6

MERCURY SEVEN

We bonded so closely, we were like brothers. Still are.
But sibling rivalry is also part of brotherhood. We had a lot of that.
—Mercury astronaut Walter M. Schirra Jr.

The American response to Sputnik, Project Mercury, was officially launched in November 1958, eight weeks after NASA was formed. At year’s end, President Eisenhower settled a debate about qualifications, deciding that the first American astronauts would be drawn from the ranks of the nation’s military test pilots. Given the strict requirement for at least 1,500 hours of flying time in high-performance aircraft, civilian pilots were effectively ruled out—as were women.¹ Among the other requirements was a bachelor’s degree in the sciences, preferably engineering.

For Eisenhower, weary of American rockets blowing up on live television or satellites tumbling out of orbit, secrecy was the highest priority. Most test pilots already held security clearances. Gus Grissom obtained a top-secret security clearance in November 1953. He and the other test pilot candidates also could be counted on to keep their mouths shut and to follow orders. Most important, NASA was in a hurry. (Prior to Project Mercury, the air force had been promoting a scheme called Man In Space Soonest, or MISS. The acronym alone may have doomed the effort.)

With Eisenhower’s edict to select only test pilots, NASA quickly formed an eight-man astronaut selection committee headed by Charles J. Donlan, associate director of the new Space Task Group and a twenty-year veteran of NASA’s predecessor, NACA. The committee consisted of engineers, flight surgeons, psychiatrists, and psychologists. The panel screened the records of no less than 508 candidates. Of these, 110 test pilots (fifty-eight from the air force, forty-seven from the navy, and five marines) were invited to attend an initial briefing at the Pentagon to hear more about Project Mercury. Only two groups totaling sixty-nine candidates were actually summoned to Washington by mid-February 1959 (Grissom was a member of the second group), and it soon became clear to the selection committee that the nation had plenty of qualified and willing astronaut candidates to choose from within the ranks of its working test pilots. The considerable sums expended over the last decade to train these test pilots would soon bear fruit. The committee’s daunting task would be winnowing the list of candidates to a dozen or so—the best of the best, or what General Donald Flickinger, the air force surgeon, referred to as the “premium man.”

The winnowing began immediately. Six candidates exceeded the height limit of five feet, eleven inches; fifteen were eliminated during an initial battery of tests along with psychiatric interviews and medical history reviews; and sixteen candidates declined for a variety of reasons, including the expectation that they would soon be receiving command promotions. By early February 1959, the number of candidates had been reduced to thirty-two men who were invited to undergo what NASA later acknowledged as “extraordinary physical examinations” at the Lovelace Clinic in New Mexico. The candidates also were apprised of the fact that they were signing up for “extreme mental and physical environment tests” at Grissom’s current base, the Wright Air Development Center in Ohio—that is, the mental and physical probing of the aerospace doctors at the Lovelace Clinic. It would be a kind of athletic competition, a marathon, with a “distinct psychological component,” future Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter concluded.2 Captain Virgil I. Grissom and the other thirty-one finalists would be competing in what amounted to the final laps of the astronaut selection process.

Some candidates summoned to Washington to hear NASA’s pitch came away thinking Project Mercury would amount to little more than what pioneering test pilots like Chuck Yeager derisively called “spam in a can.”3 Air Force captain Thomas Sumner later told space historian Colin Burgess that he too was immediately turned off by the fact that the Mercury “capsule” would have no windows and the astronaut would have virtually no control over the spaceship.

“I thought the whole thing was really ridiculous.” In hindsight, he realized that declining NASA’s invitation was “maybe one of [his] worst decisions.” Sumner had crossed paths with fellow air force captains Gordon Cooper and Donald “Deke” Slayton, and “especially Gus Grissom from Wright Patterson, and [he] often wondered how it might have ended up if [he]’d said ‘yes’ that day.”⁴

Those who did say “yes” began reporting in groups of six (the final group totaled two) to Lovelace Clinic on February 7, 1959. The candidates would now become test subjects. Dr. W. Randolph “Randy” Lovelace II founded the civilian clinic, nestled among a jumble of buildings on what was then the outskirts of Albuquerque. Lovelace was himself a pilot and had previously conducted space medicine testing on American U-2 spy plane pilots.

Physical and radiological examinations and laboratory tests began immediately on arrival. For seven and a half days, the candidates endured the probing of every body cavity, electric jolts to muscles to test reflexes, and had cold water forced into their ears. Blood was repeatedly drawn; urine and stool samples were collected daily. The physiological testing at Lovelace would give new meaning to the phrase “survival of the fittest.”

In what was to prove one of the understatements of the Space Age, air force cardiologist Lawrence Lamb acknowledged, “The candidates to become Mercury astronauts were not too happy with the nature of the examinations at the Lovelace Clinic.” Lamb, who later assisted NASA with Mercury astronaut selection and eventually became President Lyndon B. Johnson’s personal cardiologist, would soon play a central role in the drama surrounding the grounding of astronaut Deke Slayton, Gus Grissom’s next-door neighbor when they moved to Virginia to join NASA.⁵

While not playing a direct role in selecting the Mercury astronauts, Lamb and the new breed of “space surgeons” understandably were concerned about the effects of weightlessness on the future space travelers. But even Lamb acknowledged it was difficult to justify some of the more humiliating biomedical tests at Lovelace, including sperm counts. “The purpose of the selection process was to identify the best men available for the [US] man-in-space program, not to do ongoing research with methods that were of unproved validity,” Lamb wrote in his 2006 memoir.6 The results of the thorough biomedical testing were summarized and forwarded to the Aerospace Medical Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where the next round of stress and psychological tests were conducted.

