of the other modes, and the advantages of LOR. He concluded, “We believe this program offers the highest confidence factor of successful accomplishment within this decade.” Afterward, von Braun graciously sent Houbolt a personal copy of his remarks.
On July 11, Jim Webb—who had originally been a supporter of direct ascent—made the announcement: NASA had selected the lunar-orbit-rendezvous method for the job of landing men on the moon. For Houbolt, it was vindication, finally, for what would come to be seen as eminent common sense. As his division chief said to him, “Congratulations, John. They’ve adopted your scheme. I can safely say I’m shaking hands with the man who single-handedly saved the government twenty billion.”
Webb and NASA would still have to defend their selection of LOR to the president. When Webb and Jerome Wiesner, Kennedy’s chief science adviser, openly disagreed about it, the agency was forced to justify its choice in the public arena. In September 1962, during a presidential tour of Huntsville, Kennedy brought up the issue with Wiesner. Von Braun and Webb joined in, and the discussion quickly became a heated argument between Wiesner and Webb. Kennedy eventually sided with Webb, whom he trusted on the subject. The matter was finally settled in November, when NASA announced that Grumman had been selected to manufacture the lander portion of the Apollo spacecraft—the lunar excursion module, or LEM. (The name was soon shortened to lunar module, or LM, when excursion was deemed too frivolous-sounding, but it was still pronounced “lem.”)
The LM would be one of the three modules, or self-contained units, constituting the spacecraft. The three modules would sit atop the massive three-stage Saturn V rocket that would launch Apollo into space. The conical command module would house the astronauts in a hospitable environment during their journey to and from the moon. It would be connected to the cylindrical service module, which would provide electricity, propulsion, and storage for various consumables. The two segments would operate as a single unit—the command-service module—for the entire trip until the service module was jettisoned just before the final reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. The final piece of the puzzle was the spindly four-legged LM, designed to operate only in the airless vacuum of space and specifically in the moon’s weaker gravity. During liftoff, it was housed directly beneath the service module with its legs folded up. Before the translunar voyage commenced, the command-service module would turn around and dock with it, nose-first. The LM consisted of a descent stage and an ascent stage. When a successful landing was made, the upper ascent stage with its own rocket engine would blast away from the lunar surface and reunite with the command-service module. After its two occupants had scrambled through the docking tunnel, the ascent stage would be discarded.
The Space Task Group was quickly outgrowing its facilities at Langley, Virginia, and a much larger center was needed. After a site-selection committee examined nearly two dozen areas that met all the requirements—moderate weather and proximity to water, a major airport, and a top university, among others—a decision was made. The Space Task Group’s new home, and the place from which each mission would be controlled immediately after its launching, would be Houston, Texas. The Humble Oil Company had donated a thousand acres of land near Clear Lake, twenty-five miles southeast of downtown Houston, to Rice University, which in turn had offered it to NASA. (Humble owned a significant portion of the area surrounding the tract—the nicest part of Clear Lake—and knew they would eventually make millions developing it, hence the roundabout donation.)
Some people—particularly several Florida politicians—thought the eighty-eight thousand acres of flatland on Merritt Island, immediately west of Cape Canaveral across the narrow Banana River, that NASA had recently purchased was tailor-made for the home of the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), as the Space Task Group would henceforth be known. But Merritt would be used only for NASA’s new launch facilities, which included the world’s largest hangar, the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), where multiple huge moon rockets could be produced simultaneously, and several capacious launchpads. Vice President Lyndon Johnson argued that the activities of the air force launching ground on Cape Canaveral might interfere with communications during long missions, and other arguments were made against the Cape. Site requirements would shift over time, and in the end, the steamy city of Houston won out.
It was lost on no one that Texas was LBJ’s home state and that Houston was part of the district of Congressman Albert Thomas, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, which controlled funding for NASA projects. Thomas hadn’t been happy when another state had received a NASA field center when the agency opened in 1958. Now Thomas, Webb, and Kennedy engaged in a bit of quid pro quo that would not be made public until decades later—Thomas would help out on a few bills the president wanted passed if Houston got the MSC. (Webb would later insist that politics did not enter into the decision, despite the agreement between Kennedy and Thomas.) The plot got more byzantine: Thomas’s roommate at Rice had been George R. Brown, and his Brown and Root construction firms would become one of the largest in the world. Brown was also a good friend, and a major financial backer, of Lyndon Johnson. His company would receive most of the contracts to develop the many large buildings needed at the MSC.
