Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (38 page)

In August 1960 they did it again. Russia’s rocket scientists shocked the world when they announced that two dogs—Belka and Strelka—had been launched into space (crammed inside a capsule along with forty mice and two rats), completed a series of orbits around the earth, and were then returned safe and sound back home. (Strelka later gave birth to six puppies, one
of which Soviet premier Khrushchev obnoxiously sent to the White House.)

After that, no amount of spin would convince the nation that the United States was—at least in terms of the total number of satellites launched into space—ahead of the Soviets in the space race. And even the astronauts began to agree. Slayton acknowledged as much to a reporter, admitting, “There is no doubt in my mind they will be first.”

In an effort to gain some psychological leverage in the race with the Soviets, Shepard and the others compiled and signed a confidential letter to NASA officials, proposing what they called a sly “propaganda initiative.” Because the American astronauts were clearly in a neck-and-neck contest with the Russian cosmonauts, the Mercury Seven suggested an exchange of visits—the cosmonauts could come to the Cape and the astronauts could visit the Soviet space complex, the massive Baikonur Cosmodrome, on the barren steppes of western Kazakhstan. The idea was to gain some inside information on
the secretive Russian space program. And if the Russians refused, it would “reflect unfavorably in the eyes of other countries,” the astronauts wrote.

The letter, which was never made public, asserted that “we apparently stand to gain a great deal and could lose little or nothing.” But the idea found no takers. Generally, the astronauts and NASA officials tried to keep any us-versus-them sentiments from the public. In one press conference, when asked to compare the U.S. space program to Russia’s, Shepard vehemently denied that the American astronauts were in competition with the Soviets. Regardless of the “unfortunate clash of philosophies,” Shepard said, “our objective in this program is not to beat the Russians.” The same reporter as
ked if the Mercury Seven’s timetable would change to keep pace with the front-running Russians. Shepard’s response was terse: “No, sir.”

But in a later interview with a
National Geographic
reporter, Shepard acknowledged that they had been “forced
into a competitive race with another political philosophy.” And he let slip that NASA was “not making decisions based only on our own problems.” Meaning:
We’re keeping a very close eye on the other side.
NASA officials, who reviewed the story, deleted that quote from the final version.

Another letter penned by the astronauts, which was also never made public, suggested accelerating the first manned launch—now tentatively scheduled for early 1961—by cutting back on unmanned Atlas rocket launches and other test launches with monkeys riding in the capsule, and proceeding more quickly to the one goal that really mattered. The astronauts recommended that NASA “move ahead the entire subsequent Atlas schedule so that it is possible to schedule . . . a manned orbital flight . . . with a tentative launch week of 28 Nov 60.” NASA thanked the astronauts for their input but did
not change its schedule, and the astronauts felt increasingly frustrated by what they perceived to be NASA’s somewhat plodding progress.

The space race had become the centerpiece of the tense geopolitical events of the escalating cold war, which had begun to take a few dangerous turns.

When an American U-2 spy plane was shot down by Soviet missiles and crashed into Soviet territory on May 1, 1960, and its pilot—Francis Gary Powers, working for the Central Intelligence Agency—was captured, Khrushchev canceled a long-planned U.S.-Soviet summit meeting in Paris that summer. When Eisenhower refused to officially apologize for the Powers incident, Khrushchev canceled Eisenhower’s scheduled visit to Moscow as well. He did, however, keep his scheduled visit to the United Nations’ headquarters in New York that September, where he emotionally embraced Fidel Castro, fla
unting his support for socialism’s new poster boy. Later in the UN session, Khrushchev famously pounded his white shoe on a table during a sp
eech by British prime minister Harold Macmillan. Americans began asking themselves: Who is this communist wacko, and how dangerous is he?

As the presidential campaign of 1960 heated up, John F. Kennedy shrewdly latched on to the cold war and the space race as themes for his campaign. He promised voters that, if elected, he would usher in a “New Frontier,” and his campaign became all about motion, about moving ahead, catching up. With a loud and confident rat-a-tat urgency in his voice, Kennedy bemoaned the “drift in our national course” and a “decline in our vitality.”