Grissom’s group at Lovelace in early March 1959 included Carpenter, Glenn, and Slayton. Upon arrival at the Albuquerque airport, each was instructed to ask for “Tux” Turner, an air force colonel who directed traffic and delivered the candidates into the gloved hands of the space surgeons at Lovelace.⁷ The indignities that followed would prove to be a test of wills among an extremely competitive group of candidates, all determined to show they could handle anything the Lovelace doctors could dish out. The US Navy psychologist Lieutenant Robert B. Voas considered the ordeal to be a “mild test of stress tolerance and motivation.”⁸

Voas, a member of the astronaut selection committee and an industrial psychologist, explained: “While the purpose of the medical examinations at Lovelace Clinic had been to determine the general health status of the candidates, the purpose of the testing program at Wright Field was to determine the physical and psychological capability of the individual to respond effectively and appropriately to the various types of stresses associated with space missions.”⁹

Voas also was the first NASA official to understand that an extraordinary pilot who managed to survive a trip into space would have much to deal with when he returned. Communication skills would be added to the evaluation list.¹⁰ Others concluded that the process used to select astronauts ultimately came down to whether candidates would make “good heroes.” Besides being medically fit and highly motivated, Lamb concluded, “all the astronauts had the ability to present themselves well—when the occasion demanded it, and if they wanted to.”¹¹

NASA’s metrics for selecting astronauts would eventually become a subject of intense scrutiny as it became clear that either the United States or the Soviet Union would one day reach the moon. Walter Cunningham, a member of the third class of astronauts, offered this take on how the process actually worked: “We were slowly waking up to the fact that politics and favoritism were very important,” Cunningham recalled. “It wasn’t that much different from any other job where personalities play a big part, where it helps to be in the right place at the right time, and where certain factors—service relationships, first impressions, and pressure from friends (pro and con)—created fair-haired boys.”12

This was less the case in selecting the Mercury astronauts, and Charles Donlan later denied that considerations like the right proportion of air force, navy, and marine flyers played a role in selecting the first group. Neither did it hurt. “In the course of two hours, [we] came up with about a dozen [names] and called in [Space Task Group head Robert] Gilruth; and we just decided on seven, and then the next half hour I had contacted them by phone.” Explaining the thinking behind the selections, Donlan added: “If you look at the first seven, you’ll find that they all had a little different discipline to contribute. And that was part of the reason they were selected.” Donlan also stressed that such swift decision-making would today be impossible.¹³

The astronaut candidates’ ordeal at the hands of NASA doctors, what Wally Schirra later described as “a degrading experience” overseen by “sick doctors working on well patients,” would not be widely appreciated until the publication of Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book, The Right Stuff.¹⁴ Other parts of Wolfe’s book turned out to be less than accurate.

Unlike the outspoken Schirra, Grissom refrained from bellyaching about his treatment at the hands of the doctors and “headshrinkers.” Instead, he went to Lovelace determined to give it the “old school try and take some of NASA’s tests.” Ever stoic, Grissom’s main _concern was competing with what he realized were the best of the military test pilots. The opportunity far outweighed the discomfort, and the point was not to be intimidated and to give it his best shot.¹⁵

The formidable competition included Glenn, whom Grissom may have crossed paths with in Korea when the marine flyer served as an air force exchange pilot. As part of a program called “Project Bullet,” Glenn had, in July 1957, set a trans-American speed record flying cross-country in a Vought F8U-1P Crusader fighter jet in just over three hours and twenty-three minutes. His average speed was more than 725 miles an hour.

Three months later, the same day Sputnik was launched, Glenn turned up on the network television game show Name That Tune in his US Marine Corps dress blues and teamed with the child star Eddie Hodges. Glenn wowed the audience with his intelligence and mastery of the new medium of television. NASA officials quickly realized that the self-promoting yet ascetic Glenn was the best of a very talented bunch, referring to him as “Mr. Straight.” Glenn, a World War II fighter pilot from Ohio, would be the oldest of the Mercury Seven and would outlive all six of his brothers and rivals.

Donlan recalled Glenn showing up at his Langley office for a technical interview with a copy of the results of his centrifuge runs at the navy facility in Johnsville, Pennsylvania. At the end of the interview, Glenn asked if he could return that evening to look at drawings of the Mercury capsule. “Now those are the kind of things you look for when you evaluate a man’s suitability for a job like that,” Donlan stressed.16

By contrast, the other top candidates for Project Mercury were viewed as “typical fly-boys” who were nevertheless outstanding test pilots.¹⁷ That assessment certainly applied to hotshots like Gordon Cooper and the cool, shrewd Alan Shepard, but the other finalists also were dedicated flyers who had spent years honing their skills. Malcolm Scott Carpenter, one heat-transfer course shy of the engineering degree required to be a candidate (NASA made an exception) was perhaps the least likely of the group expected to make the final cut since he spent the least amount of time flying advanced aircraft. Carpenter nevertheless impressed the NASA selection committee with his scientific curiosity, world-class conditioning, and the fact that he carried himself in a way it was thought an astronaut candidate should, acting responsibly, asking probing questions, dedicating himself to the task at hand—beating the Russians into space. It did not hurt that the chiseled Carpenter looked the part of an American hero.