Some NASA employees comfortably domiciled near the Langley or DC facilities were loath to move to a city with stifling summer heat and a state looked down upon by most East Coast residents. “Texas was someplace out west that they saw in a movie with Gene Autry,” recalled one engineer. Early visits reinforced their worries; the NASA site was nothing but cow pastures and mosquitoes, and the devastation left by Hurricane Carla was visible everywhere. Gilruth had some of the same concerns, but Webb said to him, “What has Senator Byrd ever done for you?”—the point being that Virginia Democrat Harry Byrd had provided little if any support for NASA. More than one person observed that the small body of water was neither clear nor a lake. Nonetheless, all but a few of Gilruth’s people made the move in the spring and summer of 1962, and after the enthusiastic welcome and strong support, both personal and political, they received from the city and its residents, most were glad they did.
While new facilities—a dozen or so large concrete buildings, with more to come—were being built, MSC’s various divisions were temporarily housed in offices spread out all over the city and up and down the Gulf Freeway, the main highway between downtown Houston and Clear Lake.
Most of the Mercury Seven and their families moved to Timber Cove, five minutes east of the MSC on the north side of Clear Lake, where they built modest houses—typically a three-bedroom, brick, midcentury-modern home with a spacious kitchen, if Mrs. Astronaut had a hand in designing it—and acclimated to the very different Texas culture and the more humid Houston weather.
The Glenns and the Carpenters split a lot on a tree-lined cul-de-sac, and the Grissoms and Schirras lived next door to each other just a block away. The Coopers settled across tiny Taylor Lake, a Clear Lake estuary, in another recent development called El Lago. The Slaytons built a home five miles southwest, in the town of Friendswood. Al Shepard and his family decided on a luxury apartment near downtown Houston, twenty-five miles away from Clear Lake, which gave Al a chance to race up and down the Gulf Freeway in his Corvette. And a couple of the men’s spouses had an idea. Almost every military post had its officers’ wives club, so why not an astronauts’ wives club? Their casual get-togethers would bloom into a full-fledged mutual-support system for both club members and their children, especially during the stressful flights. After the novelty of being astronauts’ wives wore off and the women realized what they’d signed on for—the thankless job of raising children who hardly ever saw their fathers and the constant threat of their spouses’ deaths always hanging over them—they would need the support, particularly when a husband died. That would happen all too frequently.
When Project Gemini was announced in December 1961, von Braun was strongly opposed to it. Nobody had consulted him about it, and NASA would use the air force’s Titan II as a booster and not his Saturn (which was too large for a souped-up Mercury craft). Grissom became the chief astronaut assigned to the development of the new program. While the others trained for their upcoming Mercury flights—Shepard believed he could wangle one more out of his superiors and continued to remain heavily involved in Mercury—Grissom began spending much of his time at the McDonnell plant in St. Louis, working with Jim Chamberlin on the new spacecraft. Since Gemini would be more or less an expansion of Mercury, no other firm had been considered for the project. He sat in the mock-up for hours at a time, delivering to its designers his opinions on virtually every aspect of the spacecraft—“From the way the cockpit was laid out to what instruments went where,” remembered astronaut John Young. Grissom was determined to ensure that the Gemini was a pilot’s spacecraft.
On the morning of October 3, 1962, an Atlas booster launched Schirra’s Sigma 7 capsule into space, and a group of clean-cut fellows stood close together on the Florida coastline a few miles away and watched intently. They were eight members of the New Nine, as they were known, NASA’s new astronaut trainees: Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Pete Conrad, Jim Lovell, Jim McDivitt, Tom Stafford, Ed White, and John Young. (Missing was Elliot See, who was clearing up personal business and hadn’t reported for duty yet.)
They had been presented at a press conference two weeks earlier, and their jobs were to help man the many Gemini and Apollo missions planned over the next several years; there were far too many for the original Mercury Seven, and each flight would also require a backup crew. In his new position as coordinator of astronaut activities, Deke Slayton had overseen the selection of the nine, culling them from 253 applications. They had endured the same battery of physical and psychological tests that the original seven had, from treadmills and steel eels to ink blots and cold water in the ears, though since NASA now knew that a human being could survive at least a day in space, a few of the wackier trials had been dropped. (These men were also test pilots, so someone had sensibly decided that they didn’t need more time on the centrifuge.) Two of them were civilians, though that term was misleading—both See and Armstrong were former navy aviators.
