Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (27 page)

Shepard had almost killed himself twice, but that was in fact the whole point of being a test pilot: to make sure other pilots weren’t killed by an imperfect plane. In early 1957 he flew to Edwards once more to wring out another new jet—the F5D-1 Skylancer—as project director of a team of test pilots that would recommend to the Navy whether or not to order more F5Ds. For five days he and Billy Lawrence (his former
Oriskany
mate who had been assigned to Patuxent River, thanks to a recommendation from Shepard) and another test pilot pushed and prodded the F5D. The Navy had high hopes for th
e bat-winged, supersonic F5D, but Shepard didn’t like or trust how it flew, and he said so in a strongly worded report. “This isn’t what we want,” he wrote.

The manufacturers at Douglas Aircraft were furious. But in subsequent discussions, Shepard held his ground. Only five F5Ds had been built when the Navy canceled production of the plane and instead chose to buy the F8U Crusader. (Two of the five F5Ds would later be donated to the new space agency, NASA). The unsatisfactory report Shepard gave to the Tiger after his harrowing experience prompted the Navy to cancel future orders of that plane as well, after purchasing 199 of them. That plane’s maker, Grumman, was also furious. (Ironically, the otherwise agile jet was adopted by
the Blue Angels, which flew F11F Tigers for the next decade.)

Shepard’s work at Pax River was so highly respected that in 1957 he was asked to become an instructor. It was another indication that, despite his occasional rule breaking, people had begun listening more and more closely to Alan Shepard’s opinions. If he said a plane was a bad investment, the Navy believed him, even if millions of dollars were lost in the process. Admirals at the Pentagon had decided that Shepard had become
more than a jet jockey. He was now a leader, a mentor, an administrator. He was admiral material.

Soon after Alan and Louise had returned to Pax River in 1956, Louise’s sister died. The apparent cause of death was a flu-like illness, but there was always something a little mysterious and unexplained about her death, and those closest to the Shepards were never sure what really happened, or where, or why. The Shepards never spoke of it.

In any case, Louise’s sister had three children at the time, two boys and a girl. Their father, unable to care for three kids alone, took them to Longwood Gardens to live with their grand-parents. When Louise learned that Adele had died, she and her two daughters, Laura and Julie, drove from Patuxent River to Longwood to help her parents. After a few months it became clear that Louise’s aging parents couldn’t care for Adele’s three young children, and the children’s father seemed unable or unwilling to try. So the two boys were sent away to boarding school, leaving Louise to care for her
niece, Judith.

While Louise tended to this situation, Alan flew up to Longwood on weekends, dropping his jet low and loud over the estate to let the family know he’d arrived (and in the process terrifying some of Longwood’s employees). Over the course of long discussions in those days, while walking through Longwood, Alan and Louise decided to bring their orphaned niece into their home.

At first the poor girl was in shock. She didn’t know what was happening to her. She was only five years old and was unhappy and confused. Then, to add to the confusion, she received a new name. In order to eliminate the awkwardness of having two girls of the same age with similar names (Julie and Judith) in the same family, the Shepards changed her name from Judith to Alice. “It was a difficult time,” said a neighbor, Den
ni Seibert, whose husband helped manage the Longwood estate and lived in the big stone house beside the Brewers. “People just didn’t talk about it,” Seibert said. Many years later, they still didn’t.

Alice recalled only that Louise “did the best she could with me.”

Alan and Alice took a while to find comfortable ground on which to be father and daughter. They were both cautious at first. Except for a few family gatherings at holiday time, they hadn’t really known each other. Alice found Alan to be loose and relaxed around the family and surprisingly warm and loving. But he also had a lot of rules and sometimes blew up. Worse was the silent stare. “He’d give that famous stare, and you knew you were in trouble,” Alice recalled.

But such moments were infrequent, largely because when Alice first moved in with the Shepards, Alan was often traveling and wasn’t around much. Louise and the girls stayed at Longwood nearly a year, and toward the end of that year, Louise finally began to feel like she was making some progress at welcoming Alice into the family. One day Alice and Julie—who were both six—got into an argument over something. Alice burst into tears and ran crying into the kitchen, where she threw her arms around Louise’s legs, yelling, “Mommy! Mommy!” At that moment, Louise told a friend, she knew she had done som
ething right, something good for her motherless niece. The Shepards would never officially adopt Alice, but they would continue to raise her as their own.

When his tour as Pax River instructor ended in mid-1957, Shepard received word that the Navy wanted him to spend a year at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Initially he hated the idea of going back to school and dismissed the stint as merely a chance to “brush up on some academic subjects.” But he also knew it was a significant step toward a higher ran
k. Some of the Navy’s elite had attended the college, which was considered an apprenticeship toward an admiral’s uniform.

