The Mercury 7 in 1959. Back, l to r: Alan Shepard,
Virgil “Gus ” Grissom, Gordon Cooper. Front, l to r: Walter Schirra, Donald “Deke” Slayton, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter.
Ih e men were uncomfortable, standing around in the civilian clothes they had been ordered to wear. And they were more than a little confused about what they were doing there. Each of the thirty-five United States military test pilots had received a mysterious telegram marked “Top Secret,” and it ordered them to report here, a government meeting room on a chilly day in early February 1959.
Then a couple of high-level bureaucrats arrived and got right to the point. The brand-new National Aeronautics and Space Administration was looking for volunteers. They wanted pilots who would agree to be strapped into a small metal capsule on the top of a rocket and shot into the airless void of space.
They wanted astronauts.
The word—Greek for “star voyager”—was new to the men in the room. And it was an almost unbelievable idea. Everybody knew there was a contest to put a man into space—and that the United States was losing it. The Soviets had three satellites in orbit around the earth, and the United States had yet to get one up. But now NASA was looking for volunteers who were ready to climb up to the top of one of those unreliable rockets and fly into the complete unknown.
All the men at that meeting were military test pilots: those were the ranks from which the space agency intended to draw its first astronauts. But that had not always been the plan. NASA started off with a wild, almost comical list of places where it might find a few good men. An astronaut was going to have to be brave, obviously, so NASA thought about where to find brave people—or at least people who sought out danger. The first list included mountain climbers, sky divers, even bullfighters. Then they thought about what an astronaut was facing, besides simply personal peril, and they put polar explorers and deep-sea divers on the list—people who had experience in isolated and hostile environments.
But NASA was in the middle of a race, with a public clamoring for achievements, and the agency did not have time to wade through the ranks of daredevils and adventurers, weeding out what one engineer called “crackpots.” They thought about scientists (physicists, astronomers, meteorologists), but there was another consideration: the first plans for the mission called for the capsule to be controlled from the ground, but no one knew how the systems would hold up in a space flight. Robert Gilruth
and the men of his Space Task Group started to think that they better have somebody in the craft who knew something about flying. The person who went into space was going to have to be able to monitor the systems functions, evaluate them and report back to earth. Pilots: they needed pilots.
Many of NASA’s new engineers had come from the civilian aircraft industry, and they knew what kind of pilots were required on a project like this. Test pilots, guys who had experience with new and unknown ships, who could be part of the design process—and who had nerves of steel. “Test pilots,” Gilruth later told a historian, “are used to altitude, the need for oxygen, bends and acceleration. They are used to high discipline and to taking risks . . . the test pilots would be best because they also had the technical knowledge to understand the ins and outs of the space capsule and the rockets and navigation.”
So NASA started to map out a plan for screening the country’s civilian test pilots: the men running Project Mercury were sure they would have to recruit from civilian ranks, given President Eisenhower’s emphasis on keeping the space program separate from the military. But at a meeting with the president on December 22, 1958, NASA’s first administrator, Keith Glennan, raised the subject of military pilots. Eisenhower liked the idea: military men were already cleared for classified projects, the test pilots were the elite of the military flyers, and they were already on the payroll. He cleared NASA to confine its search to the ranks of military pilots; the armed forces could second the men to duty with the civilian space agency. “The President agreed on getting the men from the military services, so that they would have had their disciplinary training behind them,” reads a summary of the meeting.
Glennan and his men were relieved: this would speed the selection process considerably. The Space Task Group drew up a list of qualifications for these pilots: a university degree in the physical sciences or engineering; a minimum of fifteen hundred
hours of flight time, including jet experience; an age of less than forty years; optimal physical condition, with “physical and psychological attributes suited for spaceflight”; and height of less than five feet eleven inches and weight of less than 180 pounds (because the pilots would have to fit in the space capsule, and every extra pound would be one more for the rocket to lift).