Kennedy’s narrow defeat of Richard Nixon was due, at least in part, to his promise to restore the nation’s morale and geopolitical footing by regaining ground lost in the space race. And though Shepard and his family were Republicans, the election of a Democrat from Massachusetts would prove to be a fortunate thing for Shepard.

After Kennedy’s election focused the spotlight even more intensely on the space program, John Glenn—the self-anointed moralist of the group—began agitating for the astronauts to clean up their behavior. All infidelities had to stop.

“I thought we owed it to people to behave,” Glenn would write years later in his memoir. “It was now clear that, rightly or wrongly, we had been placed upon a pedestal.”

The Mercury Seven had gotten into the habit of conducting regular closed-door meetings with one another to hash out any conflicts or disagreements. A NASA official called them “séances,” and the name stuck. Many of the séances devolved into shouting matches, and a couple of times the arguments teetered toward outright fistfights.

Each man had his own trigger points and pet peeves. Slayton and Cooper once fought vigorously to have rudder pedals installed in the capsule so that it could be flown l
ike an airplane; Shepard and Glenn, meanwhile, had argued for the hand control stick that was eventually used because it weighed less than the floor pedals. Like brothers, they fought hard, yelled loudly, and then settled on a compromise. “When we came out of the room, we had an astronaut opinion,” Cooper recalled—although he added, “some of us were more team players than others.”

The two who didn’t always play by team rules were Glenn and Shepard. Glenn was a politician about his disagreements; Shepard was a bulldog. As a result, Shepard and Glenn—the two clear front-runners in the race for the first flight—bumped heads more than most.

In fact, they sometimes openly taunted each other. Shepard thought Glenn took the training exercises too seriously. He said Glenn’s experiment with dehydration during desert training had been too risky. And he thought it was hilarious when Glenn once waved off a rescue helicopter and tried to ride a raft ashore like a surfboard while practicing escape procedures in rough seas off the Florida coast. He got pummeled by the waves and rolled head over heels to shore. Glenn, meanwhile, thought Shepard was too cavalier, with his occasional partying and Corvette racing.

The personal combat between the two came to a head during one trip to San Diego. When they visited San Diego, the astronauts usually stayed at the waterfront Konakai cottages owned by one of NASA’s contractors. Late one night, shortly after midnight, one of the astronauts knocked on the door of Glenn’s cottage and said, “I think I got myself in trouble.” The astronaut had gone out drinking across the border in nearby Tijuana, Mexico, and had picked up a woman at a bar. Later, when the two were alone, he saw flashes and realized someone was taking pictures.

The next day, a “leading West Coast paper” called Shorty Powers to get a reaction to the story it was planning to run—with “compromising” photographs—the following day. Shorty, who in recent months had been warning Glenn about just such a problem, called Glenn later that night and said, “Well, it’s happened.”

Glenn immediately called the publisher of the newspaper and begged him to kill the story. He laid it on thick: They were in a race with “godless communists,” he said, and the bad guys were ahead. The press had to help in the effort to “get back in the space race.” If they didn’t, they’d only be hurting the country. Negative press could affect the amount of funding NASA got from Congress, and also the nation’s morale.

Until that moment, most of the stories about the astronauts —particularly
Life
’s whitewashed version of astronaut life—had been, as Glenn once put it, “bland and upbeat.” For the most part, the press had continued to willingly participate in the conspiracy of silence. This story would be an absolute scandal. Glenn wasn’t about to get sullied by association, nor was he about to let the entire program be hurt. In the end the newspaper backed down.

“I pulled out all the stops,” Glenn later wrote in his memoir. “To this day, and knowing the press much better now, I’m still amazed that it didn’t run.”

Later that day, at the Konakai cottages, Glenn called for a séance. With the seven men in one room, he angrily announced that they had just “dodged a bullet.” “I was mad, and I read the riot act, saying that we had worked too hard to get into this program and that it meant too much to the country to see it jeopardized by anyone who couldn’t keep his pants zipped,” Glenn said.