An assignment to the War College meant a chance to study the most sophisticated strata of warfare: philosophies of war, strategies of war, technology, politics, and policy. The college had been created in the late 1800s to prepare midcareer officers to be the next generation of naval leaders. Lectures were given not just by military people but intelligence experts, state department officials, foreign diplomats, politicians, and academics. Though he wasn’t thrilled with the assignment, Shepard knew it boded well for his career. “I thought I had a very good chance of becoming the skipper of a c
arrier squadron in another year or so and going back to sea,” he said years later. “And running an aircraft squadron is the big objective of any career pilot in the Navy.”

Louise knew the college was just a brief stop before Alan returned to flying. After Rhode Island there would be another move to another city, where Alan would leave them on shore again as he returned to the fleet, to sea—and back to foreign ports of call. But until then they could relish being a family, whole and intact. Alan came home most nights for dinner, getting to know his girls again and getting to know Alice. He played piano some nights after dinner and even bought a pair of bongos to thump on. And on Sundays the family went to church. The liberty hound was nowhere to be seen.

The change of routine was not, however, an easy one. As in many Navy families, Alan’s role so far had been that of the oft-absent patriarch. Louise had raised the family according to her own rules, and now Alan would sometimes criticize her methods and try to impose some military-style order on the family. Louise was never much of a disciplinarian nor a housekeeper. She let the girls stay up late and let the dishes pile up. When Alan began laying down new rules, the girls sometimes rebelled. There were times when Louise was relieved that Alan had to leave town again for a meeting or assignment.

Then, in the fall of 1957, just a month into Alan’s classes, a startling, disturbing feat of technological mastery would rocket through their world and shock the entire country. Everything would change—for Alan and Louise, for America and the world.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, while men like Alan Shepard, Chuck Yeager, and John Glenn helped push the Wright brothers’ creation to astonishing extremes, another group of men had pursued a parallel obsession. They were the rocket boys.

Instead of model airplane clubs, these boys had belonged to rocket clubs (especially prevalent in Germany through the 1930s), where they learned to build and launch explosive-stuffed tubes and various other self-propelled bullets. During World War II the most significant advances in rocket development had been made by engineers and scientists in Nazi Germ
any, who created the deadly V-2 liquid-propelled rocket with a bomb attached to the tip that was used to bombard the city of London night after night.

When the war ended, the United States and Russia greedily snatched up the Nazi scientists, with the United States seeming to have won the biggest prize. Wernher von Braun, a brilliant but wildly egotistical engineer who had directed the V-2 program, came to the United States as a technical adviser in 1945; five years later, he was named head of a team of scientists in Huntsville, Alabama, developing a so-called Redstone rocket.

Through the early 1950s, the rocket boys—in the United States and in the Soviet Union, both groups working with modified V-2 rockets—aimed toward a long-term goal of creating rockets that could travel thousands of miles, across entire oceans—so-called intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. The Soviets succeeded first, in 1957.

At the same time, some of the rocket boys began to ask: Instead of using such missiles as weapons—e
ssentially delivery systems for bombs—couldn’t the ICBM be used to reach space? In the United States, physicist Robert Goddard had explored such theories in the 1920s, and his ideas were used as the platform for discussions in the early 1950s about how to use a rocket to send a satellite into space, where it would circle the earth—a second moon of sorts. America would later learn that Goddard’s theories were very similar to those of Russia’s rocket pioneer, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who had published an article in 1903 called “A Rocket into Cosmic Space,” which contained plans for a liquid-propelled spaceship.

Wernher von Braun, who became a U.S. citizen in 1955, began urging his superiors the following year to let him launch a satellite into space atop one of his Redstone rockets. But the cold war that had developed between the United States and the USSR led President Eisenhower to exercise caution. The president was wary of rocket development (thinking it might precipitate nuclear war) and even ordered that no U.S. rockets be allowed to reach space and that no satellites be put into orbit. That edict opened the door for the Russians to strike first, which they did on October 4, 1957, t
hanks to von Braun’s former Nazi colleagues.

The 184-pound, basketball-sized aluminum sphere called Sputnik—Russian for “fellow traveler”—should have come as no surprise. American officials, all the way up to Eisenhower, knew Soviet scientists had been working feverishly to perfect a satellite as well as the powerful rocket needed to boost it into space. Still, as Sputnik arced across the sky that October night, the first man-made object to leave the earth’s atmosphere, the effect of its audible beep-beep picked up on U.S. shortwave radios below was profound.

Sputnik was the first aircraft to violate U.S. airspace. Not even in World War II had an enemy breached the boundaries of the continental United States. And so, except for the occasional World War II concerns about German submarines lurking offshore, Americans for the first time in their lives
imagined being harmed on their own soil. Fears that the Russians were taking overhead pictures and maybe developing plans to drop bombs down from outer space rippled through the country. And every ninety-six minutes that Sputnik soared above, an eighteen-thousand-mile-an-hour reminder of this new age of vulnerability.
Beep-beep, beep-beep—
it was like a message from God, or Satan. And the Soviet Union’s mischievous and arrogant leader, Nikita Khrushchev—whom one journalist called “the embodiment of the sheer animal force of the Soviet Union”—celebrated U.S. fears: “People of the whole world are pointing to the satellite saying the U.S. has been beaten.”