Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (32 page)

Each of them had to wonder about the parachute that NASA suggested be strapped to the first rocket rider.
What the hell good is a
parachute amid such carnage?
Ten days later, however, one of Wernher von Braun’s rockets—a modified Redstone, called a Jupiter— successfully launched a capsule containing two monkeys.

In the coming months, NASA would decide not to risk incinerating one of its astronauts on a temperamental Atlas rocket. Instead, the first American space launch would be with one of Von Braun’s more reliable Redstones. But because the Redstone lacked the power to send a capsule high enough and fast enough to reach orbit, NASA decided that that first launch would be suborbital, in which the capsule would be sent on an arcing, hump-shaped route into space and then right back to earth.

Toward the end of 1959 NASA began making plans for that launch to occur within a year—which left little time for the Mercury Seven to learn to be astronauts.

In one of his ghost-written articles for Life magazine, Shepard described the astronauts’ training regimen—which they were more fully introduced to throughout the latter half of 1959—as a mix of academics, meetings with engineers to discuss the mechanics of the rockets and capsules, and rigorous physical and stamina exercises designed to tone and prepare their bodies for the expected labors of a space flight.

“Some of this was fairly exotic stuff. For we were preparing to penetrate an environment that no one had ever dealt with before,” Shepard wrote. “Some of it, however, was
just plain down-to-earth hard work.” Haunting all the hard work was a constant reminder of why the space race had been launched in the first place: to counter the terrifying power and surge of communism.

Guerillas had overrun Cuba the previous year, allowing Fidel Castro to begin establishing his new socialist, and harshly anti-U.S., government. And Khrushchev, following Sputnik’s success, continued to verbally badger America. With a strong foot-hold in Eastern Europe and Asia, communism seemed poised to take over the world. And the Soviet Union’s obvious lead in the space race taunted the United States as apparent proof that communism might actually be a more powerful system. “Communism was on the march,” John Glenn recalled. “It was no joke.”

The astronauts’ training regimen, therefore, was fueled by an almost combat like mentality and a belief that gaining control of space might just save the world. The men threw themselves into their training exercises, spending extremely long and stressful days at various facilities around the country, strapped inside machines designed to punish their bodies and prove the cynics wrong. And in classrooms they absorbed Ph.D.-level lessons on astrophysics, rocket propulsion, and mechanical engineering.

On top of all that, the astronauts, so recently far removed from the everyday culture of America, so hidden from public view in their cloistered military fraternities, were learning other hard lessons about being famous. The headiness of their newfound fame fueled their competitiveness. In just a few months they had become new symbols of manhood and celebrity. And, as happens in any group of headstrong men, the competitive juices flowed, with each man searching for a way to stand out from the others. Amid such tensions, any tangle of two or more astronauts—from training sessions to card games—
could instantly take on the heated energy of a boxing match.

Handball games often escalated into raucous, profanity-laced sessions. Even with the astronauts’ vices, the competitive mood dictated that no one let the other guy get a half step ahe
ad. Shepard, who had been smoking cigarettes on and off for many years, decided to quit. Then so did Slayton, Schirra, and Carpenter. (A reporter at the press conference had asked how they’d find a smoke “when they get up there.”) The smokers helped each other—somewhat aggressively—by putting gasoline in the office ashtrays.

During a trip to Dallas, Shepard and Glenn stayed up late one night with an old academy classmate of Shepard’s, drinking frozen martinis, called “lead pipes,” and playing a confusing card game, similar to bridge, called Huckley Buck. When the other players ganged up on Glenn, who was on the verge of losing the game, he became furious and quit, stomping off to walk around the block.

Each man wanted to be the best at any given exercise, no matter how small. “Jockeying for position became a constant activity,” one astronaut said. “The game was to move ahead or—just as effective—move the other guy back.”

As they dove into their hectic training schedule, which took them to factories and rural military bases in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Missouri, Florida, and California, it was all about
me.
“It was a competition guaranteed to bring out the worst in a guy,” one astronaut said.

And yet it was exactly the kind of competition Shepard thrived on. Just as he had taunted other teams while rowing at the Naval Academy, just as he had taunted the “blue suit boys” at Edwards Air Force Base, he knew how to intimidate his competition while outperforming them. One day, at a NASA research center in Cleveland, Shepard strapped himself for the first time into the cockpit of NASA’s weirdest carnival ride, the most challenging exercise in the astronauts’ training regimen, a contraption called MASTIF. His attitude was:
If I can land a jet on a carrier, I can whip
this thing.
And he was sure he could do it better than the rest.

Trouble was, guys like John Glenn were thinking exactly the same thing.

At first, the astronauts had assumed their training program would consist of many hours in the cockpit of a jet-powered airplane. “We didn’t know what else to train on,” Gordon Cooper once said. “Nobody had trained astronauts before.” Instead, training for space flight evolved into an experience unlike anything the astronauts, or any human, had ever been through or, in their wildest dreams, could have imagined. NASA’s engineers developed a number of high-tech new machines, scattered at military bases across the nation, that would simulate aspects of what the astronauts would likely
confront during space flight. And that became the driving theory behind the astronauts’ training regimen: to build machines that re-created the excruciating tremors and pressures of sitting on the nose of a rocket traveling faster than any human had ever traveled; to mimic the weightlessness the astronauts would experience in outer space; to simulate the sensation of tumbling through space in a disabled and out-of-control capsule.