The list was sent out to all branches of the service, and by late January 1959 NASA had 108 names. They invited the men to Washington in three groups; they looked them over, sent the too tall or too heavy ones home (for not all the personnel files were accurate), and told the others the speculation in the newspapers was true. They wanted volunteers for suborbital and orbital flight. The program, unlike the Soviets’, would be public, but no one would know if the men chose not to volunteer; no note would be made in their military files. NASA knew some ambitious pilots would not want to leave their jobs for an uncertain civilian project and that others were not going to be interested in consigning their lives to an agency that could not get a rocket into the air in one piece. But far more men than they anticipated said yes—the men were, after all, pilots, and if there is one thing every pilot wants it is to go higher and faster than he or she has gone before. By the time NASA had reviewed the first two groups, they had thirty-two candidates, which seemed like plenty, so the last group never even got to Washington.
NASA told the pool of thirty-two men that before they could officially volunteer, they needed to pass some tests. Brig. Gen. Donald Flickinger, the expert in aeromedical research who had helped NASA make its first assessment of whether a human could survive the trip into space, was part of those first discussions about qualifications. And he wanted to see that these volunteers had a thorough medical exam. Sure, they had to be in top condition to fly for the military. But the demands of space- flight would be enormous: the G-forces, the pressure drops, the weightlessness. A tiny undetected problem in a heart valve, for
example, could be instandy fatal when a pilot was put under pressure six times the force of gravity. And so, at Flickinger’s recommendation, the thirty-two candidates were to be given a thorough medical screening. But where to do it? It had to be secret, for one thing. All the obvious hospitals for this kind of work were military establishments, but NASA was trying to keep this a civilian operation.
Flickinger suggested the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico—an operation run by his friend Randolph Lovelace II, who chaired NASA’s Life Sciences Committee. The clinic was established by Lovelace’s namesake uncle, a doctor who first went west to treat his own tuberculosis in 1922. Fie passed the mantle to his nephew in 1946. The younger Lovelace, a dark-eyed charismatic man known as Randy, had trained at the Mayo Clinic and was a widely respected doctor. He was also a pilot, with a fascination with all things to do with flight. He had served as a flight surgeon and colonel in the air force and pioneered aviation medicine in the United States. He did groundbreaking research into the effects of aeronautics on the human body; he helped invent the oxygen mask, and then in 1943 made a landmark parachute jump (his first ever) from a record forty thousand feet, holding a jar of oxygen to prove that portable oxygen could allow pilots to fly to new heights. Randy created the Lovelace Foundation in 1946 to do research and education in support of the clinic and set up an innovative department of aerospace medicine.
The Lovelace Clinic was a logical place to screen the test pilots. Lovelace himself was intimately involved in the emerging aerospace industry, and for the previous ten years the foundation had been extensively involved in clinical examination of airline and industry pilots. In 1933, the clinic was awarded a top secret contract to select and monitor the pilots who would fly the U2 spy plane missions, and its professional work had won Randy points in Washington. Dr. Lovelace had also assigned a lab to
develop a test protocol for space pilots and received a government grant in 1958 to pay for it. NASA had asked him to act as chair of its Life Sciences Committee the year before—he knew what NASA needed in its space pilots—and his aerospace medicine department was headed by a retired air force general, Albert Schwichtenberg, who would know what to look for in these fliers. The clinic was a civilian institution, and shipping the men out to Albuquerque might help to keep the secret. Lovelace it was.
The astronaut candidates were divided into groups of six or seven, and the first group arrived in New Mexico in February 1959, once again ill at ease in civilian clothes and trying to remember the aliases they were assigned to keep things secret. In 1959, no one had ever traveled beyond the pull of gravity, and nobody knew what being in space would do to the human body: would the heart cease to beat and the control of the other muscles fall away? Would eyeballs lose their shape, perhaps drift out of sockets? Would food stick in the throat, refusing to be swallowed? The doctors at Lovelace had no idea, and so they did every test they could think of. They tried to shake the mens bones with blasts of sound, sat them under pulsing strobe lights, induced vertigo, plunged them from light to dark and counted how long it took their eyes to focus again. They analyzed every bodily fluid they could wring out of the men, baked them in saunas and pushed them to the point of exhaustion.
