"Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today (10 page)

When John Glenn had satisfied all his national appearances, he came home for a parade through Cocoa Beach and a first-hand inspection by President John F. Kennedy of his Mercury spacecraft,
Friendship Seven.
(Rusty Fischer & Hartwell Conklin Coll
ections).

I joined veteran broadcaster Robert McCormick in NBC’s Radio Central at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. We broadcast the parade from start to finish, and for this farm boy’s first trip to the big city, about the only thing I felt akin to was Chet Huntley’s roll-top desk.

The next morning NBC got me out of bed to cover an award for Glenn at the famed Waldorf-Astoria hotel.

I stopped by the coffee shop for breakfast and was introduced to food in the big city. The menu said two eggs anyway you liked them. That’s what I ordered and that’s what I got—two eggs. No toast, no coffee, no jam—no anything except two eggs.

In Cocoa Beach in 1962 you received two eggs, sausage or bacon, potatoes or grits, toast, coffee, and orange juice for $1.75. You can image how pleased I was when they brought me a check for $5.75 for my two eggs and a glass of warm water.

I paid the bill and took the elevator to witness John Glenn’s award. He was happy to see a face from home.

“Any beach sand in there?” he smiled, shaking my trousers’ cuffs.

“Some,” I laughed. “How’re you doing?”

“Tired,” he said, his expression suddenly weary. “I’m ready for a rest.”

“For a guy that shortened the distance to the moon, you’re entitled.”

Standing there, it came to me God didn’t turn out too many like John Glenn. When he passes, his epitaph should read:

HERE LIES A CIVILIZED MAN

T
he public had fallen in love with John Glenn, and NASA could not have been more pleased. The word went out: It’s a long way to the moon. Keep the astronauts in orbit, keep the public’s attention.

Deke Slayton did just that. He took the reins from Glenn and went to work. Wally Schirra was his backup. But soon we began to hear rumblings that Deke was in trouble. The rumor was that it was his heart.

In Washington, presidential science advisor Jerome Wiesner spoke with NASA administrator James Webb. He told the NASA chief the White House had heard about Slayton’s heart irregularity, and added, “Sending Slayton into orbit could be a terrible mistake. Suppose something goes wrong, anything, and the word gets out that the astronaut flying the ship had an erratic heart condition. Who do you think they are going to blame? It wouldn’t matter if his heart had nothing to do with the failure. They’d be after the President’s ass.”

Webb shifted in his seat. “I get your point.”

Wiesner looked at him soberly. “It’s simple, Jim,” he said. “Take him off the flight.”

Webb nodded a half-hearted agreement. He realized the presidential science adviser was still smarting over losing his argument that JFK should cancel the whole damn manned space program.

Deke had idiopathic paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, a disturbance of the rhythm in the muscle fibers in the upper chambers of his heart, and the NASA administrator called for a medical panel to review the facts. The panel agreed with Wiesner. The job of telling Deke fell to the Mercury Seven’s own flight surgeon, Bill Douglas.

“Goddamn it, Bill, those sons-a-bitches can’t do this to me,” Deke shouted. “No one was concerned about this during selection. After all the years I’ve been flying the hottest jets, flying test flights, they said it was no big thing. Now they want me to step down? I can’t believe it,” he pleaded, shaking his head. “There ain’t a damn thing wrong with me.”

There was more bad news.

“I know the rules call for the backup pilot to slip into the seat of an astronaut unable to make a mission,” Dr. Douglas told Deke, “but Wally won’t be going.”

“God!” Deke screamed, “What the hell else?”

Douglas explained that Bob Gilruth decided Scott Carpenter, John Glenn’s backup, had more time in the Mercury simulator than Schirra, and Carpenter would be going in his place.

NASA gave Deke a few minutes with the press and then got him out of Dodge, got him the hell out of the way of Carpenter’s mission. When
Aurora Seven
lifted off on May 24, 1962, Deke Slayton was at a remote tracking station in Australia.