Like Grissom, Slayton was a no-nonsense, nose-to-the-grindstone pilot and World War II veteran looking for a way to move up the test pilot hierarchy. Another midwesterner from the southern Wisconsin farming community of Sparta, Slayton’s nickname, “Deke,” told most people all they needed to know about him. When the time came to do something difficult, Slayton frequently faced the challenge by muttering “Let’s get on with it.”

Slayton dismissed the rigors of the astronaut testing at Wright Field as a waste of time. Being baked in a heat chamber at 130 degrees was pointless for a combat veteran who had graduated from test pilot school at Edwards, Slayton reasoned. At least he could catch a nap in the isolation chamber. The doctors “had a captive group, and they exploited it,” Slayton concluded.18

Schirra, soon to become Grissom’s neighbor in Virginia, seemed destined to fly in space—both of his parents were flyers, his mother an aerial acrobat, a “wing walker”—despite a rebellious nature that was offset by a precise engineering approach to flying.

Shepard, like Glenn, a fearless and distinguished aviator, brought a midshipman’s spit and polish, as well as an innate understanding of his time and place in history. He also was widely viewed as the “shrewdest of the bunch.” Soon, those traits would make Shepard the first American in space and eventually a wealthy businessman. His Mercury colleagues initially viewed Shepard as “complicated … cold and standoffish.”¹⁹

Surrounded by extremely able men, Grissom proceeded through the Lovelace trial by fire, impressed by the competition but determined to keep pace. Working in his favor was the fact that he was compact (he would fit like a glove into the Mercury spacecraft), he had combat experience, and, most important, he was naturally competitive. Grissom respected his competitors, and they quickly respected him.

There was no complaining on Grissom’s part about the tortuous physical exams, only regret over his performance on the treadmill test when his heart rate reached two hundred beats per minute. “I thought I should have done better.”²⁰ Perhaps it was a result of growing up at sea level. The Coloradan Scott Carpenter, by far the best conditioned of the candidates, had grown up hiking, skiing, and lumberjacking at ten thousand feet.²¹

Grissom also could have done better protecting his urine jug. Carpenter recalled an evening at a Mexican restaurant as one group of Lovelace finalists welcomed the next: “At the feet of some of the outgoing candidates was a jug of urine, which they had been obliged to lug around all week in the interest of space medicine. Gus Grissom had yet to hand his over to the medics. Suddenly the most alarming expression transformed Gus’s face. He glanced under the table, and soon guys downslope were shifting in their chairs and lifting their feet off the floor. Gus had knocked over his urine jug.” More beers were ordered and everyone present helped refill Gus’s jug. “They had it topped off before the check arrived,” according to Carpenter.22

So much for the scientific precision of the Lovelace medical testing.

There was one additional cliff-hanger during the medical marathon: the Lovelace doctors, looking for any reason to disqualify a candidate, discovered while probing his respiratory system that Grissom suffered from hay fever. Digging in his heels, the candidate reminded the doctors: “There won’t be any ragweed pollen in space.”²³ In his own way, Grissom had shown the doctors and shrinks how logical he could be in a crisis, albeit a crisis that only threatened his own career. Seeing this, the doctors relented and the tests continued.

While Grissom and the others were challenged by tests like the “Complex Behavior Simulator” (variously referred to as the “Idiot Box” or “Panic Box”) designed to gauge a candidate’s reaction times under pressure, others, like a heat chamber test, were trivial. Most of the candidates figured out the trick in the hot box involved remaining perfectly still, perhaps catching a nap, and then waiting patiently for the pointless test to end.

As much as anything, the psychological testing forced the flyers to devise coping strategies that would make it appear they were cooperating without giving away details they preferred to keep to themselves. “I tried not to give the headshrinkers anything more than they were actually asking for,” Grissom admitted.²⁴ Others, like the highly motivated Carpenter, took a decidedly more intellectual approach that made him more of a participant in aerospace research than a mere test subject.

There was of course another point to this physical and mental stress. An individual’s willingness to tolerate physical discomfort and endless questioning about matters test pilots preferred not to discuss was a way of gauging motivation, maturity, and the ability to tolerate frustration.²⁵ “If the other guys can take it, so can I” seemed to be the finalists’ modus operandi.

Whether it was cold water squirted into their ears to detect involuntary eye movement (called nystagmus), muscles pierced by electrodes to gauge the response to nerve stimulation, barium enemas, pounding away on the treadmill, or dunking feet in a bucket of ice water—all were preferable to answering questions like, “Who am I?” Testing one’s physical endurance against the best pilots in the world was one thing; reflecting on one’s innermost feelings to the note-scribbling doctors was quite another. Moreover, the inquisitors seldom reacted to the candidates’ responses. To some of the men, this was unnerving.