Forever after, Glenn would refuse to disclose which astronaut was the subject of that killed story or which newspaper had gotten the photos. But Al Blackburn, Shepard’s academy classmate and a test pilot colleague of both Shepard and Glenn’s, says that Glenn once told him the culprit was Shepard.

Even though he was the one who had gone to Glenn’s cottage asking for help, Shepard became furious at what he later called Glenn’s “moralizing.” He told Glenn that not only were their personal lives not an issue, they were none of Glenn’s business. “Why is this even coming up?” he told Glenn. “Doesn’t everyone have the right to do what they want to do?”

Four of the astronauts agreed with Shepard. Only Carpenter sided with Glenn. Cooper said it was a turning point in the group’s relationship, and Carpenter felt the same. Until that night, he had thought of them all as “the Seven Musketeers.” “The camaraderie was incredible,” he said years later. But that séance—and what came after it—would cleave the group into factions, and the wounds would take many years to heal.

Glenn realized immediately that something had changed. “My views were in the minority, but I didn’t care,” he said. “I had made my point.” His one concern, however, was that his firm stance that night would affect his carefully plotted course toward the first space flight.

Indeed, shortly after the Konakai séance, the astronauts were called to a meeting with Robert Gilruth, head of NASA’s Space Task Group. Gilruth asked them each to write up a memo including the name of the astronaut—besides themselves—they’d like to see get the first ride. Glenn couldn’t believe that nearly two years of training were being reduced to what he later called “a popularity contest.” He wrote Scott Carpenter’s name atop his memo but had a pretty good idea who the others would pick.

Shepard, on the other hand, was becoming more and more convinced that he was edging ahead, especially after surviving the close call in Tijuana.

He may have been (in a description once used by one of his peers) an “asshole.” He may have been a cheating husband, a self-centered speed freak, an arrogant elitist. But Shepard never concerned himself with what other people thought about him. For him, it was always what
he
believed that mattered most, and he believed he was the best man for the job.

Glenn, however, was not ready to give up the game without a fight.

13

“We had ’em by the short hairs, and we gave it away”

On January 19, 1961—the eve of John F. Kennedy’s inaugu-ration—Bob Gilruth phoned the astronauts’ office at Langley. The seven had been working at Langley in recent weeks, a brief departure from all the travel and training, the long days and nights on the road or at the Cape. Gilruth asked the seven men to stay a little late that afternoon. “I have something important to tell you,” he said.

At 5:15 P.M. the seven sat quietly in their cramped office, with its seven metal desks and the walls busy with tacked-up flight plans and technical diagrams. All of them knew what was coming, and they were uncharacteristically silent. Wisecracks eluded even Wally this night. Finally Gus Grissom broke the tension.

“If we wait any longer, I may have to make a speech,” he said.

Gilruth entered the room and wasted no time. As soon as the door was shut, he dropped the news, calling it “the most difficult decision I’ve ever had to make.”

“Alan Shepard will make the first suborbital flight,” he said.

Gilruth then explained that Grissom would make the second flight, and Glenn would serve as backup pilot to both flights.

Shepard kept his eyes on the ground, fighting back a grin aching to break free. In a competition he had once likened to “seven guys trying to fly the same airplane,” he had won. After all those nasty spins in gut-sloshing NASA contraptions, the goal he had pursued ravenously for two uninterrupted years was his. But he knew it was “not a moment to crow,” so he kept his head down.

Gilruth asked if there were any questions but was met with silence.

“Thank you very much, and good luck,” Gilruth said, and left the room.

Finally, after a few leaden moments, Glenn stepped forward and offered his hand to Shepard, the first of the six to do so. The others came up and congratulated him—some, Shepard noticed, with less enthusiasm than others. And then they left, one by one, as quietly as they had entered. No one offered to buy rounds of drinks to celebrate, and in just a few moments Shepard was left standing in the office, alone.

He sped home to tell Louise, who came bounding down the stairs when she heard him burst through the front door. As soon as she saw his grin-creased face, she knew. “You got it!” She threw her arms around him. “You got the first ride!”

