Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (52 page)

By mid-1969 Slayton—with Shepard’s help—had adopted a fairly consistent method of choosing astronaut crews for the Apollo flights. First a three-man crew would serve as another crew’s backup. Three flights later that backup crew would become the prime crew. The three men who backed up Apollo 7, for example—Tom Stafford, Gene Cernan, and John Young—became the prime crew for Apollo 10. Apollo 10’s backup crew included Gordon Cooper, who therefore fully expected to take command of Apollo 13. But Shepard’s desires would again intrude on Cooper’s fate.

In a masterly—some said devious—stroke of what some astronauts dubbed “astro-politics,” once Shepard had proved to NASA doctors that his surgery had been a success, he convinced Slayton to give him the flight that Cooper has assumed was solidly his. Actually, as Slayton’s partner in crew selections, Shepard essentially assigned himself to Apollo 13, whi
ch made Cooper “furious” that Shepard seemed to be placing “his own interests” ahead of the good of the space program.

As the excitement of the upcoming Apollo 11 lunar landing grew, Shepard began sitting in on classroom sessions, reading up on Apollo flight systems, training in simulators, hanging out with the flight operations crews, and working out at the gym. He was back in the game, and the whispers swept across Houston. The astronaut corps knew something was up long before word leaked out of Shepard’s assignment.

When Cooper learned that Shepard had been given command of a flight—even though the Navy hadn’t yet cleared him to fly jets—he went to see Slayton to complain, and found Shepard in Slayton’s office. “Deke and I are making crew assignments now,” Shepard said, as if to imply:
You’re out of your league, Gordo—
what’s done is done.

Some were amazed, some were pissed, but few were really surprised. Shepard had less space experience than most of his peers. He’d never served on an Apollo backup crew, and now he was leapfrogging more than a dozen veteran astronauts. But no one was in a position to tell the first American spaceman he had to wait in line.

Actually, one person did: Shepard’s choice for his Apollo 13 copilot, Jim McDivitt, who complained that Shepard wasn’t ready to fly to the moon. McDivitt was subsequently replaced and lost his chance at the moon—he’d never fly again. However, when word of Shepard’s assignment to Apollo 13 reached NASA’s headquarters in Washington, Slayton and Shepard were overruled. NASA administrators in Washington agreed with McDivitt that Shepard needed more time to train.

The Apollo spacecraft was a hundred times more complicated than the Mercury capsule Shepard had flown in 1961, and the training regimen for Apollo astronauts was complex, time-consuming, and exacting. Apollo astronauts were required to know how to fly both the command and lunar modules and had
to spend 180 hours and 140 hours, respectively, in the training simulators for each vehicle. They had to know how to navigate their spacecraft using only the stars and moon, in case the computerized guidance systems ever failed. They had to spend a minimum of 240 hours in the classroom, absorbing Ph.D.-level lessons on meteorology, physics, rocket propulsion, flight mechanics, and computers. To withstand the punishing demands of spending a week inside a metal can, they had to be perfectly fit. And they had to quickly become geology experts, training in deserts and canyons to learn
how to identify rocks and minerals, which they’d have to collect on the moon, and to practice walking in their bulky space suits across rocky, sandy moonlike terrain.

There simply wasn’t enough time for Shepard to catch up and be unambiguously prepared to command Apollo 13, which was scheduled for an early 1970 launch, less than a year away. Slayton had no choice but to pull Shepard off Apollo 13.

But instead of giving the flight to Cooper, Slayton asked Jim Lovell—currently assigned to Apollo 14—if he could take Apollo 13. “Sure, why not?” Lovell said. “What could possibly be the difference between Apollo 13 and Apollo 14?” Shepard also saw little difference between the flights. His notorious impatience aside, he was thrilled to have gotten any flight to the moon. And despite some rolling of eyes and bruised feelings, most astronauts and administrators grudgingly admitted that he deserved the flight, regardless of how he had achieved it. Said flight director Chris Kraft: “He
stayed with the program. He paid his dues.”

Wally Schirra, who had retired after his Apollo 7 flight, wondered, “How the hell did he pull that one off? Unreal.” But deeper down, Schirra respected his colleague for sticking it out. “Al was probably bitter at times, watching us all fly. It was probably tough watching his buddies make all these flights,” he said. “I can’t believe he stuck around.” There was one astronaut who was less than magnanimous: Gordon Cooper, the big loser in all the politicking.

Slayton argued later that it wasn’t just Shepard’s maneuvering that cost Cooper his flight. Cooper had always rubbed NASA management the wrong way, which was why he’d almost lost his Mercury flight six years earlier. He had also been reprimanded in 1968 for attempting to race a car at Daytona Beach and then bitching to a reporter afterward that NASA wanted “tiddlywinks players” for astronauts. Also, Cooper never seemed to train as hard as the others, especially during the more complicated Apollo training sessions, and so Slayton felt it was just “time for him to move on.”

Cooper knew he “had little recourse,” but he vented one day to a
New York Times
reporter. “I’m considerably younger than Shepard. I’m still in good physical condition,” Cooper said, but declined to say why he was planning to leave the space program, other than to say “the politics” got too complicated. “I would rather not speak too much about Captain Shepard. I have my own feelings about him.” Cooper felt Shepard had flat-out stabbed him in the back. “He had to have what he wanted to have,” Cooper said ruefully years later. Though Cooper claimed to love him like a brother, “
it took me years to forgive Al.” In Cooper’s mind, Shepard had snatched something that had been his.

“I lost the moon,” he would write later.