The attitude of the frustrated, ticked off, decidedly sore candidates was best summarized by the naval aviator Charles “Pete” Conrad, known to the Lovelace doctors as “examinee number eight.” Largely due to his unwillingness to play along with the doctors, Conrad would not be accepted into Project Mercury. He would join the second astronaut class, the “New Nine,” selected in September 1962. Seven years later, Conrad would walk on the moon after executing a pinpoint landing within sight of another manmade object—an unmanned lunar lander called Surveyor. After Conrad provided the shrinks a suggestive and detailed description of a Rorschach card, the psychiatrist held up a blank white card and again asked the wiseacre candidate to tell him what he saw. “I’m sorry, Doc. I can’t,” Conrad said. “Oh? And why can’t you?” the doctor replied. “Because you’ve got it upside down.”26

Voas, referred to by the Mercury astronauts as “our official headshrinker,”²⁷ described what the space agency ultimately sought: “Intelligence without genius, knowledge without inflexibility, a high degree of skill without over-training, fear but not cowardice, bravery without foolhardiness, self-confidence without egotism, physical fitness without being muscle-bound, a preference for participatory over spectator sports, frankness without blabber mouthing, enjoyment of life without excess, humor without disproportion, and fast reflexes without panic in a crisis.”²⁸

Along with the inkblots, the candidates took several widely used psychological tests requiring them to answer “yes” or “no” to questions like, “My father was a good man” and “Strangers keep trying to hurt me.” Along with these personality and motivation tests, they also took a battery of aptitude and intelligence tests, including the air force officer and navy aviation qualification tests. For good measure, the candidates were quizzed on mechanical and spatial skills, tests that mechanical engineer Grissom likely aced.²⁹

Grissom next reported on March 8, 1959, to the Aero Medical Laboratory at the Wright Air Development Center back in Ohio, his home base the previous two years. This would be the final phase of astronaut candidate evaluation.30 Grissom was in the fourth group to come through the lab. Among the other members was navy Lieutenant Jim Lovell, who quickly would be eliminated from Project Mercury for a slightly elevated level of bilirubin, a natural liver pigment. The doctors were now looking for any reason to eliminate a candidate. Lovell too would join the second group of astronauts in 1962, fly twice to the moon, and become one of the American space program’s most articulate ambassadors.

The roster of candidates was reduced to thirty-one as the “stress testing” began in earnest at Wright-Patterson. That number would be reduced further to eighteen by the end of March. The survivors were clearly the “cream of the crop,” recalled Walter B. “Sully” Sullivan Jr., who as an air force first lieutenant served as the astronaut candidate’s liaison officer at the Wright Aeromedical Laboratory. Sullivan had seen a lot of test pilots come through Wright-Patterson, including U-2 and X-series pilots.

The astronaut candidates were the “most wonderful group of men I ever met,” Sullivan said a few months before his death in December 2012. Any of the remaining candidates could have qualified for Project Mercury, he reckoned.

Sullivan was assigned to meet the candidates at the airport in Dayton and make sure they got to the base without being noticed by reporters. “I’d hang out by the airline check-in desk and wait for the guys with ‘white sidewall’ haircuts to walk up to the ticket agent,” Sullivan told author Colin Burgess. “You could tell them from a mile off.” War stories about the ordeal at Lovelace were swapped on the ride to the air force base. “Little did they know of the ‘torture’ that awaited them, beginning Monday morning,” Sullivan recalled.³¹

Sullivan and others at the base kept a “side list” of the best candidates. He refused in an interview to reveal who was on his final list but heaped praise on Grissom, whom Sullivan had come to know while the astronaut candidate was stationed at Patterson Field as a test pilot. Sullivan said he long ago decided to keep his memories of Grissom to himself, saying only: “The rest of the astronauts thought the world of him.”

So too did the NASA doctors, who would later come to fear him. Grissom was a grinder. As an astronaut candidate, he applied the same determination that had gotten him through engineering school, qualified him as a fighter pilot in Korea, and propelled his rise through the ranks to become one of the military’s best test pilots. What he lacked in polish, Grissom more than made up for in native intelligence, technical skills, and a willingness, like his colleagues, to devote his life to a risky, utterly new endeavor.

In the midst of astronaut selection, NASA awarded its first major Project Mercury contract to McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, which had been selected over Grumman Aircraft Engineering. The St. Louis aerospace company would build and equip the Mercury space capsule, the term used before the astronauts insisted it be called a spacecraft. McDonnell and Grumman were deemed by NASA procurement officials to be technically equal with sound management. The deciding factor, according to NASA’s first administrator, T. Keith Glennan, was that Grumman was “heavily loaded with Navy projects in the conceptual stage.”32

McDonnell Aircraft had something else going for it: an agile management structure that would eventually allow the Mercury astronauts to go to the top of the company, to James Smith McDonnell, the inestimable “Mr. Mac,” to force changes in the Mercury design. The astronauts wanted a window and an exploding hatch that operated like an ejection seat on a fighter jet. If it made sense to him, Mr. Mac made sure the astronauts got what they wanted. By the time McDonnell won the contract for the next American spacecraft, the two-man Gemini, Grissom would be camping out at the company’s facility in St. Louis.

