The Right Stuff (33 page)

Well, my God—what an improvement Project Mercury was over the daily lot of the test pilot's wife! No question about it! The worst part of the Pax River days had been the constant wondering and worrying, alone or with uncomprehending little faces around you. This morning Louise knew exactly where Al was every minute. He was hard to miss. He was on nationwide television. There he was. She had merely to look at the screen. On nationwide television they were talking about no one else. You could hear the laconic baritone voice of Shorty Powers, the NASA public affairs officer, in the Mercury Control room at the Cape periodically reporting the astronaut's status as the countdown proceeded. Then the telephone rings—and she hears that same voice, calling to speak to her, Louise. Al had spoken to Deke, and Deke had spoken to Shorty, and now Shorty—possessor of the voice that the entire nation was listening to—was talking to her personally, explaining the reasons for the delays, as Al had requested. Nor was she alone in this house. Hardly! It was getting crowded in here. In addition to the children, there were her parents, who had come from Ohio and had been here for days. A few of the other wives had arrived. Al had been stationed nearby in Norfolk when the program began, and so they had many Navy friends and neighbors whom they knew well, and quite a few of them had come by. There was quite a burble of voices building up in the living room. It didn't sound very tense in there. And of course she had merely half the newspapers in America in the front yard, plus the usual rabble of gawkers who materialize for car wrecks or roof jumps or traffic arguments, and the whole lot would have liked nothing better than to charge in and gather round if she had opened the front door to them so much as a crack.
Life
had wanted to have two writers and a photographer on the premises to record her reactions from start to finish, but she had held out against that. So they were waiting in a hotel on the beach, and it was agreed they could come inside as soon as the flight was completed. Louise hadn't even had all that much opportunity to sit in front of the television set and let the tension build. She had gotten up before dawn, in the dark, to fix breakfast for everybody who was staying in the house, and then there was the whole business of fixing coffee and whatnot for the other good folks as they arrived… until before she knew it she was caught up in the same psychology that works at a
wake
. She was suddenly the central figure in a Wake for My Husband—in his hour of danger, however, rather than his hour of death. The secret of the wake for the dead was that it put the widow on stage, whether she liked it or not. In the very moment in which, if left alone, she might be crushed by grief, she was suddenly thrust into the role of hostess and star of the show. It's free! It's
open house
! Anybody can come on in and gawk! Of course, the widow can still turn on the waterworks—but it takes more nerve to do that in front of a great gawking mob than it does to be the brave little lady, serving the coffee and the cakes. For someone as dignified and strong as Louise Shepard, there was no question as to how it was going to come out. As hostess and main character in this scene, what else was there for the pilot's wife to do but set about pulling everybody together? The press, the ravenous but genteel Beast out there upon the lawn, did not know it but he was covering not the Anguished Wife at Lift-off… but the Honorable Mrs. Commander Astronaut at Home… in the first wake, not for the dead, but for the Gravely Endangered… Louise didn't even have
time
to collapse in neurasthenic paralysis over the possible fate of her husband. It was all that the star and hostess could do to get back to the TV room in time for the final minutes of the countdown, to watch the flames roaring out of the Redstone's nozzles.

Hmmmm… with all the world wondering about the state of her soul at this moment… what kind of face should she have on?

Over his headset Shepard heard Deke Slayton, from inside the Mercury Control Center, as it was called, saying, "We have lift-off!" And as he had done hundreds of times on the centrifuge and on the procedures trainer, he reached up and turned on the onboard clock—which would tell him when to do this and that on his flight schedule—and he said over his microphone: "Roger, liftoff, and the clock is started"… as he had said hundreds of times on the centrifuge and the procedures trainer. And then, with the automatic anticipation of someone who has heard the same phonograph record over and over again and is now hearing it yet once again and senses every chord and phrase before it sounds, he waited for the gradual buildup of the g-forces and for the beating noise as the rocket lifted off… which he had felt and which he had heard hundreds of times on the centrifuge—

