The Right Stuff (49 page)

It was decided that one of Wally's major operational tests would consist of powering down all of the attitude-control systems, automatic as well as manual, and just drifting in any attitude the capsule's inertia took it, upside down (in relation to the earth), head over heels, canted this way and that, whatever. Scott heard about it and told Wally that he didn't really think it was necessary. He had drifted for most of his last orbit, in an attempt to conserve fuel for the re-entry, and had proved to his own satisfaction that you could stand the capsule right up on its aerial or let it revolve or put yourself in any other attitude and it was not the least bit disorienting or uncomfortable. Why didn't Wally put the proposed drifting time to other uses? Wally said no, he was going to devote his flight to experimenting with drifting flight and to conserving fuel, in order to prepare the way for missions of long duration.

Scott would learn that planning sessions had been held—and he had not been informed of them. It was not that Scott was supposed to take any official part in the planning for Wally's flight, and it was not unusual in flight test for a pilot to have his own particular circle of colleagues and ground crew he preferred to consult with. But be that as it may, anyone could recall how much Scott had valued John Glenn's counsel before his flight. In fact, one of Scott's concerns had been that John wasn't available more. The demands on John's time in his role as NASA's number-one hero had become enormous. But anytime John was around, Scott—and the engineers, too—wanted John at the meetings. Wally also complained that John wasn't around. He caused quite a flap when he told Walter Cronkite, in a taped interview, that John was off on the banquet circuit so much, he was lost to the program. He didn't complain about the absence of Scott, however. Scott began to conclude that Kraft and Williams were overreacting to the fact that he had overshot the target by 250 miles. The possibility that there were people—
pilots
—going around saying that he had
panicked
never even crossed his mind.

Given the goal of the flight—which was to prove that a
cool
pilot could travel twice as far as Carpenter with half as much fuel consumption and ten times the accuracy—Schirra was terrific. From the moment he got up that morning, he was about as cool and relaxed a human being who ever went out to sit on top of a rocket shaft. A few days ago Wally had played one of his patented
gotchas
on Dee O'Hara, the nurse. One of her tasks was to collect urine samples. She gives him the usual little bottle and asks him to bring in a sample and leave it on her desk. She comes into her office, and on top of her desk is not a little bottle but a huge beaker holding about five gallons of an amber liquid with a head of foam on top. It couldn't possibly be—but
could
it possibly be?—and so she puts her hands on the sides of the beaker to see if it's warm, and—

"Gotcha!"

—she wheels about, and there's Wally peeking in the doorway, him and his beaming face and a couple of the boys. He had concocted it of water, tincture of iodine, and detergent. The next day Dee O'Hara presents Wally with a clear plastic bag, a big thing, about four feet long, telling him that it's the urine receptacle for his flight, replacing the little condom device that Grissom, Glenn, and Carpenter had worn.
Gotcha
! So today, the morning of his flight, here comes Wally down the hallway in Hangar S in his bathrobe, heading for the medical room. Flopping out below the robe and dragging along the floor between his legs is the huge plastic bag. He parades right past Dee O'Hara, as if he were going to suit up that way.
Gotcha
! And he kept it up. That whole day he was the jolly Wally from beginning to end. He was amazing. He never sounded for a moment like someone under the stress of a novel form of flight test. It was like listening to a good buddy at beer call, recollecting in tranquillity. He practically out-yeagered Yeager. As soon as the escape tower blew off, marking the successful completion of the fully powered part of his ascent, Schirra saw it streaking through the sky and said: "This tower is a real sayonara."

Chris Kraft, the flight director, gave his approval for the first orbit, and Deke Slayton, the capcom at the Cape, told Schirra: "You have a go from Control Center."

Schirra said: "You have a go from me. It's real fat."

Then Slayton said: "Are you a turtle today?"

"Going to VOX recorder only," said Wally. Then he spoke into the tape recorder, whose microphone was not hooked into the open radio circuit.

"You bet your sweet ass I am," he said.

The Turtle Club was one of Wally's gotcha games. If one good buddy who played the turtle game met another good buddy in public—preferably in the company of very proper folk—and challenged him with the question "Are you a turtle?" that good buddy had to answer, "You bet your sweet ass I am," in a loud voice or else treat everybody else to a round of drinks. This was three minutes and forty-one seconds into the flight. Wally was already maintaining an even strain.