With the psychological and stress tests completed at Wright-Patterson, the candidates drifted back to their duty stations to sweat out the final cut. Some of the candidates had picked up hints before departing that NASA was very interested in them. Schirra noted later that the doctors examining a polyp on his larynx were in a big hurry to have it removed. The attending physician, unnerved by the rush, remarked before the procedure: “From all the fuss they’re making over you, you must be getting ready to go to the moon or something.” Schirra took this as a sign that his chances of joining Project Mercury were excellent.33

Given his duty station at Wright-Patterson, Grissom too might have heard scuttlebutt that he was still in the running. At about this time, Grissom’s school mate Bill Head told anyone who would listen in Mitchell that “I can tell you one [candidate] that’s gonna be in” Project Mercury. “Whatever they announce, it’s gonna be Grissom,” he insisted. “I was sure he was gonna be [selected] from just things that I heard from him,” Head recalled. “That’s how he made it.”³⁴

The names of the eighteen finalists were recommended to NASA without medical reservations at the end of March. Donlan later claimed the ordeal of the medical and psychological testing actually had little to do with the final group of candidates he submitted to his boss, Robert Gilruth. “Those tests, per se, had little to do with their actual selection,” Donlan told an interviewer in 1998, “because the only questions I ever asked finally was: ‘Are there any physical or mental reasons any of these candidates should be dismissed?’ If the answer to that was ‘No,’ they were on a list.”³⁵

It turned out that a critical consideration was gauging the candidates’ reaction to viewing drawings of the Mercury capsule during technical interviews. “We would spread the drawings out and acquaint them with what at that time was the situation, and ask them if they thought there was any legitimate role for the test pilot experience,” Donlan recalled nearly four decades later. “A lot depended on how they answered that question. Some would look at it and say, ‘Uh, I guess not.’ Well, others would say, ‘My God, this is a pioneering venture. Of course.’”³⁶

Donlan could be excused for conflating a key theme of the coming Kennedy administration with Eisenhower’s hesitant but geopolitically expedient foray into manned spaceflight. Grissom was certainly among the astronaut candidates who expressed enthusiasm about the Mercury concept. Indeed, he eventually would help oversee development of the spacecraft manual and automatic controls that would make the early astronauts something more than just “spam in a can.”

Carpenter’s recollection of his first glimpse at the Mercury specifications sheds light on how critical the technical interviews were for the finalists. Carpenter, who would orbit Earth three times in May 1962, noticed that Donlan sat up in his chair when the navy test pilot mentioned a camera installed on a photo-reconnaissance fighter, the F-9F-8P, which he had flown at the Patuxent Naval Air Station. The camera gave the aviator a view of the ground.

Donlan’s interest was piqued because the Mercury designers were contemplating a periscope-like device that would give the astronauts a view that could be used for navigation purposes. Carpenter’s experience with the camera, along with his strong background in celestial navigation and communications while flying larger navy aircraft, made a favorable impression on Donlan. It was seemingly inconsequential incidents like this that greatly influenced the selection of the seven Mercury astronauts.37

Getting his first look at the spacecraft schematics, Grissom undoubtedly realized he was glimpsing the future of flight. “I knew instantly that this was for me,” he wrote later. “This is where the future of test piloting lay.”³⁸ Spaceships, not rocket planes, were going to take humans into space, and Grissom the test pilot instinctively understood Mercury was the best way to go faster and higher.

The selection committee settled on seven “premium” men at the beginning of April 1959. Gilruth signed off on the selections, and Donlan began notifying the chosen on Friday, April 2. “You’ve been selected to join us, if you’re still interested” was about all Donlan said. Each candidate immediately accepted.

Before beginning his nearly seven-year career as an astronaut, Grissom had been rated as a “senior pilot” at the Wright Air Development Center. He was at the top of his profession. His decision to put his test pilot career on hold and accept NASA’s invitation to try out for the astronaut corps was risky, since no one in the late 1950s was sure what would happen after the completion of the Project Mercury program. Would there be a follow-up manned effort? What about a space station? Early in the space competition with the Soviet Union, only Wernher von Braun and his US Army rocketeers were thinking seriously about a trip to the moon. The true intentions of the Soviets and von Braun’s Russian counterpart, Sergei Korolev, remained unknown.

On April 13, 1959, “CAPT VIRGIL L. GRISSOM”39 received special orders from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, relieving him from his assignment at the Directorate of Flight and All-Weather Testing. He would be assigned until at least early 1962 to US Air Force Headquarters in Washington, DC, with a permanent duty station at Langley Research Center in Virginia, the home of NASA’s Space Task Group.⁴⁰ The order noted only parenthetically that Grissom was now part of Project Mercury.

At age thirty-three, the second youngest member of the Mercury Seven after Cooper was instructed to report no later than April 27 to Warren North, a well-known NACA test pilot and a member of the astronaut selection committee, as well as chief of manned spaceflight for the Space Task Group. Grissom was ordered to personally carry his pressure suit and parachute with him to Langley Field.

A small-town striver from southern Indiana had made the final cut. Cold War necessity and the arc of aviation history had swept up Gus Grissom and his six colleagues. Some had seen combat, been shot at, and fired at faceless adversaries in the sky, sending them circling to their deaths. There also was a parallel group of less skilled but equally fearless fighter pilots gathering at a place called Star City in the Soviet Union. The astronauts, most of them top-notch test pilots, and Soviet flyers training to be cosmonauts prepared to duel in space. Grissom was now among them.

The Mercury Seven were brothers, and, like siblings, they would fight like hell to be first.

Four days before Grissom’s new orders arrived, on April 9, 1959, an extraordinary event took place in the auditorium of NASA’s temporary headquarters at Dolley Madison House in Lafayette Park adjacent to the White House. It was the long-awaited NASA press conference introducing the nation’s new Mercury astronauts: Lieutenant Malcolm Scott Carpenter, along with Lieutenant Commanders Walter Marty Schirra Jr. and Alan Bartlett Shepard of the US Navy; Captains Leroy Gordon Cooper, Virgil Ivan Grissom, and Donald Kent Slayton of the US Air Force; and Lieutenant Colonel John Herschel Glenn of the US Marine Corps. Their names would become mythic, their faces forming the Mount Rushmore of American space explorers.