Hundreds of times
! Even if he had been ordered at that point to broadcast to the American people a detailed description of precisely what it felt like to be the first American riding a rocket into space, and even if he had had the leisure to do it, he could not possibly have expressed what he was feeling. For he was introducing the era of procreated experience. His launching was an utterly novel event in American history, and yet he could feel none of its novelty. He could not feel "the awesome power" of the rocket beneath him, as the broadcasters kept referring to it. He could only compare it to the hundreds of rides he had taken on the centrifuge at Johnsville. The memory of all those rides was imbedded in his nervous system. Scores of times he had sat in the gondola on the wheel, as he sat here now, in his pressure suit, with the Mercury instrument panel in front of him and the noise of a Redstone launch piped into his headset. And compared to that—what was happening at this moment was not awesome. Quite the opposite. He was braced for it, but…
It didn't throw you around like the centrifuge
… The centrifugal force of the centrifuge threw you around inside the capsule as well as increasing the speed and the g-forces… The rocket was smoother and easier…
It wasn't as noisy as the centrifuge
… On the wheel the recorded sound of the Redstone rocket was piped directly into the capsule. But now, since he was the figurine in the packing box, it came from outside, through layer after layer. By the time it penetrated the escape-tower cover and the capsule wall and the contoured seat behind his head and the helmet and his headset, it was no louder than the engine noises a commercial airline pilot hears on takeoff. In fact, he was far more conscious of the noises inside the capsule… The camera… There was a camera set up to record his facial expressions and eye and hand movements, and he could hear that whirring about a foot from his head… There was a tape recorder set up to record all the sounds inside the capsule, and he could hear its little motor running… And the fans and the gyros and inverters… it was like an extremely compact modern kitchen in here… with all the gadgets running at once… And of course the radio… He thought he would have to turn the volume up to maximum, as he had on the centrifuge, but he didn't have to touch it. All he had to do was talk into his voice mike and say the exact same things he had said a thousand times on the procedures trainer… "Altitude one thousand… one-point-nine g's…" and so on… and they would answer back, "Roger, we copy, you're looking good…" and it even
sounded
the same way over the headset.

He could still see nothing. The periscope was still retracted. He had no way to judge his speed except by the needle on the instrument panel that showed his rising altitude and the buildup of the g-forces on his body. But this was gradual. It was a very familiar feeling. He had felt it hundreds of times on the centrifuge. It was much easier than pulling four g's in a supersonic aircraft, because he didn't have to struggle to push his hands forward against the weight of the g-forces to control the trajectory of the aircraft. He didn't have to lift a finger if he didn't want to. The computers guided the rocket automatically by swivelling the nozzles. He had very little feeling of motion, just the g-forces driving him deeper and deeper into the seat he was lying on.