The day before they were introduced at the press conference, the New Nine had gathered together for the first time at Ellington Air Force Base, near the new Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, to be briefed on their jobs, their schedules, and their responsibilities. “There’ll be plenty of missions for all of you,” Bob Gilruth told them. With ten manned Gemini and more than a dozen Apollo missions planned—about sixty seats to fill, plus backup crews—there would be more than enough flights for everyone in the room.
Slayton got up and discussed the many pressures they would face, including business propositions and freebies. “With regard to gratuities,” he said in typically blunt Deke-speak, “if there is any question, just follow the old test pilot’s creed: Anything you can eat, drink, or screw within twenty-four hours is perfectly acceptable, but beyond that, take a pass!”
The men smiled nervously. Walt Williams held up his hand and said, “Within reason, within reason.”
Unlike the Mercury Seven, this new group of astronaut trainees was, on average, slightly more educated—three of them had master’s degrees—and since NASA had raised the maximum height to six feet and lowered the age limit to thirty-five, they were slightly younger and a tad taller and heavier. And like their predecessors, they were all married with children. Most of the Mercury Seven were too busy to offer much of a welcome, and the fact that nine new guys meant that each man’s piece of the $500,000 Life pie was now only $16,000 didn’t increase their hospitality. Nevertheless, soon after the nine’s arrival, John Glenn invited all of them to dinner at his house in Timber Cove.
The new astronaut trainees would find that people believed their predecessors’ after-hours reputation applied to them too. But the complexity of the post-Mercury spacecraft would mean more time devoted to simulation, training, and interacting with contractors, leaving them fewer off-hours—though many of them managed to squeeze in some playtime. In that era, celebrity infidelity, provided it was discreetly conducted, was ignored by the press. In the eyes of most of the public, the reputations of these American heroes remained lily-white. And though most of them were good family men, others found it hard to resist the companionship of the many women eager to meet America’s space heroes and partake of their high-test testosterone. Like their predecessors, they moved their families to Houston, mostly settling in the Clear Lake area, and began adjusting to the frenetic schedule of an astronaut.
Also like the Mercury Seven before them, they underwent an intensive education program about space operations. Each one received a two-inch-thick flight manual that he became intimately familiar with. They were taught by experts in various fields—computers, guidance and navigation, communications, rocket flight, astronomy, orbital and reentry mechanics, meteorology, environmental control systems, and much more. With the Mercury Seven, the New Nine underwent survival training for contingency landings in jungle, desert, and water. And after their basic training, each received a technical assignment in a different area. Besides steady visits to the Cape, they made frequent field trips to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville; to St. Louis, where McDonnell was producing their Gemini spacecraft; and occasionally to Boston, to familiarize themselves with MIT’s computer-guidance system, and Worcester, Massachusetts, to get fitted for spacesuits. And they began spending hundreds of hours in the Gemini simulators, running through every conceivable abort situation, each performance recorded and assessed, and making many thirty-second-long flights on the C-135 for experience in weightlessness.
With the help of their cut from the Life deal, the New Nine also moved into the Clear Lake area, most of them to Timber Cove or El Lago. (One moved into Nassau Bay, a new development just south of the MSC.) The astronaut candidates settled into their new routines, and their families settled into their new lives, new homes, new schools, new friends, and new surroundings.
By now, with the addition of the Gemini and Apollo flights, NASA was preparing more definite schedules. Some of the astronauts might fly more than once, but the increasingly complex missions required extensive and intensive training and preparation and were so tightly scheduled that each crewman would have his hands full for a while. And attrition was inevitable, due to injury, death, or some other reason, such as Scott Carpenter’s blackballing. Even more astronauts would be needed. Based on a point system he had developed using academics, pilot performance, and character/motivation as criteria, Slayton got on the job.