The press conference, memorable even by Washington, DC, standards, was the first time all seven astronauts appeared together in public. They had probably met in passing in a cafeteria or a restaurant during the testing ordeal. Now they were joined at the hips.

The seven were dumbfounded by the public reaction to their introduction, particularly since each understood he had done nothing to deserve the adulation. “I’ve never seen anything like it, before or since,” Slayton wrote, recalling the media “frenzy.”41

At 10 a.m. sharp, the NASA spokesman proclaimed to the breathless reporters and news photographers elbowing for a position: “Ladies and gentlemen, the astronaut volunteers.” The seven men dressed in suits with skinny ties—Glenn and Slayton in bowties—were arranged at a long table in alphabetical order, meaning the reticent Grissom frequently had to follow the loquacious Glenn in responding to reporters’ questions. The answers initially were clipped and perfunctory, until Glenn got ahold of a question and ran with it. Glenn “ate this stuff up,” Slayton recalled.

Responding to a query about whether their wives supported their decision to fly in space, Glenn delivered a tour de force, aw-shucks reply that the newspapermen could not resist. “A damned speech about God and family and destiny,” Slayton insisted.

Then it was Grissom’s turn to reply. As always, he was matter-of-fact, sounding like the family man he was, even though he was not home much and his absences would now grow longer. “Well, my wife feels the same way [as Glenn’s wife] or of course I couldn’t be here,” he began, pausing as Glenn and Schirra laughed. “She’s with me all the way. The boys are a little too young to realize what’s going on yet, but I’m sure they’ll feel the same way.”

Not bad for a reserved Hoosier with a deer-in-the-headlights expression on his face. Glenn was polished, sincere. Grissom was an everyman placed in an awkward situation, doing the best he could with little or no preparation. “We were all as green as grass,” Slayton admitted.⁴² The seven test pilots with little or no experience with the press were making it up as they went along.

The reporter’s question about the wives’ attitudes turned out to be perceptive. NASA psychiatrists had pointedly asked each astronaut candidate whether his spouse was opposed to him participating in the space program. Those who answered in the affirmative were rejected.

Grissom reluctantly learned how to deal with reporters and photographers, later saying the hardest part of a mission for him was the preflight press conference. Others like Glenn and Shepard quickly embraced their celebrity status; Grissom and the rest would take longer to adjust to the press scrutiny, the invasion of privacy, and the uncomfortable feeling of being marketed like soap. Upholding the image of the All-American astronaut also put a crimp in Grissom’s by-now-established pattern of partying as hard as he worked, meaning he would have to be more discrete in his off-hours carousing.

Back in Mitchell, the Grissom family was divided over what to make of the eldest son’s accomplishment. “My dad was really enthused about it. He thought it was something really wonderful,” brother Lowell recalled. “My mom wasn’t quite that excited about it. She’d heard too many stories like coming back into the atmosphere on a tail of fire so she was not that enthused about it.”43

The new astronauts dined with the top air force and navy brass on the evening of April 9, and then made their way south to settle in at work in their cramped office with seven desks and a secretary in a building at Langley Field in Virginia. In the interim, they had signed a lucrative deal giving Life magazine exclusive rights to their stories. Before the deal was finalized in early August, the astronauts were still dealing with press queries while acclimating themselves to NASA’s operations as officers on loan from their respective service branches.

With the astronauts’ arrival at Langley Field in late April, the American manned space program was now gathering steam. “All of a sudden, we had money,” said Jerome “Jerry” Hammack, a Mercury-Redstone project engineer at NASA Langley, who eventually moved into a house across the street from the Grissoms’s in the Houston subdivision of Timber Cove. “Oh man, we were going!”

When the astronauts reported for duty at Langley Field in the spring of 1959, Hammack and others decided to head over to the cafeteria to meet them. Mercury had been a test program up to that point, and here were the astronauts, “flesh and blood,” Hammack recalled.⁴⁴

The Langley engineers immediately began working closely with the astronauts on the design of the spacecraft. Gilruth welcomed their participation in the design process. “I gravitated toward Gus,” Hammack said. “He’d come over and bug me” about something. Scott and Mark Grissom were the same age as the Hammacks’s two sons. “We got to be good friends.” Indeed, Betty Grissom and Hammack’s wife, Adelin, would become lifelong friends.

As the Redstone rocket and Mercury capsule began to take shape, Grissom and Hammack would frequently fly together to both McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis, where the spacecraft was being built, and Huntsville, Alabama, to check on the Redstone rockets. At this point, Grissom did not know which booster he would be riding, but each of the astronauts became immersed in all aspects of the Mercury program.