Shepard was officially restored to flight status on May 7, 1969, just eleven days before Apollo 10’s launch. NASA wouldn’t announce publicly for another few months that not only was Shepard an astronaut once more, but he had been chosen to command Apollo 14.

First NASA wanted to run Shepard through the wringer, looking for any residual signs of the Ménière’s disease. They spun him in the centrifuge and dunked him underwater and whipped him about in the MASTIF. These were all efforts to shake loose Dr. House’s tube, but they all failed—the fles
h around the tube in his ear had healed and now held the tube tightly in place.

On July 16 Alan and Louise joined the crowds at the Cape to watch Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and Buzz Aldrin make history in Apollo 11. In a roped-off VIP section of the viewing stands, Shepard stood off by himself, looking out at the enormous skyscraper of a rocket, the same Saturn 5 booster that would soon deliver him above. He stood looking dreamily out at the rocket standing three miles away, “aloft in my own thoughts,” when an old man wearing rumpled clothes and an upside-down sailor cap approached and introduced himself. “Captain Shepard?” he said. “I’m Charles Lindbergh.” Shepar
d knew who he was before he’d opened his mouth. The two men had briefly met a few years earlier at a White House dinner. Shepard called his daughters over and introduced them, and then Louise, to Colonel Lindbergh. Then the two men walked off along the sand, to talk alone as the countdown to Apollo 11’s blastoff continued.

Shepard told Lindbergh how his 1927 flight had inspired him as a three-year-old boy, had planted the seeds of his future and boosted him toward a career as a Navy pilot. Lindbergh told Shepard that his 1961 space flight had been pretty heroic, too. They talked about the similarities between the early days of aviation and the genesis of the space race—the danger, the media crush, the politics. The two men talked for thirty minutes and then watched as a river of fire trailed behind Apollo 11 as it began its 250,000-mile journey.

Lindbergh later described the awe he felt as he witnessed the launch by Shepard’s side: “My chest was beaten and the ground shook as though bombs were falling nearby. Then a flame arose, left the ground behind—higher—faster—a meteor streaking through the sky. It seemed impossible for life to exist while carrying that ball of fire.”

Ten years earlier, when Shepard began attending his first meetings with engineers at Langley, he quickly learned—from the arguments, the dissension, and the naiveté—that NASA’s best and brightest didn’t yet have a clue how to get to the moon. They were brilliant men, no doubt about it; NASA’s half-decent pay scale and noble mission attracted some of the sharpest minds in the nation. Still, just as there had been many competing theories over how to fly like the birds in the late 1800s, no one knew for sure how best to travel the quarter of a million miles to the moon.

The tricky part was t
he thrust. How, the engineers argued, can a rocket carry enough fuel to not only blast off from the earth but then also travel to the moon and back? Such discussions had intensified during the summer of 1961, in the wake of Shepard’s
Freedom 7
launch and Kennedy’s historic vow to reach the moon within eight years.

Among the ideas on the table in the early 1960s was to build the largest rocket yet known, cram it with enough fuel to blast it all the way to the lunar surface, and at the last minute turn it around and bring it in backward—like backing a car into a garage. The same rocket would blast off again and fly back to earth. When that “direct ascent” theory proved to be unrealistic, another plan emerged and was soon adopted by Wernher von Braun as the best plan. The “earth-orbit rendezvous” theory called for launching two rockets, one carrying the astronauts’ capsule and another carrying an extra eng
ine full of fuel; that engine would be attached to the astronauts’ capsule while they orbited the earth, and then used to propel them to the moon. But there was one “voice in the wilderness,” as NASA engineer John Houbolt called himself, who had a completely different plan.

Houbolt called his theory “lunar-orbit rendezvous.” It called for a two-piece mothership—the bell-shaped command module and the cylindrical service module beneath that—to reach and then leave earth orbit, at which point a spidery lunar excursion module, or LEM (whose acronym was later shortene
d to LM, but was still pronounced “lem”), would be released from a “garage” of sorts (actually, the Saturn rocket’s third stage) beneath the service module; the command module would then turn 180 degrees so that it could attach to the nose of the lunar module. The Saturn’s third-stage engine, still attached beneath the LM, would then boost the linked-up spaceship—command, service, and lunar modules—toward the moon. Once the spacecraft reached orbit around the moon, the LM (having already shed the Saturn’s third-stage engine) would detach from the command module’s nose and descend to the moon’s surface
, carrying two astronauts, while the third stayed with the command module as it continued orbiting the moon. The lunar module would carry enough fuel to blast off from the moon’s surface and rendezvous with the orbiting command module. The astronauts would crawl out of the LM into the command module and then discard the LM and fly back to earth in the conjoined command and service modules. Just before reentering the earth’s atmosphere the command module would separate from the service module and parachute to a landing at sea. At the time the concept seemed so bizarre that Houbolt suffered t
he ridicule of his peers and was dismissed by supervisors. Mission Control’s flight director, Chris Kraft, considered Houbolt “a madman with a mission.”

But at a tense and historic meeting with von Braun in 1963 Houbolt was able to finally sell his method to the proud, stubborn German, and NASA officially selected lunar-orbit rendezvous as the wisest means of reaching the moon. NASA officials look back with wonder at those heady days and the powerful collusion of politics, technology, imagination, and youthful determination. “If Jack Kennedy had been older and wiser, he would never have committed us to the moon. The same was true for all of us,” Kraft said years later. “If we’d been older and wiser, we would have known that we couldn’t get it
all done. But we weren’t. So we did it.”