“Lady, you can’t tell anyone, but you have your arms around the man who’ll be first in space,” he told her. Louise pulled back from him and looked around the room. “Who let a Russian in here?” she joked, somewhat presciently.

Shepard wasn’t allowed to tell anyone else. Officially, NASA planned to announce in another month that Shepard, Glenn, and Grissom were still vying for the first flight. That meant Glenn and Grissom would have to pretend in public that they still had a chance—a ruse that all the astronauts thought was ridiculous and annoying.

While a couple of the other six were hurt and angered by Gilruth’s choice—Wally, for one, felt “really deflate
d . . . a very traumatic feeling,” like he’d been demoted to “the second team”— the decision didn’t surprise Scott Carpenter.

“For Al, it was the competition,” he said. “He felt for his comrades, but he also had a need to be better than
anyone else. . . . Everything he did was evidence of that. He was single-minded in his pursuit of the first flight.” Glenn, on the other hand, seemed during the previous two years to be working equally hard on the public relations side of the pursuit. “John figured he had made all the right moves,” Slayton said. “He just figured wrong.”

Deke Slayton was “shocked, hurt, and downright humiliated” that he hadn’t even been selected among the top three. But, back in December, it had been Shepard’s name that he had scribbled on the “peer vote” memo Gilruth had requested. Slayton felt that Shepard not only had the piloting skills but was the smartest and most articulate of them all. And so when Gilruth picked Shepard, Slayton said, “it was all right with me.”

Still, something about the decision nagged at him. It wasn’t until the next day, Kennedy’s inauguration, that “reality walloped me right between the eyes.” “Of course! Politics!” Slayton thought. “No way was it an accident that both Shepard and John Kennedy were Navy.”

Snow began falling after midnight on Friday, January 20, and the next morning was bitterly cold. Kennedy, his breath emerging in puffs of steam, called his inauguration “a celebration of freedom.” Alan, Louise, and some of the other astronauts drove up from Langley to join the crowds. Kennedy said a torch had been passed to a new generation—“born of this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage.” He famously asked his people to ask themselves how they could help carry their country toward the freedom of man. And in an ausp
icious declaration for the space program, he also said, “Together, let us explore the stars.”

Later that night Bill Dana performed at Kennedy’s inaugural ball, a fête sponsored by Frank Sinatra at the National Guard Armory. With the electricity downed by the continuing snow-storm, generators powered the auditorium’s lights. José entered, helmeted and clad in his silvery space suit, escorted by Marine officers. With Milton Berle as his straight man, José complained about his uncomfortable $18,000 space suit, but at least, he conceded, “it has two pairs of pants.” Then he told a chuckling Kennedy that the best part about space travel is the blastoff.

“I always take a blast before I take off. . . . Otherwise
I wouldn’t get in that thing.”

Earlier that afternoon, far from the inaugural celebrations, John Glenn sat down and wrote an urgent letter to his superiors, a letter designed to snatch the first space flight from Alan Shepard’s grasp.

Despite their similar goals, Shepard and Glenn had very different methods.

Glenn loved the spotlight, and it loved him. With his crinkly smile, light blue eyes, and freckled face, he was truly the all-American lad. Despite his aw-shucks demeanor, he worked hard to perfect his boy-next-door image. “Glenn loved an audience on whom he could turn his charm,” one top NASA official said. Another NASA official said that Glenn seemed less interested in becoming technically proficient and more interested in “cozying up to top management and thus improving his chances.”

It was exactly that image consciousness that led some NASA officials to consider Shepard the better choice for the first flight, not Glenn. “We wanted to put our best foot forward,” Walt Williams, director of operations for Project Mercury, said in an unpublished memoir. Williams considered Shepard “the most capable” and said so during discussions about who should fly first.

But in choosing Shepard, NASA knew it was
taking a chance on a mercurial personality. One of the seven anonymously told
Life
magazine, in an article published soon after Shepard’s selection: “You might think you’d get to know someone well after working so closely with him for two years. Well, it’s not that way with Shepard. He’s always holding something back.” Shepard admitted it in an interview with the same
Life
reporter: “I have never been my own favorite subject, and I don’t think I’ve found anything new about myself since I’ve been in this program.”