On October 18, 1963, just a year after the New Nine’s selection, NASA held a press conference to introduce a third group of astronauts: Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, William Anders, Charles Bassett, Alan Bean, Eugene Cernan, Roger Chaffee, Michael Collins, Walter Cunningham, Donn Eisele, Ted Freeman, Richard Gordon, Russell Schweickart, David Scott, and Clifton Williams. The Final Fourteen, they called themselves. They were slightly younger and slightly more educated than their predecessors. The test-pilot requirement had been dropped, and new candidates were expected to have a background flying military jet fighters, so while they were less flight-experienced, they were even more engineering- and research-oriented than those in the previous class.
But even with intensive training and classroom instruction, frequent visits to the various plants scattered across the country that were manufacturing the myriad spacecraft parts, and countless other duties, they too found time for fun, both with their families and without them.
The space race had intensified, and Steve Bales, the boy from Fremont, Iowa, had not lost his childhood desire to be part of it. But his family didn’t have much extra for college; his mother worked in a beauty salon, his father in a hardware store. From the age of twelve, Steve had mowed yards—at one time he had forty that he kept up—and saved his money. When he got older, he worked summers as a hired hand on a farm, cleaning out hog pens, walking fields cutting thistle and sour dock, and driving a tractor to mow hay. In the end, all his savings wouldn’t be enough.
But Sputnik had sparked an encouragement of science and technology, and scholarships and low-interest loans were available to those who wanted to major in those subjects. In 1960, Bales applied for and received a scholarship to study aerospace engineering at Iowa State, 107 miles away from home. In February 1962, he watched John Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission on TV, and when footage of Mercury Mission Control was shown, Bales wondered what it would be like to work there. He began reading all he could about NASA, and in the spring of 1964, during his senior year, he filled out a federal-government job application and sent it to Houston. Though he was a few credits short of his degree, he was hired as an intern that May. He decided to finish school the following semester, and soon he was in Houston giving tours of the new Mission Control Center. That summer he learned as much as possible about every job in the Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR—pronounced “moaker”) by talking to every flight controller he could. He went back to college and finished his degree, then returned to Houston in December with a job.
The Gemini program was gearing up, and soon Bales was assigned to the complex area of Mission Control handled by the flight dynamics officer (FIDO), who was responsible for determining the location of the spacecraft and its trajectory. Mostly he observed and learned, helping to write mission rules. Eventually he switched to the guidance officer (GUIDO) console, where he helped monitor the guidance systems of the spacecraft, including its computer. He was not much younger than most of the other flight controllers in the room, and, like them, after a lot of self-instruction, classwork, and on-the-job training, he had gotten thrown onto the hot skillet of Mission Control. The ones who survived their trial by fire might someday become “steely-eyed missile men,” the people who made informed life-or-death decisions: go, no-go, and, occasionally, something in between. Bales survived and thrived; at the age of twenty-three, he graduated to full-fledged controller—GUIDO—on Gemini 9.
About that time another new guy came aboard: Jack Garman, a big, friendly twenty-one-year-old whiz kid born in Oak Park, Illinois, and hired right out of the University of Michigan. His major in engineering and minor in computers had helped get him a job working on Apollo’s onboard software system, then being developed by MIT. He’d interviewed with several companies, most of which were involved in some way with the space program, and he’d picked NASA even though it offered the lowest starting salary—he wanted to be on the inside of the program, not the outside.
As soon as he finished his last class, he drove to his parents’ house in Chicago, then got back in his car and headed south—he didn’t know exactly where Houston was, only that it was somewhere below Dallas, but he figured he’d be able to find it. Upon arriving there, he was given a choice: he could work with the big Mission Control Center ground computers or the onboard software, the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). He chose the one that would fly, the AGC, and though he felt intimidated at first, he found that almost no one there knew much about computers. After a month’s worth of intensive computer classes in Houston, he returned to find that he knew more about the machines than anyone at Mission Control, and since he was now an “expert,” they made him a group leader. When Mission Control asked for help with the AGC, he volunteered to man the GUIDO staff support room down the hall, where a group of experts were on hand to advise each of the MOCR positions during a mission. For the next few years, he lived and breathed the AGC, flying up to MIT frequently to confer with its inventors. He had little time for recreation, but he didn’t care. He loved what he was doing. Besides, when he did go out, if people found out that he worked for NASA, he was treated like a king. Houstonites loved what the agency had brought to their city.
Sometimes the sense of magic that had lured him into the space program would disappear. But during a flight, Garman could sit at a console and read the cascading numbers on his screen and realize he was “looking at a computer that literally was out in space,” and, as he would remember later, “it got to be awesome again.”
