Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (41 page)

After more than three hours in the capsule, he felt it, and hoped it would go away.

But it didn’t, that nagging pressure in his groin. His bladder had filled with the early morning’s orange juice and coffee. Finally he had to confront it: He had to urinate.
Bad.

He radioed to Gordon Cooper, who was stationed in the nearby blockhouse and serving as Shepard’s contact until Slayton took over as cap com. “Man, I got to pee,” Shepard said. “Check and see if I can get out quickly and relieve myself.” Cooper couldn’t believe his ears. No one had prepared for anything like this. The flight was supposed to last just fifteen minutes, so no one thought Shepard would be in the capsule long enough to feel the urge.

Shepard said he’d been in there “forever” and if he didn’t go to the bathroom, his bladder would burst. He suggested bringing the gantry back and letting him get out. Cooper relayed the message, but Wernher von Braun said no. Shepard had to stay put. Or, as von Braun put it: “Zee astronaut shall stay in zee nose cone.”

Finally Shepard began shouting. In a conversation that would be stricken from the transcript NASA would later share with reporters, Shepard said that if they didn’t let him get out, he’d have to “go in my suit.” Technicians in Mission Control began twittering that the urine would short-circuit the medical wires attached to Shepard’s body, including the electrical thermometer inserted in his rectum. So Shepard sugg
ested simply turning off the power until he’d had time to go. After some frantic discussions, they finally agreed, and Shepard let loose, with a long “ahhhh,” as the warm liquid pooled at the small of his back.

“Weyl,” he reported over the radio in his lousy José dialect, “I’m a wetback now.”

Shepard then braced himself for an electrical shock when they turned the power back on. But the urine was absorbed by his long cotton underwear and then evaporated in the 100 percent oxygen filling the suit. NASA was spared the embarrassing task of reporting that America’s first spaceman had been electrocuted by his own piss.

The PR people did, however, have on hand a scripted response to any potential disaster. The public affairs office had prepared a carefully worded “announcement in certain contingency situations” that would inform the world of Alan Shepard’s death. There were different announcements for different disasters, such as death during launch, death in space, death during reentry. If, for example, Shepard died during the launch itself, Shorty Powers would use the following words: “Rescue units on the scene report that Astronaut Shepard has perished today in the service of his country.”

Death was not something Shepard liked to discuss or even think about. A week earlier a reporter had asked him if he ever considered his own demise, and Shepard reluctantly admitted that he’d made certain “financial arrangements” for Louise. But competing to fly into space, despite the dangers, had nothing to do with facing and/or cheating death. Shepard tried to explain to the press that he considered what he was doing “just a faction of maturity,” just taking his flying skills to the next level. “If you don’t use your experience, your past is wasted,” he said. “You are betraying yourself.”

The death of an astronaut, however, was very much on John Kennedy’s mind. The last thing his administration needed was the publicly televised explosive destruction of Alan Shepard. And in the days before launch, Kennedy becam
e more and more anxious about the decision to televise the launch live. At one point he called NASA’s administrator, James Webb, to ask him to “play down the publicity on this venture.”

“He is afraid of the reaction of the public in case there is a mishap in the firing,” Kennedy’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, wrote in her diary early that week.

NASA tried to assure Kennedy that the escape tower atop Shepard’s capsule was designed to whisk him away from an exploding rocket. But Kennedy’s fears continued right up to the launch. Just minutes before TV stations picked up the countdown, Lincoln called NASA and asked who was in charge. Paul Haney, one of the public affairs officers working with Shorty, picked up the phone and, after looking around and seeing no one who outranked him, said, “I guess I am.” “Please hold for the president,” Lincoln said, explaining that Kennedy wanted to discuss the details of the live television coverage.

Kennedy’s intense interest in Shepard’s launch had surprised many.
Time
magazine reporter Hugh Sidey once described the meeting Kennedy held two days after Gagarin’s flight, at which he saw a man “awed by the romance of the high frontier” lean back in his chair and scold his staff to offer ideas on catching up with the Russians. “Let’s find somebody—anybody,” Kennedy said, while picking at the sole of his orthopedic shoe. “I don’t care if it’s the janitor over there, if he knows how.”

After five anxious minutes of holding, Lincoln came back on the line and explained to Haney that Kennedy had had to take a call from an obscure African president, and that Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary, would speak to Haney instead. Haney told Salinger about the escape tower designed to protect Shepard from any problems with the rocket. Shepard could pull hard on his abort handle if things got ugly, and the rocket-powered escape tower bolted atop the capsule would pull the capsule up and away from the Redstone rocket. Salinger said he’d relay the information to Kennedy.

Other modest protections against accidental death included the parachute Shepard wore strapped to his chest and a small survival kit beside him, carrying items to sustain him in case he landed far off course. He had a knife capable of cutting through metal, a fishing line and hook, a rig that could desalinate a pint of water, a few bites of dehydrated food, and a raft.

But for now, the bigger problem was just getting off the ground.