The training program sprang from all the what-ifs that the engineers and scientists had posited. Because, in truth, the experts weren’t too sure
what
would happen to a man in space; opinions ranged from “nothing” to “disgusting, painful death.” So, to cover all their bases, the engineers decided to explore each what-if and then see if the astronauts could survive an approximate duplication of that scenario. When they weren’t in classrooms learning about astrophysics, geophysics, and astronomy, the astronauts were flying from city to city, allowing themselves to be subjected to
heat chambers, pressure chambers, a “rotating room,” and other of NASA’s noisy, dangerous, gut-sloshing experimental training contraptions.

“There was always another what-if,” Glenn once remarked, referring to the nervous Nellies in NASA’s medical corps who dreamed up many ghastly scenarios. What if the astronauts experienced “separation anxiety” and inexplicably refused
to return to earth? What if the astronauts’ eyeballs oozed and became misshapen in the zero gravity of space? What if the fluids of the inner ear, which control balance, floated out of the astronauts’ heads, leaving them permanently dizzy and vertiginous?

And what if the astronauts’ orbiting space capsule spun out of control? To prepare for the off chance of such a scenario, the brilliant minds of NASA created MASTIF—the multiple axis space training inertial facility. Similar to a gyroscope, MASTIF was an enormous set of three concentric cages, called gimbals, one inside the other. Each cage was a misshapen, geometric skeletal box that looked as though it’d been assembled from the leftover parts of a set of playground monkey bars. The outer cage was red, and inside that was a smaller green cage, both of them vaguely circular. At the center w
as a yellow cage, roughly cone-shaped, to represent the astronauts’ space capsule. And at the center of the yellow cage was a cockpit where the astronaut sat, strapped in tight. Each gimbal was hinged to the next, but they all rotated independently from each other and in different directions, so that the cockpit could be programmed to spin—just like the Mercury capsule might in space— on three axes: pitch (from front to back), roll (from side to side), and yaw (from left to right, in a twisting motion).

The engineers could program the machine to rotate just one of the cages, which would cause the astronaut’s capsule to simulate a side-to-side pitching motion. Then the programmers could rotate two of the cages, causing the astronaut’s cockpit to pitch and spin simultaneously. Finally, they could rotate all three cages, simulating a completely out-of-control capsule, tumbling and spinning and yawing through space. The astronauts had to learn to use a hand control—similar to the control stick in a jet—that released spurts of gas that acted as a brake against the rotating motion of the g
imbals. The goal was to stop the cockpit from tumbling and bring it to a complete stop.

Shepard intended to be the first to master MASTIF. But in a flashback to his downcheck during flight trai
ning at Corpus Christi and the two near-fatal jet crash dives at Edwards Air Force Base, he was immediately, frighteningly humbled.

The practice sessions began slowly, with just one or two of the cages spinning at modest speeds, and Shepard was able to quickly stop the cockpit from tumbling. But when he first gave the thumbs-up for the technicians to spin all three cages, and also to increase the speed—each gimbal was capable of up to thirty revolutions per minute—things got ugly. As the cages spun faster and faster, their breezelike whooshing sound rose into a piercing scream. After just a minute or two, with Shepard’s body being tossed front to back and side to side, he reached out and slammed the red “chicken switch” bu
tton, which set off a loud klaxon that told the technicians to shut down the machine.

The cages stopped tumbling, and engineers helped a dizzy and nauseated Shepard from the cockpit and led him to the cot they kept nearby—with a mop and bucket beside it, just in case. But Shepard was determined to master the thing. He got back in it that afternoon and performed a little better, but still had to punch the chicken switch, and so he decided to quit for the day. A few of the doctors on hand that first day were surprised at how long it took Shepard to recover from his dizziness and nausea.

The next morning he strapped himself in again. And the next. Within a few days he was able to withstand the full thirty revolutions per minute in each axis. He learned how to quickly and accurately twist and turn the control stick until he stopped one gimbal, then the next and then the next, bringing the cockpit to a standstill. In one of the 35 mm films NASA took of the training sessions, Shepard emerged from a session in MASTIF, then stopped and stared back at the machine, the disgust plain on his face. Then he lifted his head as if to say,
I beat you, you mechanicalfreak,
turned, and walked out, chin in the air, chest out.

Shepard became the first of the seven to tame the MASTIF, but some of the others had less luck and considered any day with MASTIF a bad day. Schirra, for example, who h
ad been inside his share of tumbling jets, likened a MASTIF session to “a bulldog tearing away at you . . . we’d never felt anything like it.”

Another machine—the one Shepard despised most, even more than MASTIF—was the centrifuge outside Philadelphia. It was a small flying-saucer-shaped capsule at the end of a fifty-foot arm that spun in a tight circle, like a tree-sized croquet mallet being swung by a giant. The sadistic purpose of the machine was to expose the astronauts to the type of excessive gravity, or G forces, that they’d experience riding atop a launching rocket. They would be traveling faster than any human had flown, and the doctors had to determine whether their bodies could take the strain.