The staff at the foundation observed the order of secrecy, although Lovelace himself later recalled “a special electricity” in the air while the astronaut candidates were being screened. But the nurses and doctors paid close attention to their subjects: NASA wanted men who saw the tests as a challenge, not an ordeal. It was noted who was jumpy or abrasive, and a little flag was put beside the names of those who kept their heads regardless of what the doctors did to them.
Only one man was weeded out at Lovelace: the rest were ruled without flaw. “We were used to seeing all different kinds of
human beings/’ says Donald Kilgore, a clinic doctor involved in the screening. “But these men were intellectually, physically and psychologically extraordinary. We were dealing with something we had never seen before.” The thirty-one surviving candidates were directed to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, for psychological, endurance, altitude and isolation testing. It was another grueling ordeal: they were sent to a simulated height of sixty-five thousand feet without oxygen or pressure suits, left in dark rooms for three hours and then subjected to a barrage of questions: “Who am I?” over and over, for example, or “What do you see here?” (on a blank sheet of paper).
Finally a board made up of senior NASA engineers, flight surgeons, psychologists and psychiatrists made the selection. They were meant to winnow the list down to six, but they couldn’t get past seven, and in the end they gave Robert Gilruth seven names.
With rockets blowing up all over the place, NASA needed some good publicity, and on April 9, 1959, it introduced the word astronaut—and the seven men to whom it gave the title— to a hungry public. But nobody in NASA or the government predicted the wave of national fascination that greeted these men who were ready to leave earth.
The press conference was jammed with reporters, and the usually jaded group actually applauded when Keith Glennan introduced the seven men at the table. Glennan outlined the astronaut selection procedure, emphasizing the large pool from which this team was drawn. He introduced Randy Lovelace, the doctor who had supervised the medical screening, and the media seized on the details of the examinations, breathlessly describing the ordeal.
The reporters hustled the NASA types through the technical details of the Mercury program, because they wanted to get to the men. They wanted to know everything about them. Did they go to church? What did their wives think of this? Weren’t they afraid?
There were three air force pilots: the sharply intelligent Deke Slayton, a relentless racer called Gordon Cooper and a reticent loner named Virgil “Gus” Grissom. There were three navy pilots: the joker named Walter Schirra, Alan Shepard, the big-picture guy, and the dreamer, Scott Carpenter. Plus one marine, the straight arrow, John Glenn. The reporters could tell just by looking at them—spines ramrod straight, hair buzzed almost to their scalps, reactions like lightning—that these men were impervious to fear. Asked which of them would be the first in space, each of the seven immediately raised a hand. Glenn raised both hands. The astronauts were clearly stunned by the force of the media attention that was suddenly trained upon them, and most of them were more than usually reserved—except for John Glenn, whose skill with media quickly became apparent. They were nonetheless irresistible, these men, in their laconic, casual bravery.
Lined up behind the table, they were a remarkably homogenous group. AJ1 were white, Protestant men from small towns; four were named for their fathers; three were graduates from military colleges; all were married and had children. This, America was told, was what an astronaut looked like.
The seven were instant heroes. Their families were besieged by reporters, and in acres of media coverage they were held up as the embodiment of American virtue: decorated war veterans, fearless pilots, husbands, fathers, churchgoers, devoted to their country and prepared to risk their lives for its greater glory. The astronauts reduced the space race and the competition with the Soviets to the level of single combatants: these were Americas warriors, and the country pinned its hopes on seven pairs of broad shoulders.
The United States needed heroes. The Soviets were still leading the race, and it seemed as if every few months there was another triumph. In September 1959, the Soviets launched Lunik 2 from the end of a rocket and the small sphere hit the moon. In October, they shot Lunik 3 around the moon and past
it. The capsule sent back astounding photographs, the first ever taken of the dark side of the moon.
Americas astronauts reported for duty at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, where NASA had established its astronaut training facility, and very quickly established a culture of unadulterated machismo. They raced on the long country roads around the space center in their signature Corvettes; they played elaborate practical jokes on one another, and they caroused, creating a “wild boy” ethos that would endure for twenty years. The men were womanizers, all but John Glenn, and soon there were women around who claimed to have bedded six of the seven.
