Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (39 page)

On February 21, 1961, a month after Shepard had been selected, NASA finally issued a press release announcing that the seven had been narrowed to three. It announced that Shepard, Glenn, and Grissom would begin training for the first manned flight, but that the actual pilot of the first flight “will be named just before the flight.” The intent of such obfuscation was to take the pressure off Shepard so that he wouldn’t
be hounded by the press during his final months of training. But for Glenn, the tactic presented an opening.

Because Shepard’s selection wasn’t yet public, Glenn figured there was still time to change things. The afternoon of Kennedy’s inauguration a month earlier, Glenn had written a letter to Gilruth, criticizing his use of a “peer vote” in deciding who should become the first astronaut, and explaining why he might have lost that vote. In Glenn’s mind, he had been punished by his peers for his speech in San Diego back in December about keeping their pants zipped. “I might have been penalized for what I thought was the good of the program,” Glenn said in his strongly worded letter. “I didn’t think
being an astronaut was a popularity contest,” he said decades later in his memoir. “I would turn out to be wrong about that.”

Glenn wasn’t alone in trying to change Gilruth’s mind. One or two of the others warned Gilruth of Shepard’s “wild antics” and complained that Shepard was “too lighthearted for the job” and didn’t have the “perfect image.” On the other hand, maybe NASA knew exactly what it was doing. Maybe Shepard was a better fit for NASA’s sought-after image. Maybe NASA intentionally overlooked the Boy Scout in favor of the liberty hound.

A few weeks later Gilruth finally intervened. “I want this backbiting stopped right now. Alan Shepard is my choice. That’s it.”

Glenn grudgingly abandoned his campaign and began training alongside Shepard. But there were days he was withdrawn, even morose. Although he once reprimanded the press for overemphasizing who would be the first American in space— “as though we are out trying to knife each other every night to see who was going to be first”—Glenn had harbored an intense desire for the slot. And now he wouldn’t even be second; Grissom had been chosen to fly after Shepard.

“Those were rough days for me,” Glenn said a year later. A lingering remorse would addle Glenn for another year, un
til he got a flight of his own—one that would end up being well worth the wait.

Until that day came, Glenn had to serve as Shepard’s backup. The two men began spending long days together, training in the simulators, going over flight plans, and continuing to pretend that they were still competing for the first ride. At a press conference following NASA’s announcement that Glenn, Shepard, and Grissom were in the running for the first flight, the normally personable and chatty Glenn was a bit chilly when asked to re-create his wife’s reaction when he told her that he had made the cut to the final three. “I would rather not get into places and times, and such things as that,”
he said.

Shepard, meanwhile, seemed to be having fun with the situation. “If I may be hypothetical: assume that I had the opportunity of going first . . . ,” he began, in response to one reporter’s question. And when asked how far in advance he’d like to be notified that he had been chosen to fly first, Shepard said, “At least before sunrise on launch day.”

At the time he had reason to feel relaxed and confident. NASA was making tentative plans to put Shepard into space the following month, sometime in March. With Glenn’s challenge behind, and with all glitches apparently fixed on the rocket, it seemed Shepard was destined to become the first human to leave the earth’s atmosphere—the Lindbergh of space.

But then a chimp, a German, and a Russian got in the way.

A few weeks earlier, in late January, NASA had launched a chimpanzee named Ham on a flight, using the same type of Redstone rocket that Shepard was scheduled to fly. For two years NASA had been using chimps and pigs in test launches. This time, engineers had designed Ham’s flight as a means of testing its system of communicating with the capsule; Ham was trained to pull certain levers during the flight, and if he pulled the correct leve
r, NASA would send a signal to the capsule that would release banana pellets as Ham’s reward.

That flight, while considered a success, was riddled with imperfections. A faulty valve caused too much fuel to pump into the engine of the booster rocket, causing Ham to fly too high and too far. Because too much fuel was pumped through the rocket’s engines, the tanks ran dry, which triggered Ham’s capsule to separate from the spent rocket. The capsule then reentered the atmosphere too fast and at the wrong angle, which increased the friction between the capsule and the atmosphere, causing temperatures inside the capsule to soar. The capsule’s electrical system also malfunctioned, so th
at instead of receiving banana pellets for pulling the appropriate levers, Ham received electrical shocks. Ham’s capsule finally splashed into the Atlantic but immediately began filling with seawater. Recovery crews arrived thirty minutes later and pulled Ham from the sinking capsule. The chimp was very pissed off.

Wernher von Braun didn’t want Shepard’s flight to be similarly marred, and he decided to conduct one more unmanned test launch. But Shepard, despite the life-threatening dangers the chimp had withstood—dangers he now faced himself—was furious at the delays, blaming excessive “German thoroughness” and NASA’s willingness to “pacify” von Braun. “We’re ready to go. Let’s go,” he’d tell anyone who would listen. One day he urged von Braun directly, “For God’s sake, let’s fly now.” But von Braun wouldn’t budge. And NASA backed him.

Then, to make matters worse, politics intervened. Jerome B. Wiesner, a scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whom Kennedy had selected to be his technical adviser on science issues, had advised Kennedy a week prior to his inauguration that “the prestige of the United States will in part be determined by the leadership we demonstrate in space activities.”