Bales and Garman were only two of the many brilliant—and very young—flight controllers who thrived in the high-pressure environment of Mission Control. Managers like Chris Kraft rarely had to fire those who weren’t working out, since the people who couldn’t take the pressure usually left of their own accord. The ones who stayed helped define the role of flight controller, and they became legends to generations of their successors.
In late 1963, after his bid to fly one last Mercury flight was denied, Alan Shepard had been chosen to command the first Gemini mission, a short five-hour shakedown cruise designed to test the new spacecraft’s maneuverability. Tom Stafford, a standout among the New Nine, would be his copilot—except he wouldn’t be called that. Though Stafford’s duties as Shepard’s crewmate could accurately be described as those of a copilot, Deke Slayton had decided that no astronaut on a Gemini or an Apollo flight would ever be referred to by that term. Shepard and every other lead pilot on every mission would be the command pilot, or commander. His crewmate would be the mission’s pilot.
Shepard was pleased, and unsurprised, at being selected. First to fly Mercury, first to fly Gemini—the first Apollo flight, he hoped, would be next, and perhaps he’d even be in on the first moon landing. He and Stafford began training, spending many hours in the Gemini flight simulator, which could run through a full mission with all its potential abort situations.
But Shepard had been keeping a secret. He’d been suffering from dizzy spells, many severe enough to incapacitate him. The first had occurred a few months after his Mercury selection. The next one hadn’t happened until late 1963, years later; he began having them in the morning, soon after he rose. The attacks were so bad that they left him helpless on the floor, his head spinning and his stomach roiling. It was all he could do to drag himself to the bathroom to vomit. He’d tried everything—a private doctor, medication, vitamins—but nothing worked. And then the episodes began occurring more frequently and were joined by a ringing in his left ear. When he had an attack one day while giving a lecture and had to be helped off the stage, he had no choice but to tell Slayton, who convinced him to see the NASA flight surgeons. The diagnosis—Ménière’s syndrome—was a serious one; doctors didn’t know what caused it, and there was no known cure. Shepard was grounded. He couldn’t even fly a NASA jet alone. He and Slayton, also still unable to fly due to his heart arrhythmia, shared that embarrassment.
Shepard, who had just turned forty, considered leaving NASA—it looked like his astronaut career was over. But in June 1964, Slayton, who had moved up to assistant director of flight crew operations, offered Shepard his old job as head of the astronaut office, and Shepard took it.
Shepard didn’t handle being grounded nearly as well as Slayton had, and having to act as mother hen to the astronauts wasn’t easy for him. He came down on them hard, earning himself the nickname of the Ice Commander. He believed he was just running a tight ship, but even Slayton thought he was excessively critical and told him to ease up. (During the interview part of the astronaut-selection process, Shepard seemed to delight in asking tough questions and intimidating interviewees. “His cold eyes seemed to look right through me,” remembered one.) He started dabbling in investments, some of them requiring his time as well as his money. He became part owner and vice president of Baytown National Bank and got involved in wildcatting and a cattle ranch. Often, he’d go to the office for an hour or two and then spend the rest of his day handling his outside business interests; “He was never there,” recalled one astronaut. But he was Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and rules seemed to be bent for him. No one else could have criticized one of his charges for not being an astronaut twenty-four hours a day and gotten away with it—but Shepard did.
He and the rest of the original seven didn’t let the new guys forget that there was a pecking order. “Don’t feel so smart,” Grissom told a member of the New Nine one day. “You’re just an astronaut trainee,” Schirra told another. “You don’t count for anything around here.” In their view, no one was a true astronaut until he’d flown into space. Those who hadn’t were just apprentices.
Grissom had been Shepard’s backup command pilot for the first Gemini flight, so when Shepard was grounded, Grissom was named prime crew. And after Gus got through with it, the spacecraft—no longer just a capsule, since its more powerful translational rocket thrusters could change its course and orbit, unlike the primitive Mercury—was a pilot’s dream, a smooth-handling sports car compared to the Model T Mercury. Even the myriad controls and displays were laid out in a way that made it clear a pilot had had a direct hand in the design.