Now NASA had its star voyagers, but it did not have a craft to get them to the stars. The plan called for the rocket to carry the capsule to the edge of the atmosphere, where the arc of flight would propel it through the atmosphere and into orbit around the earth. The pod would be equipped with small retro-rockets that would push it down far enough for the force of gravity to pull it back for a splash down in the ocean.
The rockets were still a problem: they were exploding on the platform or going awry a few minutes after launch. And NASA’s engineers were struggling with the design of the capsule. It had to be small—really small—because the Atlas rocket could launch a maximum payload of twenty-seven hundred pounds. The Space Task Group’s first priority was this orbital vehicle, one that would protect a human passenger through all phases of a space- flight: launch, weightlessness above the atmosphere, reentry deceleration with its furnacelike heat, and descent to parachute deployment at about ten thousand feet. The capsule had to keep its occupant alive in the wild temperature extremes of space (two hundred degrees Fahrenheit above in sunlight and two hundred below in shadow), and then the fiery reentry (where they believed the heat might reach four thousand degrees Fahrenheit). It had to protect the astronaut from the intense radiation, the
huge aerodynamic stress and the forces of massive acceleration. The designers had decided on a cone-shaped pod made of titanium, the curved wider end of which would be covered with a heat shield made of fiberglass and resin composite that would burn away during reentry.
The Mercury capsule, when they finally built one, was nine feet five inches high and barely six feet two inches across at the widest point—because that was the width of the rocket that would launch it. The astronaut would have to slide in on his back between the seat and the instrument panel. Packed in around his contoured seat were the systems to keep him alive (water and oxygen), the radio, the impact bag, the mechanical and electrical systems and their backups—before long, the capsule’s weight had crept up to more than twenty-seven hundred pounds, not even counting the 180-pound astronaut.
Meanwhile the Space Task Group was grappling with a crucial question: would the man in the Mercury capsule be a pilot or a passenger? The original design gave the pilot virtually no control over any of the systems: he would, in effect, be lobbed up and wait to fall back down. McDonnell Aircraft Corporation in St. Louis won the contract to build the capsule in 1959, and they had initially proposed a craft whose primary flight control systems were entirely automatic. Rumors about the pilot as payload had spread in test pilot circles, leading Chuck Yeager and the guys out at Edwards Air Force Base who were testing the transonic X-l aircraft—very much a ship controlled by its pilot—to dub the astronauts “Spam in a can.”
But NASA’s engineers began to argue that if something were to go wrong with that automatic system, the pilots should have the ability to take over. And once the Mercury 7 were involved in the process, they added angry voices: they intended to fly the capsule just as they had their jets. They had experience under great stress and with what pilots call G-loads, the pressure of forces many times greater than gravity, which come with acceleration
or sharp banking maneuvers. They had started doing some testing during brief moments of weightlessness when planes were in steep dives, and they were confident they would still be able to fly in space. They made technical recommendations: for the rearrangement of the control panel, an escape hatch they could open from the inside and a window. And they pushed for a conceptual shift—that the astronaut was not just there to survive the trip, but also to control at least some of it.
But in truth, the astronaut remained largely a passenger. When the capsule design was unveiled in the autumn of 1959, the astronauts had their window and their escape hatch. And while the attitude thrusters (which turned the capsule) and braking rockets (which would slow the capsule down to take it out of orbit) had an emergency override system, they would primarily be controlled by engineers on the ground. The astronaut could fire the thrusters to change the capsules roll, yaw or pitch (its three axes), but he could not alter the trajectory or the speed at which he traveled. He could fire the retro-rockets in an emergency (but only once—and if he was pointed in the wrong direction, he would go into higher orbit with no means of coming home). He wasn’t a straightforward passenger, but he sure wasn’t a pilot—not that you heard that assessment around Langley.
Work progressed on the capsule, and the astronauts trained in everything from desert survival (lest they come down somewhere unplanned) to astronomy (so they could navigate by the stars). But there were significant obstacles standing between the men and space. In Washington, there was by no means consensus on the urgent need for a staffed spaceflight: Eisenhower’s advisers were still not convinced it would work, and they were sure it was going to cost too much. And the astronauts had to deal with a stern team of flight surgeons. The doctors put the men through repeated rounds on a centrifuge that simulated eight or more G-loads, and they shot them up in a parabolic flight in a C-135
jet that produced a bit less than a minute of weightlessness, but none of it was enough to convince them that space travel was going to be safe for humans.
