By the end of the 1960s, twelve human beings had traveled to the moon; four had walked on its barren, untouched surface. Eight more American astronauts would reach the lunar highlands in the early 1970s. The American people and NASA had accomplished what they said they would do: land men on the moon by the end of the decade and bring them back. And it was done in front of the entire world. When asked what it all meant a few weeks after his return from the moon in July 1969, Apollo 11 command module pilot Michael Collins put this singular human achievement into perspective: “I think it [was] a technical triumph for this country to have said what it was going to do a number of years ago, and then by golly do it just like we said we were going to do.”1
In the decades since the final US moon landing, most of America’s early astronauts recorded their stories for posterity. In one form or another, these early space pioneers published their memoirs, mostly with the help of professional writers or aerospace journalists who covered their exploits. (Notable exceptions include Collins, undoubtedly the finest writer ever sent into space, and Walter Cunningham, who chronicled the early years of NASA along with his own career as an Apollo astronaut.)
From Shepard to Glenn, Armstrong to Cernan, these men were able to shape the public’s perception of these early astronauts’ lives and careers. While Virgil Ivan “Gus” Grissom managed to coauthor one book about his role in the Gemini program before his death (completing a draft manuscript weeks before the Apollo 1 fire on January 27, 1967), most of what we know or think about the third human being to fly in space, if we think of him at all, was shaped by press accounts, documentary snippets, and a few interviews given by the press-shy Grissom to trusted newspaper and television reporters. In the early days of the Space Race, inhabited as it was with ultra-competitive men with enormous egos, Gus Grissom was often a footnote.
Aside from a 1968 self-published tribute by the Grissom family’s pastor and a 2004 biography that focuses heavily on Grissom’s Indiana years, no comprehensive survey exists of this simultaneously simple and complex man, his supersonic life, and his tragic and unnecessary death. This volume is intended to fill that gap in the historical record, to examine the life and career of Gus Grissom, to reconsider his place in the annals of space exploration as well as in the history of the Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Grissom was a Cold Warrior in the truest sense. No geopolitical rivalry better defines this period of human history than the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for supremacy in space exploration. The first waypoint was a manned lunar landing. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy understood this instinctively. America, Kennedy concluded early in his administration, could not survive if the Soviet Union controlled outer space.
By hanging their hides out on the line, Grissom and his fellow Mercury astronauts became the instruments, the business end, of US Cold War strategy. Grissom was an eager, willing participant, agonizing over every Soviet space spectacular, and then redoubling his own efforts to keep pace and eventually pass the Soviets in a race to the moon.
By the mid-1960s, with planning for lunar missions well under way and technological development moving at a breakneck pace, Grissom had emerged from the pack as the odds-on favorite to be the first human being to walk on the moon. He would focus all of his energies on that goal. He and his family would pay the ultimate price for his unswerving dedication.
The reticent test pilot and astronaut from downstate Indiana was more than willing to do the tedious testing and other unglamorous engineering work required to reach the moon by the end of the 1960s. He was utterly uninterested in tickertape parades and White House ceremonies, unimpressed, as fellow astronaut Wally Schirra later observed, with personal prestige. Gus Grissom did not care. He just wanted to fly. And the best place to go was 238,000 miles from Earth.