S
cott Carpenter made a perfect ride into orbit. He was a gatherer of facts and a builder of knowledge, and in a sense he was the first science-astronaut. He made the most of what he had on board. On his first two orbits he drank more and ate more. He wanted to know how the digestive tract would handle weightlessness, and he wanted to know the limits of Mercury’s attitude-control jets. By wringing them out, from one position and then to another, he virtually depleted the fuel available for attitude maneuvering. He took all the pictures he could until his cameras ran hot, and th
en he ran through his scheduled program checklist, which included releasing a balloon in space.

He was having a ball.

After his first two orbits, Mercury Control began to worry. Scott had consumed so much fuel, flight director Chris Kraft was giving serious thought to ending his mission an orbit early. But he made a last-minute decision to let Scott stay up for his third and final planned trip around Earth if he would go into a “drifting mode.” That would conserve fuel. Scott liked the idea. He lay back in the comfort of weightlessness.

But as he entered his final sunrise, he couldn’t control himself. Scott had an idea. He banged his hand against the inside wall of
Aurora Seven.
He was right. The moment he struck the wall he was flying through a swarm of John Glenn’s “fireflies.” Again he banged the capsule’s bulkhead, and more fireflies slowly moved into view. “Damn,” he cursed. “I must know.” He fired the jets, swung the capsule around, and proved the mysterious fireflies originated from water vapor vented from the Mercury capsule. Vapor produced primarily by the human on board.

The astronaut’s body perspired, urinated, and exhaled, and the moisture was removed from the spacecraft through an external vent on the side of the capsule. The instant this moisture entered the low temperatures of the space night, it froze into ice particles. Some particles swarmed about the capsule or floated away; others clung to the ship’s side, to be knocked off when Scott thumped the wall. When the sun angle was just right, at sunrise or sunset, these particles became the famed “celestial fireflies,” only to be melted away by the heat of the space day.

The thinking astronaut had solved another mystery. But his eagerness to learn had cost Carpenter precious fuel and time needed to prepare for reentry. He landed 250 miles beyond his intended landing target. Scott was isolated on the surface of the Atlantic, beyond radio range. For nearly an hour he was lost to a frantic Mercury Control and to a worried worldwide radio and television audience.

We stayed on the air during the search, and I talked about every space fact I had ever collected. I was down to telling our listeners what the food was like in the Cape’s cafeteria when a recovery aircraft picked up Carpenter’s radio beacon.

The aircraft crew found Carpenter floating in the life raft attached to his bobbing Mercury capsule. Scott had had the good sense to make sure his radio beacon had activated and to bail out of
Aurora Seven
and
climb into his raft. He was just sitting there, eating a Baby Ruth, cataloging what he’d seen and learned.

B
ehind the scenes, a devastated Deke Slayton was waging a fierce struggle to return to flight status, and his fellow astronauts were worried. To the man, they were concerned about the effect the grounding was having on him.

As you would expect, John Glenn stepped forward. “We’re a team,” he said. “We’ve got to pull for our friend.”

“We’re going to give Deke back his pride,” Alan Shepard said.

“Yew man,” Gus Grissom agreed. Two words from Gus was a full speech.

So they decided to make Deke their boss.

“Give him the power,” Wally Schirra said. “His own title, office, whatever he needs.”

“Hell, he’ll be chief astronaut,” Gordo Cooper said, “but we’ll have to work fast.”

“Why?”

“Washington’s at it again,” Cooper told them. “Our friends at Edwards tell me they’re bringing in an air force general to take charge of the astronauts.”

“Like hell they are,” snapped Shepard. “Maybe an admiral, but no general,” the future admiral laughed.

“Well,” pondered Glenn, “we’ll just stand firm.”

“Damn right,” Cooper agreed. “It’s gotta be one of us.”

“Damn right,” Scott Carpenter said, slamming a fist on the table. “It’s gotta be Deke.”

They stood solid. Stonewall Jackson would have been proud.

N
ASA knew the Mercury Seven could not fly all the orbital flights in the upcoming Gemini program. New pilots had to be recruited for the astronaut corps. The agency went back and hired Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Charles “Pete” Conrad, James Lovell, James McDi
vitt, Elliott See, Tom Stafford, Ed White, and John Young. They had just missed the Mercury Seven cut, and with the exception of civilian Armstrong, they were all military. They were immediately dubbed the Gemini Nine.