The first Mercury flights, they insisted, were going to have to be made by monkeys. The suborbital flights of two chimpanzees, Ham and Enos, went fine, but the doctors were not certain. They wanted more tests.
While NASA was struggling with the science, there was also a political battle under way. The United States was not, in fact, doing that badly in the space race: in 1959, NASA had launched eleven satellites that made major scientific discoveries about solar flares and radiation, the first communications satellite and several probes that passed by the moon. The Soviets, in contrast, launched only three satellites.
But it didn’t matter: the Soviets had the firsts. And while the average Americans weren’t too excited about solar flares, they certainly understood the goals that Nikita Khrushchev was setting for his space program. In August I960, the Soviets sent up two dogs, Belka and Strelka, who orbited the earth several times before returning, alive and well, and proving for the first time that a living creature could go into the weightlessness of space and survive reentry. It was obvious the Soviets were closing in on the goal of sending a human.
It was an election year, 1960, and space figured large in the contest. John F. Kennedy, the Democratic challenger, hammered his Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, on the issue, alleging that under Eisenhower’s watch, a perilous “space gap” had been allowed to open. He warned of Soviet superiority in missiles and their delivery. And he spoke of a global struggle in which the uncommitted nations of the Third World would soon choose between the East and the West, saying the Soviet Union was winning the race for hearts and minds. He promised that his administration would see the “American giant” stir once more. Kennedy won, in what was then one of the country’s tightest election races.
But while the space race was a major plank in Kennedy’s election platform, in truth the subject was not of great interest to him. Once he was in office, he turned over the portfolio to his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, the only member of his cabinet who knew much about it. Johnson, for his part, had sensed the public interest in the space race early on and, as an adroit politician, had fashioned a position as a supporter of bold American action. Kennedy saw it as a good way to keep Johnson occupied and away from the social policy matters of his a new frontier.”
Meanwhile the new president appointed Jerome Weisner, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as his science adviser. Weisner had been highly critical of NASA during the election, and he was a major opponent of staffed spaceflight, saying it would be too costly and too dangerous, and that the United States was better off probing the military uses of satellites. He urged Kennedy to dissociate himself from Mercury.
But on April 12, 1961, something happened that forced Kennedy to pay close attention: the Soviets announced that a Russian named Yuri Gagarin was orbiting the earth. Launched in a capsule called Vostok (“East”), he traveled at seventeen thousand miles an hour, 203 miles above sea level. He orbited the earth once, passing from day to night and back again, a trip that took him 108 minutes. Gagarin, the twenty-seven-year-old son of peasant farmers, was a major in the Soviet Air Force. He was the first person to see the spines of mountains and twists of rivers from above, the first to discern the delicate blue halo around the earth, and to see the endless black reach of space. On his return to earth, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev greeted him with the words “You have made yourself immortal because you are the first man to penetrate space.”
“Now let the other countries try to catch us,” Gagarin replied.
It was Sputnik all over again: the United States had been humiliated, beaten, and the Soviets had shown themselves to have a new and threatening technology. The whole world was
heralding their achievement. Kennedy tried to downplay Gagarins flight, saying the United States would “go into other areas where we can be first. ,, But Congress was demanding inquiries and reviews—and Kennedy already had a crisis to worry about, for U.S.-backed Cuban forces were anchored off the Bay of Pigs.
Two days later he gathered his closest advisers and the administrations experts on space. “Is there any place we can catch them?” the young president demanded impatiently. “What can we do? Can we go around the moon before them? Can we put a man on the moon before them?” NASA’s Hugh Dryden and newly appointed administrator James Webb suggested a crash program, like the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, that might beat the Soviets to the moon. But Kennedy’s budget director, David Bell, warned of the cost of such an effort. The president ordered the group to put together more information on projects that might beat the Soviets. “There’s nothing more important,” he said as he left the meeting.