The rocket rose so gradually it took forty-five seconds to reach Mach 1. An F-104 fighter plane could have done it faster. When the rocket reached transonic speed, .8 Mach, a vibration started building up—just as it had for the X series of rocket planes at Edwards years before. Shepard was quite prepared for it… He had been through it on the centrifuge… so many times… But it was a different vibration. It didn't shake his head about as violently, but the amplitudes were more rapid. His vision began to blur. He couldn't read the instrument panel any longer. He started to report the phenomenon over his headset but thought better of it.
Some bastard would panic and abort the mission
. Christ, the vibrations, no matter how bad, were preferable to an abort. Within another thirty seconds all the vibrations were gone, and he knew he was going supersonic. With the vibration gone, he once again had no sensation of motion. He was still blind to the world outside. He was still lying on his back, looking at the instrument panel, no more than eighteen niches from his eyes, in the greenish light of the capsule. The g-forces reached six times the force of gravity, then began to tail off as the rocket and the capsule approached the weightless phase of the arc of flight.
It was different from the centrifuge
—
It was easier
! On the centrifuge the only way to reduce the g-load as you simulated the approach to the weightless phase was to reduce the speed of the centrifuge arm, and this always threw you forward against your straps. When the simulated moment of zero-g arrived, you were thrown against the straps quite hard. On a rocket ride, however—as all the rocket pilots at Edwards knew—your speed did not abruptly decrease as the rocket ran out of fuel. It kept sailing. Shepard was eased into weightlessness so smoothly it was as if the weight of the g-forces had simply slid off his body. Now he could feel his heart pounding. The most critical part of the flight, next to the launch itself, was only a moment away… the separation of the capsule from the rocket… He heard a muffled explosion from above…
just the way it sounded in the simulations
… and the escape rocket blew off and the capsule was now free of the rocket. The force of the rocket pulling away accelerated his speed, and he felt as if he had had a kick from below. A three-inch-long rectangular light lit up green on the instrument panel. On it were the letters JETT TOWER, for Jettison Tower. With the tower gone, the periscope would start operating, and he could look out, but he had his eyes pinned on the green light. It was beautiful. It meant everything was going perfectly. He could forget about the abort handle now. The launch phase was over. The most treacherous part of the entire ride was now behind him. All that endless training in the procedures trainer… "Abort!… Abort!… Abort!"… he could put that behind him and forget about it. Small portholes were on either side, above his head, and he could see only the sky through them. He was now slightly more than a hundred miles up. The sky was almost navy blue. It was not the much-talked-of "blackness of space." It was the same dark-blue sky that pilots begin to see at 40,000 feet. It looked no different. The capsule was now automatically turning so that its blunt end, the end beneath his back, which had a heat shield for the re-entry into the earth's atmosphere, was aimed toward the target area. He was facing back toward Florida, toward the Cape. He could not see the earth out of the high portholes at all, however. He wasn't even particularly interested in looking. He kept his eyes pinned on the instrument panel. The gauges told him he was weightless. After reaching this point so many times on the procedures trainer, he knew he must be weightless. But he felt nothing. He was so tightly strapped and stuffed into this little human holster there was no way he could float as he had in the cargo bays of the big C-131s. He didn't even experience the tumbling sensation he felt when riding backseat in the F-100s at Edwards.
It was all milder
!—
easier
! No doubt he should say something to the ground about the sensation of weightlessness. It was the great unknown in space flight.
But he didn't feel anything at all
! He noticed a washer floating in front of his eye. The washer must have been left in there by a workman. It was just floating there in front of his left eye. That was the only evidence his five senses had to show that he was weightless. He tried to grab the washer with his left hand, with his glove, but he missed it. It floated away, and he couldn't move his hand far enough to get it. He had no sensation of speed at all, even though he knew he was going Mach 7, or about 5,180 miles an hour. There was nothing to judge speed by. There were no vibrations at all in the capsule. Since he was now completely beyond the earth's atmosphere and was no longer attached to the rocket, there was no rushing sound whatsoever. It was as if he were standing still, parked in the sky. The sounds of the interior of the capsule, the rising and falling and whirring and moaning of the inverters and the gyros… the cameras, the fans… the busy little kitchen—they were exactly the same sounds he had heard over and over in the simulations inside the capsule on the ground at the Cape… The same busy little kitchen in operation, whirring and buzzing and humming along… There was nothing new going on!… He knew he was in space, but there was no way to tell it!… He looked out the periscope, the only way he had of looking at the earth.
The goddamned gray filter
! He couldn't see any colors at all! He had never changed the filter! The first American to ever fly this high above the earth—and it was a black-and-white movie. Nevertheless, they'll want to know about it—

"What a beautiful view!" he said.

He could hear Slayton say: "I bet it is."

In fact, there was a cloud cover over most of the East Coast and much of the ocean. He was able to see the Cape. He could see the west coast of Florida… Lake Okeechobee… He was up so high he seemed to be moving away from Florida ever so slowly… And the inverters moaned up and the gyros moaned down and the fans whirred and the cameras hummed… He tried to find Cuba. Was that Cuba or wasn't that Cuba? Over there, through the clouds… Everything was black and white and there were clouds all over… There's Bimini Island and the shoals around Bimini. He could see that.
But everything looked so small
! It had all been bigger and clearer in the ALFA trainer, when they flashed the still photos on the screen… The real thing didn't measure up. It was
not realistic
. He couldn't see anything but a medium-gray ocean and light-gray beaches and dark-gray vegetation… There were the Bahamas, Grand Bahama Island, Abaco Island… or were they? The pale-gray cloud cover and the medium-gray water and the pale-gray beaches and the medium-gray… the grays ran together like goulash… He didn't have time to fool with it. He had a long checklist. He was supposed to try out the roll, yaw, and pitch controls. They were all operating automatically up to now. He switched over to manual one at a time and tried using the hand controller.