He buckled down to the task of conserving hydrogen peroxide. Ordinarily, when the booster rocket separated from the capsule, the capsule was then turned around by the automatic control system, but this consumed considerable fuel. This time Schirra nudged it around manually, using only the low thrusters, the five-pound thrusters, of the fly-by-wire system. Soon he was telling Deke at the Cape: "I'm in chimp mode right now and she's flying beautifully." He started using this phrase
chimp mode
. On the chimpanzee flights the attitude of the capsule had been controlled automatically throughout.
The chimp mode
was a little zinger for the benefit of all those on the mighty ziggurat, whether astronauts or X-15 "dream pilots," who were aware of the taunt: "A monkey's gonna make the first flight." Schirra's continual reference to
the chimp mode
as much as said: "Who cares! Here—I'll wave the bloody monkey in your face." As soon as he could, however, he went into what he called
the drifting mode
. He just let the capsule twist into any attitude it wanted, as Scott had on his final orbit.

"I'm having a ball up here drifting," said Wally. "Enjoying it so much I haven't eaten yet."

When he came over California during the fourth orbit, John Glenn, acting as capcom at Point Arguello, was instructed to have Wally say something for live broadcast over television and radio.

"Ha, ha," said Wally. "I suppose an old song, 'Drifting and Dreaming,' would be apropos at this point, but at this point I don't have a chance to dream. I'm enjoying it too much." When he was over South America, he was asked to say something in Spanish for live broadcast.

"
Buenos días
, you all," said Wally. (And the Latins loved it.)

After nearly four orbits, drifting and yakking and yukking it up, cool, relaxed, a turtle to the last, Wally had used up barely 10 percent of his hydrogen peroxide. He had already traveled one orbit farther than Carpenter or Glenn. He had floated every which way, and (as Scott had told him) there was nothing to it. There was no sensation of up or down in weightless flight. It was obvious that you could send a Mercury capsule on a seventeen-orbit flight, like Titov's, if you wanted. As Schirra came over the Cape, Deke Slayton said, "Flight would like to talk to you now."

"Flight" meant the flight director, Kraft himself, was coming onto the circuit.

"Been a real good show up there," said Kraft. "I think we are proving our point, old buddy!"

Glenn was sitting in front of a microphone in the tracking station at Point Arguello. Scott was sitting in front of a microphone in the tracking station at Guaymas. Kraft had never come on the circuit to say any such thing to either of them. Scott was beginning to see what the point,
our point
, was.

As he neared the completion of his sixth and last orbit, Wally announced that he had 78 percent of the fuel left in both the automatic and manual systems. He had flown twice as far as Glenn or Carpenter, and he could have gotten through another fifteen orbits or so if he had to. One of Kraft's lieutenants, an engineer named Gene Kranz, came on the circuit and said to Wally: "Now
that's
what I call a real engineering test flight!"

Scott picked up the message in his central nervous system even before his mind analyzed it.
Unlike the last one
, the man was saying. There was even a hint of…
unlike the last two
.

To complete an operational triumph Schirra now had only to land on target. Carpenter had landed 250 miles off the mark. As he began his descent toward the atmosphere, Wally told Al Shepard, the capcom on Bermuda, near the target area, "I think they're gonna put me on the number-three elevator." He was talking about the number-three elevator used for moving aircraft up to the flight deck on the carrier
Kearsage
, This was a bit of the Schirra metonymy for "squarely on target." Oh, yes! And in fact he landed just 4.5 miles from the carrier. The swabbos crowding the flight deck could see him coming down under his big parachute. Carpenter had found the capsule uncomfortably hot once he splashed down and had crawled out through the neck of the capsule and waited on his life raft for the rescue planes. Glenn had also complained of the heat. Schirra's suit had an improved cooling system, and he was willing to stay in the capsule indefinitely. He refused a helicopter's offer of a lift to the carrier. What was the rush? He stayed in the capsule while a crew of swabbos in a motor-driven whaling boat towed him back to the carrier. Once he was on the
Kearsage
he told the doctors: "I feel fine. It was a textbook flight. The flight went just the way I wanted it to."