But then, when he became head of the newly appointed President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) that s
pring, Wiesner got cold feet. His committee—scoffed at by the astronauts as those “pee-sack” people—began warning Kennedy of the damage a dead astronaut could do to his young administration, and advised that NASA first send more chimps into space, possibly two dozen or more. Shepard told Glenn he was ready to have a “chimp barbecue.”

Cartoonists had a field day with the chimps. One showed a chimp instructing astronauts how to operate a capsule and get bananas for pushing the right buttons. Another showed Ham explaining to Shepard that at some point during his flight, he’d crave a banana. Shepard’s colleagues began teasing him:
first the
chimp, then the chump.
Depending on his mood, he either chuckled or sneered.

During one training exercise at the Cape, when Shepard began complaining about some aspect of the simulation run, one of the engineers joked, “Maybe we should get somebody who works for bananas.” Shepard grabbed an ashtray and threw it at the man’s head, just missing him. At one press conference, Glenn made a joke about the similarities between the astronauts and NASA’s chimps. Shepard had finally heard enough about chimps and told Glenn to “scratch” himself.

But he’d soon have bigger worries than chimps.

Wiesner continued to advise caution in a memo to the White House: “The effect of TV cameras staring down (astronauts’) throats . . . could have a catastrophic effect.” The scientist acknowledged that the launch of an American into space would be an event “viewed in the same category as Columbus’ discovery of the new world . . . and should be exploited properly by the Administration.” But in the interest of safety, he called for a panel of experts to study the situation and prepare a report that would recommend to Kennedy whether or not to go ahead with a manned launch that spring.

Panel members visited all of NASA’s training sites, where Shepard and the others were required to perform dog-and-pony shows for the panel, proving all over again that they could handle fifteen Gs in the centrifuge (and, therefore, could withstand the physical forces of a rocket launch), that they could tame MASTIF, and so on. Shepard had to show members how he would exit from his capsule, a replica of which was placed in the pool at Langley. The space program had come so far in the previous two years and was now on the verge of its first major success, but here were these gu
ys in suits, fretting and wringing their hands. Shepard was disgusted and became convinced that the committee consisted of weak men incapable of making a bold decision.

“What the hell can we tell these pee-sack people that we haven’t told them ten times?” Shepard complained to a NASA official during the delays to his flight. His overriding fear was that the delays had opened the door for the Russians to reach space first.

A senator who sat on the PSAC committee visited the Cape one day and asked if he could pose for some pictures with Shepard. Shepard was doing simulated launches in the training capsule, and the senator climbed the steps and stuck his head inside the capsule, where Shepard lay on his back, scrunched into a contoured couch. “Well, you seem to be in a rather tight spot there, young man,” the lawmaker said. “Yeah, Senator,” Shepard said. “But probably not so tight as some of the spots you get into up there in Washington.” Shepard laughed loudly at his gibe, and the senator chuckled s
ome, but not much.

The PSAC report was due for release April 12, 1961. Already the original schedule for Shepard’s launch—which at one point had been planned for early April—had been pushed back a few weeks. But by the time the PSAC report neared completion, Shepard’s window of historic opportunity had closed.

That very day—April 12—Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagar
in blasted into space, circled the earth, and returned to it. “The stars in the sky look brighter,” the blond-haired, blue-eyed cosmonaut reported. His capsule parachuted to safety in a field beside the Volga River; in his bulky orange suit, helmet in hand, he approached a peasant girl and her mother. “Have you come from outer space?” the woman asked.

“I am Soviet,” Gagarin said. “I’ve come from outer space.”

At 3 A.M. the next morning a reporter called Shorty Powers, NASA’s spokesman, to get a reaction. Shorty, who was groggy and quite possibly drunk, gave a response that would haunt him the rest of his days: “We’re all asleep down here.” The press ran with it: U.S. Is Asleep While Soviets Orbit Earth.

Shepard was in a hotel room at the Cape when he heard the news. A public affairs official from NASA came to his room early on the morning after Gagarin’s flight to break the news. They turned on the television and in disbelief watched grainy footage of millions of Russians welcoming their new hero to Moscow’s Red Square. Shepard scowled at the coverage and slammed his hand down so hard on a table that the NASA public relations officer feared he might have broken it.

Glenn handled questions from the press later that day and conceded defeat. “They just beat the pants off us, that’s all,” he said. “There’s no use kidding ourselves about that.” President Kennedy said much the same that afternoon: “We are behind. And it will be some time before we catch up.”

Over the subsequent days, newspaper and magazine headlines reflected America’s disgust and, just as Sputnik had four years earlier, chafed at the nation’s sense of inferiority. “Russia’s Triumph in Space—What Does It Mean?” asked U.S. News &
World Report.
“A Chance That We Missed,” said
Life.
Pictures of a jubilant Khrushchev ran alongside pictures of a hangdog Shepard, head down and hands shoved into his pockets, walking away from the camera past John Glenn.

Then, like salt on the wound, Shepard learned of the results of the PSAC committee report that was delivered to President Kennedy that very afternoon. They recommended that NASA proceed with its plans for Shepard’s flight, and their report likened his pending mission to “the flights of the Wright Brothers, Lindbergh.”

In the days after Gagarin’s feat, Glenn tried to keep Shepard focused on their still-busy training schedule, which he hoped would keep Shepard’s mind off the disappointment. But Shepard kept saying the same thing, over and over:
We could have,
should have, gone sooner.
“We had them,” he repeated. “We had them by the short hairs, and we gave it away.”