Still, Shepard had shown with his intense focus during sessions in the MASTIF and the centrifuge, with his attention to detail and his curiosity about capsule designs and flight plans, that—despite a sometimes testy personality and a few self-admitted skeletons in his closet and “secrets”—he was the best man to become the first American in space. Shepard wanted to know about all the egghead stuff that some of the other astronauts left in the engineers’ hands. He befriended the engineers and learned to speak their language. He was wary but respectful with his superiors, and if
he ever disagreed with their decisions on the progress and purpose of the training schematic, he never pouted or whined. Instead he spoke bluntly and openly with his superiors and, in turn, impressed them not with pandering but with a genuine curiosity about space flight and a hunger for information about every detail of the mission he had signed up for.

Shepard was chosen not because he was the most popular, the most likable, or the best person among the seven. He was, in short, the best flyer.

“He was an egotist,” said Chris Kraft, who would be the flight director for Shepard’s launch, and considered Shepard “a typical New Englander . . . hard, cold.” “But he was all business when it came to flying.”

Shepard and Kraft began working closely together a few weeks later, in mid-February, beginning with a series of simulated launch exercises at the Cape. The plan for Shepard’s upcoming flight was to launch his capsule atop one of von Braun’s
Redstone rockets. The Redstone lacked sufficient power to boost the capsule into orbit; an orbital flight would have to travel three times as fast. Still, Shepard’s Redstone carried enough thrust to blast him up and through the far side of the earth’s atmosphere. Without the necessary speed to reach orbit, though, Shepard’s capsule, after reaching speeds of five thousand miles an hour and an altitude of a hundred miles, would arc back down to earth and through the atmosphere for a landing at sea, three hundred miles east of the Florida coast.

That parabolic flight was expected to last just fifteen minutes, and NASA engineers had crammed each of those minutes with many tests and tasks for Shepard to perform. He’d be required to look through his periscope at the coastline below, search for stars above, constantly check the capsule’s systems to ensure they were working properly, then briefly take control of the capsule by grabbing the hand control stick and testing the ability of an astronaut to actually fly a spacecraft. To prepare for the densely packed mission, Shepard began to rehearse each second of the flight inside a NASA si
mulator.

As in a sophisticated arcade game, Shepard would sit in a mockup of a capsule cockpit, facing the same dashboard of buttons, switches, and levers that would be in his own capsule, while he and the NASA engineers practiced launch and landing procedures over and over. Each man rehearsed his role, with Kraft presiding like the choreographer. Shepard would spend so much time in that simulator he’d learn to find and flip switches with his eyes closed.

But during his first simulator session Shepard goofed, and he and Chris Kraft had a showdown. During the computerized launch simulation, the computer program surprised Shepard, as well as the engineers in Mission Control, with a simulated system failure, and Shepard failed to take the obvious and proper action (which was to abort). Afterward, Kraft and his Mission Control team invited Shepard to sit in on their poste
xercise critique session, which they called their “dog-eat-dog sessions.” Kraft was insulted when Shepard shrugged off his mistake, made a joke about it, and then asked for another simulator session.

“Let’s go again,” Shepard said.

“No,” Kraft replied. “It’s coffee time.”

Kraft took Shepard aside and explained that he and his team took their critique sessions seriously, and suggested that Shepard do the same. He knew Shepard had “quick reflexes and a quicker brain,” but he wanted him to admit to his mistake.

“It’s how we learn,” Kraft said. “I don’t want it to happen when you’re up there.”

Shepard stared at Kraft, and for a few long, silent moments the two men barely moved. Kraft said it seemed as if Shepard was making up his mind about what to do next. And then, slowly, the look on Shepard’s face changed, “from one of defensiveness to understanding.” He admitted that they used to conduct similar postflight critiques in the ready room of his aircraft carriers, and he also admitted—reluctantly, Kraft felt—that it was probably a good idea.

Kraft would learn that Shepard did not often admit to his faults. But after their face-off, the two men went right back to work and in time became close friends. Kraft felt that he had passed some type of test, had proven himself to Shepard and earned his respect.