Shortly after nine, with two minutes before liftoff, the countdown was halted once more. The pressure of the liquid oxygen inside the Redstone was too high. They’d have to either reset the pressure valve—which would require the flight to be canceled—or try to bleed off some of the pressure by remote control. After three hours of sitting (an hour of it in his own urine), Shepard had had enough. They were all acting like spinster aunts, fussing and clucking over a newborn. He was ready to go, his rocket was ready to go—hell, had been ready for months—and he was getting tired of al
l the fiddling and delays.

“I’m cooler than you are,” he finally barked into his microphone. “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle.”

When it seemed as if the last of the glitches was corrected, the countdown resumed—four hours after he’d first climbed into the capsule. But the numbers from ten to one sounded like gibberish to Shepard, whose pulse rose during those last seconds from a rate of 80 beats per minute to 126. In the final seconds, he muttered a prayer to himself, asking “the man upstairs” to watch over him and telling himself,
Don’t screw up, Shepard.

As the count reached zero, Shepard tightened his grip on the abort handle and pushed his feet hard against the floor, bracing himself for a jolt that never came. Despite all the centrifuge
training and preparations for an inhuman rush skyward, the ascent felt “extremely smooth—a subtle, gentle, gradual rise off the ground.”

“Roger,” he said, his first word during the flight, which coincided with his finger punching a button to start the onboard timer. “Liftoff, and the clock is started.” Shepard was grateful for Slayton’s attempt to ease his tensions: “You’re on your way, José.”

In Newark, New Jersey, Mary Lombardo—one the many ordinary citizens whose reactions were recorded by the nation’s journalists—touched a small cross around her neck. “God bless him,” she said. In the nation’s classrooms, youngsters counted down in time with Cape Canaveral: “Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one.” New York City cabdrivers stopped picking up passengers so that they could listen to radio reports. Loudspeakers outside City Hall in lower Manhattan crackled with the live radio broadcast as throngs crowded the park outside. A Philadelphia appeals court judge
interrupted a hearing when a clerk handed him a note. Free champagne flowed at a Fort Wayne, Indiana, tavern, and traffic slowed or stopped on southern California freeways as drivers—including two future astronauts—listened on the radio to the blastoff. People danced in the streets at Times Square, hugging each other, thrusting their fists in the air. “He made it!” a woman in Chicago gasped, then burst into tears. “He made it!”

President Kennedy broke up a National Security Council meeting, walked into his secretary’s office, and stood before the television. Joined by his wife, brother, and vice president, Kennedy stood silently, hands jammed deep into his pants pockets.

Bart, Renza, and Polly Shepard watched their television, holding hands and silently praying. None of them spoke, each afraid to break the taut silence.

Louise, meanwhile, sat nearest the TV, at
one point reaching out to touch the screen. As their father’s rocket rose slowly heavenward, the girls shrieked and cheered. But Louise just whispered, “Go, Alan. Go, sweetheart.”

Shepard had discussed with the operations director, Walt Williams, his plan to talk as much as possible during liftoff, to keep everyone on the ground informed about even the slightest bits of information. So, as the rocket built speed, he began reeling off bits of data: “This is
Freedom Seven.
The fuel is go. One-point-two Gs. Cabin at fourteen PSI. Oxygen is go. . . . The main bus is twenty-five and the isolated battery is twenty-nine.”

Then, two minutes after liftoff, his easy ride turned bumpy. Though the liftoff itself was smoother than Shepard had expected (he experienced only about six Gs during liftoff—less than half what he had trained for in the centrifuge), the turbulent transition from the earth’s atmosphere into space was a surprise. The capsule began shuddering violently, with Shepard’s head jack hammering so hard against the headrest that he could no longer see the dials and gauges clearly enough to read the data. He decided, instead of alarming those jittery technicians with his garbled voice, to wait t
o say anything else until the violence passed. Finally his spacecraft rocketed through the riotous and dangerous segment of the launch known as max Q—the point at which the capsule is accelerating beyond the speed of sound and into the thinner air of the upper atmosphere, which exerts enormous dynamic pressure on the spacecraft. The astronauts would come to call this “passing through the gate,” and once the rocket reached supersonic speeds, the tremendous buffeting stopped. Only then did Shepard feel comfortable enough to report in to Deke Slayton.

“Okay. It is a lot smoother now,” he grunted. “A lot smoother.”

“Roger,” Slayton replied.

The do-or-die moment came seconds later as Shepard prepared for his capsule to separate from the spent booster rocket. Once the liquid oxygen fueling the Redstone rockets had been expended, it would trigger the ignition of small explosives that would sever the connection between the rocket and the capsule. But if the capsule failed to separate from the rocket, Shepard would have to quickly strap on his parachute, pop open the capsule’s hatch, and jump away from the doomed Redstone and capsule—an escape plan with a ludicrously slim chance of success, since Shepard was now trav
eling at Mach 2. In fact, on future flights, the astronauts wouldn’t even bother with the silly parachute.