The idea to make it a two-man vessel had come from Max Faget, who had been named the MSC’s director of engineering and development after the move to Houston. It seemed like common sense to use two men, especially given the longer missions and more complex operations now involved. Faget’s shop also favored a landing system that included a parachute that could be steered and had retro-rockets to cushion touchdowns on the ground. But problems in that system’s development seriously delayed implementation, and it was finally scrapped.
Faget did not like the proposed landing system that was officially a part of the Gemini program and was planned for use in the last few flights: the Rogallo wing, an inflatable paraglider that would allow the craft to land on a runway using skids and would grant its pilot some maneuvering capability. Grissom and NASA civilian research pilot Neil Armstrong tested an early trainer version of the wing, but there were too many kinks to work out, and it was canceled after twenty-seven million dollars and years of development had gone into it. So the spacecraft would land as Mercury had—with an unguided splashdown into the water, which required a huge fleet of naval vessels to be ready in the primary, secondary, and contingent recovery areas.
The new, improved Mercury Mark II would also be twice as heavy as the original Mercury capsule, with 50 percent more space inside, so it would need a more powerful launcher. A new ICBM booster called the Titan II caught Chamberlin’s eye. It was being developed for the air force to launch nuclear warheads, and its total thrust of 430,000 pounds would be the most powerful in the nation’s arsenal. The first version of the Titan had an overly complicated engine, and early tests revealed its unreliability—“If the rocket got out of sight where you couldn’t see it, it was classified a success,” remembered one engineer. Another problem was its “pogo”—a liquid-fueled rocket’s tendency to vibrate longitudinally, which could result in structural failure, blur its occupants’ vision, and possibly inflict serious injury. These problems delayed the program by more than a year. But after some simplification and once the pogo and the other problems were fixed, Titan proved a reliable and powerful booster, and the final version of it received accolades from the astronauts. “A young fighter pilot’s ride,” one described its quicker acceleration at liftoff. But the bigger rocket was also louder at launch; one astronaut said it was “deafening…like a large freight train bearing down on you.”
Its fuel system used hypergolic propellants that ignited on contact with each other and required neither an ignition system nor the super-cold storage facilities that liquid oxygen demanded. This greatly simplified launching, though the spontaneous combustion also made it more dangerous.
With that in mind, Chamberlin decided to use ejection seats instead of Mercury’s escape tower, in case of an explosion during launch. Neither Faget nor Kraft supported that decision—the force of the ejection would subject the astronauts to twenty g’s, which might mean serious injury or death, and it was so dangerous that the system was never actually tested with a human—but the two were overruled. Chamberlin’s background was in jet aircraft, and jets used ejection seats. For easier access and egress, two large hatches would be installed. But the interior was still so cramped that an astronaut couldn’t stretch his legs out straight. There was about as much space as you’d have in the front seat of a Volkswagen Bug.
Despite the cramped quarters, astronauts loved the Gemini. They would no longer be glorified passengers unable to fly the craft—this spacecraft was all “stick,” with the pilot controlling virtually every movement. “My Gemini spacecraft was the orbital equivalent of a fighter aircraft…my favorite flying vehicle,” said Schirra. The only thing the ground control could do was update the computer. And the astronauts would no longer have to put up with jokes about sweeping the monkey shit off the seat, since no chimp alive could learn to fly it. Each man would have his own set of controls, though they would share the joystick, which was mounted between them. And the Titan, for all its quirks, offered a smoother, quieter post-liftoff ride than the Atlas.
The McDonnell company had learned much from creating the Mercury capsule, and Gemini was an improvement on it in virtually every way. A primitive but helpful onboard computer, a rendezvous radar, and after the first few missions, instead of large batteries, compact fuel cells that produced more electricity, weighed much less, and yielded a useful by-product, water, came standard on the Gemini, like disc brakes on the new 1965 Corvette.
To the astronauts in the NASA bubble—working and training long days and nights at Cape Canaveral and the new Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, visiting aerospace contractors’ plants for weeks at a time, spending barely enough time at home to reacquaint themselves with their families—real-world events only occasionally seeped into their consciousness. Politics, sports, popular culture, entertainment, and even the violent race riots and the civil rights protests and opposition to the Vietnam War sparked by the emerging counterculture of the new Left—to the astronauts, this was mostly background noise. But not the events that occurred on November 22, 1963, in Dallas.