NASA had also come to realize it needed someone to manage the astronauts’ office, to select flight crews, make assignments, plan and schedule training time, and be a link between the pilots and management. In short, be a mother hen to this elite corps.

The Mercury astronauts made three recommendations to NASA management: Deke Slayton, Deke Slayton, and Deke Slayton. NASA administrator Jim Webb smiled and turned a thumbs-up, and Deke became chief astronaut.

Those who were there said it was like turning on a switch. Deke’s pride was back. The first rule he made was there would be no copilots in space. No test pilot could stomach being called a copilot, and Deke laughed and proclaimed, “Our Gemini crew members will be made up of a command pilot and a pilot.”

Astronaut Wally Schirra is slipped into his Mercury spacecraft
Sigma Seven
for his textbook flight.
(NASA).

Some outsiders judged the appointment as a pacifier for a crestfallen astronaut, but that attitude had a short life. Deke took absolute charge. In short order his office was
the
power to be reckoned with. The new levels of respect carried over to the entire astronaut team. Everybody stepped back when it came to astronaut selection for flights. Deke carried the ball, and on October 3, 1962, while the World Series was being played, an Atlas rocket boosted Wally Schirra and his
Sigma Seven
into orbit. Wally proved his skills, as Deke knew he would. He stayed up for six orbits—nine hours. He had been launched with the same fuel quantity as Glenn and Carpenter, but he conserved fuel in a way that amazed Mercury Control. In the process he went through hi
s scientific and engineering checklist with an efficiency that would have turned a robot green with envy.

It was what NASA watchers had been waiting for, a perfect flight.
Sigma Seven
splashed down less than four miles from the main recovery carrier near Midway Island in the Pacific. One broadcaster dubbed it “the flight of the Mongoose.”

W
hen the dust had settled in the wake of Schirra’s mission, the new Gemini Nine test pilots had been given the title of astronaut. The new group would join the Mercury Seven in flying the Gemini maneuverable spaceships.

Deke Slayton now had fifteen astronauts under his wing. He set the newcomers up for indoctrination and training and figured the more they saw of the remaining days of Project Mercury, the better prepared they’d be for flying the heavier, larger advanced Gemini—a spaceship that could not only maneuver, but could change its orbit, change its altitude, and rendezvous and dock with other ships, a spaceship that would define and test the procedures needed for Apollo to reach the moon.

Slayton also knew something most reporters didn’t. America was going to the moon for national prestige—nothing else. “If the Russians weren’t kicking our ass, Barbree,” he told me, “there would be no Project Apollo.”

Astronaut Gordo Cooper whips himself into shape for his marathon flight by jogging in the shadow of the
Saturn 1B
rocket pad.
(NASA)
.

The chief astronaut drew up a flight plan that would put Mercury in a category with Russia’s ships in time spent in space. No three-or-six-orbit flight for the fourth and final orbiting Mercury. This would be a shot of twenty-two orbits—a day and a half spent circling Earth. And he would need a “hot dog” to handle such a tough assignment. He would need the best stick-and-rudder man in the air force. He would need Leroy Gordon “Gordo” Cooper, a kick-ass barnyard of a pilot who knew only one way: “Git ’er done.”

Operations director Walt Williams stopped by Deke’s office and said, “Look, I know besides yourself, Gordo Cooper is the only Mercury guy who hasn’t flown. But maybe it would be a good idea to consider moving Al Shepard into this last Mercury flight.” Then Williams saw the chief astronaut’s face. He swallowed hard. “Of course, it’s your call, Deke.”

Deke began to simmer and could barely nod a good-bye when Williams left. He wasn’t fooled for a second. The issue at hand was that Gordon Cooper was too much of a maverick for some in the space-
agency hierarchy. His hotshot jet flying and his tendency to bend the rules did not sit well with them. Deke judged Gordo as nothing less than a terrific pilot. He had come up through the ranks—paying his dues all along the way, flying everything from J–3 cubs to F–106s, and he belonged at the stick of the last Mercury. If anyone knew how it felt to have an earned flight yanked from under his feet, it sure as hell was Deke Slayton. He wasn’t about to stand by and see Gordo get the shaft.