About the time Grissom was selected as an astronaut, Sam Beddingfield, his flying buddy from Wright-Patterson, retired from the air force and took up farming back in North Carolina. It took Beddingfield about three days to realize he was not cut out to till the soil. He’d heard that NASA, just two hours up the road, was doing some new kinds of flight testing. On a whim, Beddingfield hopped into his car to see if he could get a job as an aeronautical engineer working on aircraft testing. That section at Langley wasn’t hiring, so Beddingfield was sent to the other side of the runway to talk to the new “rocket people.” The first person he ran into was Grissom. “What are you doing here?” the surprised astronaut asked Beddingfield. Sam told Gus he was looking for a job but knew nothing about rockets. The astronaut told him not to worry, “They don’t have anybody who does.”45

Indeed, the Mercury engineers at Langley and the contractors at McDonnell Aircraft were making things up as they went along. No one really knew how to go about flying in space. Lowell Grissom had started working at the McDonnell plant in St. Louis shortly after his brother was selected as an astronaut. “Those were exciting times,” he said. “When I first started work there they had molded the couches for Mercury and they had them setting up on a wall with the individual names on them.” Lowell continued, “Right across from my office is where they were building the heat shield for the Mercury spacecraft…. Those guys [at McDonnell], they really didn’t know what they were doing. Everything was brand new. I remember talking to them about the heat shield, and one guy said, ‘Well, we think it has to be this thick, so we’re making it just a little bit thicker.’”46 Cecile Grissom’s concerns about her son riding a tail of fire during a Mercury reentry were not unfounded.

Back at Langley, Beddingfield explained to Grissom that he had left the air force. “That’s perfect,” Grissom replied. “If you don’t like it, you can just get up and leave.”⁴⁷

Ten days after being hired by NASA in September 1959, Beddingfield was reassigned to Cape Canaveral to work on Project Mercury. Perhaps Grissom had put in a word for him, but Beddingfield possessed practical engineering experience, and the new space agency needed every qualified engineer it could find. Beddingfield would retire from NASA in 1985 as deputy director of the US Space Shuttle Program. He was among the most able of the engineers who worked at NASA in the glory days of manned spaceflight. He and Grissom would work closely together for the next eight years. On Grissom’s first flight, Beddingfield watched over his spaceship when it arrived at the Cape and was responsible for the “weight and balance” of the vehicle, along with the escape and retrorockets, the parachutes and the pyrotechnics, including those used to blow the hatch off Grissom’s spacecraft.

Without engineers like Beddingfield, the United States would not have walked on the moon or flown the shuttle. Beddingfield, a country boy at heart, retired up the road from the Cape in Titusville, Florida, where he died on June 23, 2012. He and Grissom had made history together, and Beddingfield was determined to make sure no one forgot his air force buddy and what together they had done for the nation.

In August 1959, the Project Mercury astronauts signed an exclusive contract with Time-Life for theirs and their families’ personal stories. The astronauts received $500,000 to be divided equally. The stories would appear in Life magazine under their own bylines, and the astronauts and their wives would have final approval on anything that was published. The controversial deal was designed in part to preclude a bidding war for individual story rights. The rest of the press corps was furious; the astronauts and their families tasted the first fruits of astronaut celebrity driven by the public’s firm belief that at least some of them would go up in flames.

While the others made separate living arrangements, Grissom, Schirra, and Slayton began looking for a place to live near Langley Field. They ended up moving “off-base” into a housing development just up the peninsula from Langley near Newport News. The Grissoms and Slaytons were next-door neighbors, with the Schirras a few doors down. The three commuted to Langley while their wives unpacked and got the kids settled in new schools. Scott Grissom was now eight, a second grader. Mark was five.

Betty had been running a temperature of 102 the night before the NASA press conference in Washington when Gus called her back in Ohio to warn her about what he suspected would be a press onslaught once the news broke. Betty proceeded to straighten up the house and made a doctor’s appointment for the next morning, where she received a penicillin shot. Stopping at the grocery store on her way home, Betty was approached by reporters from Life. She invited them home. Soon the place was crawling with journalists and photographers all wanting to know if Betty was proud of her husband, the new astronaut who, they assumed, would probably die in a fireball. The mob left behind a trail of trash, spent flashbulbs, and ashtrays full of cigarette butts.

When it was over, the Life reporters took Betty and the boys to dinner. Their heads were still spinning. NASA had let the wives fend for themselves. Betty would not forget.

It soon became evident that Betty simply was not cut out for this sort of thing. Unlike some of the other astronaut wives like Rene Carpenter, who appreciated the historic significance behind Project Mercury, small-town Gus and Betty never really understood why anyone would be interested to know how they lived their lives. Like the other wives, Betty would back her husband’s decision to ride a rocket but keep her reservations to herself.

Two years later, when it was her husband’s turn to be launched into space, Betty struggled mightily to hold it together as the press again laid siege to her home. Under the Life contract, the magazine’s reporters had access to the Grissom home on the day of Gus’s flight. Each family had their own access rules for the press, and Betty’s were particularly stringent. No one would be allowed in her house. “Look at them out on my lawn,” she barked, veering between revulsion and a desire to support her husband by being available to answer the usual postflight questions. Rene was with Betty all that day and wrote out a statement for her to use. Betty glared at the draft and said, “What a bunch of lies!” Observing Betty throughout launch day and noticing the chip already forming on her shoulder, Rene concluded, “It was difficult.”48

After the Project Mercury astronauts were introduced to the nation, Betty immediately began packing while Gus looked for a place to live in Virginia. Not fully grasping the extent to which their lives were about to change, Betty convinced herself that Langley was just another move to another duty station. The next thing she knew, Gus and his colleagues were appearing before Congress in May. The congressmen wanted to see the new heroes with their own eyes and be seen with them.