Earlier that year, President Kennedy’s fervor for manned spaceflight had flagged; were the results really worth the money? In a September 20 speech to the United Nations, he had even suggested that the United States and the USSR combine their efforts toward a lunar landing, though the Soviet system was still too deeply entrenched in insularity to accept such an invitation. In congressional hearings, the space program and its massive budget had experienced its first solid opposition. Jim Webb had been forced to use all his powers of persuasion and to resort to scare tactics—The Russians are still ahead in the space race—to keep the Senate from cutting NASA’s 1964 budget by half a billion dollars. On November 12, the president had issued a memorandum calling on Webb to begin developing a program of cooperation with the Soviet Union in the field of outer space—a program that would include lunar landings.
That order would not be carried out. On November 18, President Kennedy toured the new “moonport” facilities at Cape Canaveral. Wernher von Braun had flown down to give him a guided tour of pad 37B, which was being prepared for an unmanned Saturn I launch. In dark sunglasses, Kennedy posed for photos under the mammoth booster while Secret Service agents stood by nervously. He walked around the prototype of the rocket that would launch three men to the moon, hopefully before the end of the decade, per his directive. Gus Grissom and Gordon Cooper took him up in a navy copter to give him a bird’s-eye view of the new moonport. Then he flew to Houston, the first stop on a quick jaunt through Texas to shore up political support for the ’64 elections, and took a look at the fast-growing MSC. On November 21, at a NASA facility in San Antonio, he gave a speech in which he told the story of a group of boys hiking across the Irish countryside who came to a high orchard wall and tossed their caps over it, forcing them to find a way over: “This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space and we have no choice but to follow it. Whatever the difficulties, they will be overcome.” His initial indifference to manned spaceflight and his previous waffling on its importance became enthusiastic approval in public.
From San Antonio he flew to Fort Worth and spent the night there. The next morning, the president and his entourage made the short flight to Dallas’s Love Field. At a luncheon later that day, he was planning to give a speech defending the space program’s cost. “This effort is expensive,” it went, “but it pays for its own way, for freedom and for America.” In Dallas, in an open limousine, he and the First Lady, along with Governor John Connally and his wife, were driven through the large friendly crowds lining the streets. At 12:30 p.m. in downtown’s Dealey Plaza, the president was shot dead.
Americans were devastated, and millions around the world shared their sorrow. Everyone in NASA was grief-stricken; von Braun, in his office three days later doing paperwork while the funeral played on TV, broke down and cried, the only time his secretary ever saw him do so. Many in NASA worried about what would happen to the United States space program now that its biggest public supporter was gone. Lyndon Johnson, the new president, had been a strong advocate of it, but a vice president had the luxury to choose and nurture his pet projects. A president had far less leeway. And consuming an increasing amount of Kennedy’s attention over the past year had been the growing conflict in Vietnam, where Communist forces from the north were threatening to take over U.S.-backed South Vietnam. The attempt to stem the “red tide of Communism” before it spread through the rest of Southeast Asia was demanding more American soldiers and dollars every day, and it showed no signs of slowing down.
Many of the astronauts had met President Kennedy, and the Mercury Seven had spent time with him at the White House and at NASA facilities. But his assassination hit John Glenn especially hard. Since his triumphant flight twenty months before, Glenn had become close to the Kennedy clan, much to the amusement—and, likely, jealousy—of some of the other Mercury astronauts. The president and his brother Robert had adopted him into their extended family, and the Glenns had spent time at various Kennedy houses and compounds. Glenn became especially close to attorney general Robert Kennedy; he and his brother had even suggested that Glenn challenge an aging incumbent in the Ohio Democratic primary for a Senate seat. Glenn was interested, but he thought he still had something to give the space program—and there remained that outside chance of a moon flight, the astronaut’s holy grail. He had continued to train with the astronauts, and he had asked Slayton and even Bob Gilruth for a Gemini flight assignment.
But they hadn’t given him a definitive answer, and Glenn began to suspect he’d never get a mission. Then a NASA official told him that Washington believed that he was too valuable to the program to risk losing him on another flight…and then he asked if Glenn was interested in becoming an administrator.
The death of the president helped Glenn make up his mind. Seven weeks after the assassination, on January 16, 1964, Glenn resigned from the space program. The next day he announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate seat in Ohio and began campaigning. The initial reaction was promising.