That became the verdict on Schirra's performance: "A textbook flight." He had done everything on the checklist. He had turned in a hundred percent performance. He had successfully proved that a man could ride around the earth six times and barely turn a hand or move a muscle and hardly use an ounce of fuel or expend an extra heartbeat and never, not for a moment, surrender to psychological stress, and ride the ship down to a designated drop in the vastness of the ocean. Sigma, summa, Q.E.D.:
Operational
!

Wally came back to celebrations in Houston and Florida and a big Wally Schirra day in his hometown of Oradell, New Jersey. The next day he went to the White House for congratulations by President Kennedy, and the President presented him with the Distinguished Service Medal. It all turned out to be rather brief and unceremonious, however, and something of a disappointment. A little chat, a few grins, a few photographs with the Chief Executive in the Oval Office, and that was it. The date was October 16. In time Wally would learn that Kennedy had just seen photographic evidence, from U-2 flights, that the Soviets had set up missile bases in Cuba. The President had kept his appointment with the astronaut only to maintain appearances, to prevent word from getting out about the critical situation that was developing.

By and by Conrad started carrying Glenn's bag, as well as his own, and facing up to the role. It was the only sensible thing to do. Otherwise, the two of them would arrive at some airport, St. Louis, Akron, Los Angeles, wherever, and it would take them five minutes to walk forty feet. The autograph seekers came in waves. Every few steps Glenn would have to put his bag down and sign some more autographs and shake some more hands. Actually he was great at it. That big sunny freckle-faced smile of his lit up the place. People came up to him as if they knew him personally and loved him.
He is my protector. He risked his life and challenged the Russians in the heavens for me
. They adored him so much it would have been hard for him to brush past them, even had he been of that sort of disposition. So he would put his bag down and sign some more autographs, and the two of them would have to stop.

If Conrad carried both bags, they could keep moving. Glenn could wave and sign autographs and shake hands and chat and beam that terrific smile at everybody in transit without seeming rude. As for Conrad, he was in absolutely no danger of having to stop and put down the bags. He was now an astronaut, officially, but not to the mobs of autograph seekers. They couldn't have cared less. He looked like some little guy who carried bags for John Glenn. What was more, that was what he felt like. That was about all the second group of astronauts was doing: chores for the first, for the one, the only, the Original Seven. Conrad, as part of his training, had been accompanying Glenn in his travels. Now that Project Mercury was drawing to a close, Glenn was supposed to make Project Apollo, the moon program, his "area of specialization." He was visiting the factories of the major contractors, just as he had in the early days of Mercury. Conrad's area of specialization, officially, was "cockpit layout and systems integration"; but mainly he was… with John Glenn. John Glenn visiting the factory took on the aura of the general coming to inspect the troops. He was a magnet for every sort of VIP who could get next to him, particularly congressmen and senators. There were times when senators actually pushed—elbowed! hipped! bellied!—secretaries, stenographers, and other mere gawkers out of the way to get next to Glenn's fabled hide and speak to him and grin a great deal. Standing by, all the while, would be an unknown young man, the single-combat hero's valet, apparently, his batman, as the British Army called military servants. Namely, the anonymous Lieutenant Conrad, Group II Astronaut.

Nevertheless, Conrad had made it this time, and that was the main thing. That was all that any really competitive military pilot upon the great ziggurat could focus on any more: becoming an astronaut. By now, only three years later, any such session as he and Wally Schirra and Alan Shepard and Jim Lovell and the others had gone through at the Marriott motel in February of 1959… it was hard to believe it could have ever taken place. Remember Wally that night? Wally!… adding up the pros and cons and agonizing over what the space program might do to his chances of commanding a squadron of F-4Hs! And now Wally—the same Wally with whom they had gone waterskiing on Chesapeake Bay, with whom they had weathered that bad string at Pax River, the old affable prankster himself—now Wally stood at the very apex of the great invisible pyramid of flying. For the seven Mercury astronauts had
become
the True Brotherhood. They were so dazzling you couldn't even
see
the erstwhile True Brethren of Edwards Air Force Base any longer.