The furniture soon arrived from Ohio, banged up by the movers. The homebuilder had installed the wrong color tile in the bathroom. They wouldn’t paint the outside trim the color Betty wanted. The roof leaked. However, it was easier for Betty to deal with these household matters and getting the boys situated in school than sitting around contemplating the family’s new celebrity status and what it might mean. “I’m too busy with the house right now to worry about it,” she claimed. “Maybe later I’ll start to worry.”⁴⁹

Deskbound, the astronauts fretted about maintaining their flight proficiency along with the extra flight pay that came with it. On loan to NASA, they were no longer collecting badly needed per diem. NASA finally relented and provided the astronauts with access to T-33s, the training version of the F-80 Shooting Star.

Grissom and Slayton were so close by the time they moved to Virginia that they would head over to Langley Air Force Base on weekends, jump into the two-seat trainer, and fly cross-country and back just to squeeze in the flight hours needed to earn extra pay—in the case of air force captains, an extra $190 a month. The two midwesterners said little to each other on these flights. Glenn joked that it was “East Coast to West Coast in ten words or less.”⁵⁰ Grissom and Slayton would show up at Langley Field on Saturdays and “just take off, flying the plane cross-country until our fannies were tired,” Slayton said.51 When they weren’t flying across the continent, the test pilots–turned-astronauts were out hunting in the Virginia countryside. Betty and the boys waited at home.

Most of the future astronauts had at least one brush with death during their flying careers. After all, one reason they were selected for the Mercury program was their ability to find a way out of a tight spot.

Grissom came as close as any of the astronauts to “buying the farm” during a flight test of the unreliable Mercury Atlas rocket that would eventually take Americans into orbit. Grissom and Cooper had been assigned to fly “chase” on launch day, April 25, 1961. Grissom, flying a delta wing F-106A fighter, would approach the rocket dubbed MA-3 at about one thousand feet, ignite his afterburner, and climb alongside the Atlas to observe the early phase of the flight. Cooper would take over at 25,000 feet. “No sweat,” Grissom said, describing the incident later. “Ignition and lift-off were bang on schedule, and I was congratulating myself on having the finest possible view of an ascending rocket.”⁵²

Grissom had maneuvered his aircraft alongside the Atlas and was observing the escape tower pulling the unmanned Mercury capsule away when, as described by the pilot not given to exaggeration—“Kablooie!” Forty seconds after liftoff, the spacecraft having separated from the booster, the NASA range safety officer destroyed the Atlas. However, the safety officer apparently had failed to note the position of the chase planes when he hit the self-destruct button. The exploding booster produced the largest fireball Grissom had ever seen, undoubtedly because he was practically inside it. Acting on instinct after hundreds of hours flying jet fighters, Grissom immediately pulled up and over and “went away from that place fast.”⁵³ A friend in Cocoa Beach watching the launch turned to his wife and advised, “Well, now there are only six astronauts.”⁵⁴

Knowing the NASA engineers would want a report on how the spacecraft fared as it floated on its parachute to the ocean, Grissom headed down to find it. Suddenly, he noticed what he thought were “big seagulls” around his plane. They turned out to be large chunks of the exploded rocket raining down around him. Luckily, none hit his plane.

The test was considered a failure. The unmanned spacecraft splashed down just over seven minutes after launch. The exploding Atlas “was quite a spectacle, but never again, thanks,” Grissom realized.55 Luck and piloting skills had again saved his hide.

Amid their training, the Mercury astronauts were now required under their lucrative Life contract⁵⁶ to sit still for interviews. Early in the program, Grissom talked with space writer Loudon Wainwright for about forty-five minutes, the reporter’s tape recorder apparently running. “Before that bright and laconic man left, I tried to play back the tape and found we’d recorded nothing. When Gus heard that, he stared hard at me for a moment, then sat down and said: ‘Let’s do it again.’”⁵⁷

The astronauts also were busy focusing on various areas of specialization in early 1961 as NASA began sending chimps up on Mercury test flights. Each astronaut was assigned a component of the spacecraft or the two rockets they would fly, the suborbital Redstone and the Atlas, an intercontinental ballistic missile modified to send humans into Earth orbit. Grissom’s assignment was the manual and automatic controls on the Mercury spacecraft.

Once the ship separated from its booster, Grissom explained a year before his suborbital flight, the automatic pilot would take over to position it properly in orbit, or what the astronauts considered a “bullet facing backwards.”⁵⁸

The autopilot then controlled the spacecraft “in its attitude as it orbits around the earth,” Grissom continued, including the sensors used to pinpoint the earth’s horizon as a navigation reference to control spacecraft attitude. The reaction controls used to change yaw (side-to-side), pitch (up and down), and roll were operated by a “hand controller which the pilot can use at his option to control the attitude of the capsule himself,” particularly if the autopilot failed. In other words, Grissom emphasized, the pilot could fly the spacecraft by controlling its attitude. Beyond that, the Mercury flight path was unalterable.⁵⁹

In the back of each astronaut’s mind was the flight schedule and who would get the first mission, perhaps the first manned spaceflight in history. Each was absolutely convinced he was qualified. The process used to select the first American in space turned out to be somewhat arbitrary and more than a little political. Grissom, Shepard, and Glenn had appeared on the cover of Life in March 1961 under the headline: “Astronaut First Team.” Grissom, the press believed, remained in the running to be first right up until the day in May when a Redstone booster lofted the first American into space—three weeks after Russian pilot and cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin became the first human being to orbit Earth.