Six weeks later, in a hotel while on the road, Glenn slipped while adjusting a bathroom mirror and smacked his head on the shower door’s metal track, knocking himself out. He came to and found himself in a pool of blood. Worse than the concussion he sustained was the damage to his inner ear’s vestibular system, which controls balance. His symptoms were much like those of his rival Shepard—extreme dizziness and nausea. After weeks in a hospital bed, he withdrew from the Senate race. His political career appeared over before it ever started.
The Russians, meanwhile, were not flying as often as they had been. Since the June 1963 Vostok 6 flight that had included Valentina Tereshkova, there had been no manned missions…or at least none made public. That hiatus ended with another Russian space first on October 12, 1964: three men were launched in Voskhod 1.
It was only much later that the West learned the men went up in a stripped-down, one-man Vostok capsule modified to carry three cosmonauts, a strategy insisted on by Soviet politicians to upstage the announced two-man Gemini program. There was so little space in the cabin that there were no ejection seats, and the three short men—a pilot, a physician, and one of Korolev’s design engineers—could not wear spacesuits. They underwent just a few months of training, and for most of that time they had to diet to reduce the capsule’s payload to a sustainable level. When they squeezed into their spacecraft, they wore nothing but lightweight clothing. Fortunately, there was neither a booster accident during the launch nor a cabin depressurization during the brief sixteen-orbit, single-day flight. The spherical capsule dropped to Earth safely with the help of a braking rocket added to the parachute lines, since the cosmonauts had to make a ground landing. Besides being the first multi-person space mission and the first with no one wearing a spacesuit, Voskhod 1 set an altitude record of 209 miles.
During the flight, the crew spoke by radiotelephone to Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who was at his villa on the Black Sea. This would be the last time he spoke publicly as the leader of his country. Though he had overseen a relaxation of the Stalinist terror tactics and introduced some academic and cultural openness, many of his policies were unsuccessful, and other Soviet politicians decided it was time for a change. Later that same day, he was summoned to Moscow, where he was removed from office on October 14. Two offices, actually—Leonid Brezhnev replaced him as first secretary, and Alexei Kosygin took his job as premier. The country’s two new leaders greeted the cosmonauts upon their arrival in Moscow eight days later.
Five months after that, on March 18, 1965, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov accomplished the world’s first EVA—extravehicular activity, or space walk—when he crawled through an inflatable air lock and floated out of Voskhod 2 at the end of an eighteen-foot umbilical cord. He spent twelve minutes floating and cavorting outside as the spacecraft orbited the Earth—the first human satellite. But when he tried to reenter the craft, he found that his spacesuit had expanded and stiffened so much that he couldn’t bend his legs to fit through the air lock. As his oxygen supply dwindled down, he decided on an extreme measure. He partially depressurized his suit by opening a valve and letting air bleed out, then jammed himself inside headfirst; his crewmate, Pavel Belyayev, hauled him through the air lock.
Leonov was exhausted. He had expended so much energy that he was up to his knees in sweat. Years later, he would reveal that he had a suicide pill to swallow in case he was unable to reenter the craft and his crewmate was forced to abandon him. (This was an option no American astronaut would ever be given, despite persistent rumors to the contrary.) Leonov would later insist that he hadn’t been scared; “There was only a sense of the infinite expanse and depth of the universe,” he said.
Belyayev and Leonov’s capsule landed a thousand miles east of its intended recovery point, wedged between two large fir trees in the Ural Mountains. The two cosmonauts spent a frigid night huddled together, trapped inside the craft while wolves howled nearby, and were found the next morning by a rescue team on skis. But those details came out later; at the time, the mission was deemed another Soviet space spectacular. The Russians appeared to have the inside track on a lunar orbit or landing, a belief they reinforced in various public comments. “But our immediate goal, the target before us, is the moon,” said one spokesman, and under the headline “Sorry, Apollo!,” a Pravda article bragged that “the gap is not closing, but increasing.” Evidence of how close the Soviets were to that goal could also be seen in Leonov’s environmental system: a self-sufficient backpack, far more complex—and troublesome in terms of getting in and out of an air lock—than a relatively simple umbilical. Such a backpack would be needed for a walk on the moon but was hardly necessary for an EVA in space.
But there would not be another Soviet manned mission for more than two years. It was America’s turn.