NASA’s designers knew a moon mission was one area where they might beat the Russians. Bob Gilruth met with the president, and told him, “You’ve got to pick a job that’s so difficult, so new, that they [the Soviets] will have to start from scratch.” If both countries had to start from zero, he said, the United States could probably win.
Meanwhile Gagarin’s flight had silenced the doubters, the doctors who had insisted on more flights with monkeys—or at least the Soviet first had given the astronauts and their backers the political force to overrule the flight surgeons.
On May 5, 1961, American pride was salved when Alan Shepard was successfully launched in Mercury capsule number seven, on Redstone rocket number seven. Shepard had given his craft a name, too: Freedom 7, for the seven astronauts. Forty-five million Americans, an astonishing number for the time, leaned close to grainy black-and-white television screens to watch the slender Redstone shoot into the air on a cushion of fire. The
capsule came away from the rocket just as planned, and Shepard flew 116 miles high. He was well below the height needed to orbit, but he was weightless for about five minutes. And he felt fine: he could see, he could radio back to Cape Canaveral, he could monitor the systems. As the capsule began to fall back, the parachutes opened and Freedom 7 splashed down three hundred miles off the Florida coast. Within minutes a helicopter had lifted the spacecraft onto an aircraft carrier, and Shepard stepped out, grinning broadly.
At last the United States had its hero. Thousands turned out to see Shepard ride in a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, he was received at the White House, he was on the cover of every newspaper and magazine. Now the space race had the heart and imagination of every American.
Kennedy knew he had to capitalize on that energy. Three weeks after Shepards flight, on May 25, 1961, the president addressed Congress. He spoke passionately about the worldwide struggle between “liberty” and Communism. He addressed the difficult social and economic problems of the developing world and the military challenge presented by Soviet expansionism. Then, two-thirds of the way into his speech, he turned to the space race.
“If we are going to win the battle that is going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, if we are going to win the battle for men’s minds, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.”
Kennedy’s voice, strong and controlled, took on a new urgency as he got to the climax of his speech, words so fantastic that his audience could barely conceive of the plan he described.
“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. No single space project in this period will be more exciting or more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
Unspoken, of course, was one other word: first. Landing a man on the moon, first. The Soviets had the first satellite and the first man in space and they would go on to have any number of firsts. But with Kennedy’s public pledge, the space race suddenly had a finish line. The Americans had tried to hit the moon with a small probe three times, and the Soviets had quietly tried four times—they succeeded with Luna 2, in 1959. But now it was out in the open. The broad ideological and political contests between two rival world powers had been acknowledged, and the prize hung on the evening horizon for the winner.
It is hard to recall now, when Neil Armstrong’s first words as he stepped on to the lunar surface are some of the best known in the world. But when Kennedy spoke to Congress in 1961, his dream of a moon landing looked impossibly far off. Robert Gilruth marveled at it years later, saying that if the president had been any older, any wiser, he would never have taken the risk of committing to going at all, let alone within a decade. When Kennedy made the pledge, the United States space program had to its credit fewer than fifteen full minutes in space.
“Kennedy’s 1961 challenge can only be fully appreciated if we remember that 23 days prior to Shepard’s flight the Soviet Union put Yuri Gagarin in Earth orbit aboard a Vostok spacecraft,” wrote Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, in his memoir Men from Earth. “The Russians were beating us, hands down. They had huge leads in every element of manned spaceflight: propulsion, life support, and flight control. For Kennedy to dare the Soviets to a moon race in 1961 remains one of the classic examples of chutzpah in modern history.”
The space agency adopted the goal enthusiastically. “The manned lunar landing ... is the largest single effort within
NASA, constituting three-fourths of our budget, and is being executed with the utmost urgency,” administrator James Webb wrote in an assessment memo to Kennedy on November 30, 1962. When Kennedy was assassinated a year later, the goal became a covenant. Webb constantly reminded the engineers and technicians of the ticking clock, of the need to honor their fallen president by meeting his goal of a moon landing within a decade, and the agency became increasingly streamlined, focused on this single objective.
The whole world heard Kennedy’s pledge before Congress that warm May day in 1961. But thirteen women took it very much to heart.