Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (40 page)

Five days later the nation suffered another cold war blow. A band of fifteen hundred Cuban exiles, trained and financed by the CIA, invaded their homeland with plans to overthrow Fidel Castro. But Castro was waiting for them; many of the rebels were slaughtered and the rest were captured, leaving Kennedy to sheepishly deny that the United States was behind the attack. The Bay of Pigs fueled the determination of Kennedy’s young administration to strike back with a victory. In a speech to the nation shortly after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy acknowledged that he was sick and tired of Russia’s suc
cesses and of communism’s march. And, in the wake of Gagarin’s flight, he met with NASA officials and his staff to plead with them to find a way to catch up. A Kennedy aide later called those days “the grimmest I can remember in the White House.”

In late April, to remind everyone that America was still in this space race, and to give the media a taste of what a real launch would soon look like, NASA conducted a full dress rehearsal of Shepard’s mission, which was now scheduled for May 2.

Gordo Cooper, acting as Shepard’s stand-in, suited up. He walked from the transport van to the base
of the gantry, the skeletal supporting structure that rose alongside the rocket, where an elevator waited to carry him to a platform at the top. With doctors and technicians escorting him and photographers and reporters watching from behind a rope, Cooper suddenly stopped and began backing away from the gantry. “I don’t want to go,” he bawled in a staged tribute to José Jiménez. “Please don’t send me.” The crew, who was in on the gag, grabbed Cooper and forced him into the elevator.

But in a reflection of the seriousness of the times, the press didn’t appreciate the joke. Stories in the next day’s papers excoriated NASA for goofing around at such a tense and important time in the nation’s history.

Shepard, meanwhile, was back at Henri Landwirth’s Holiday Inn, packing up for a move into the crew quarters in Hangar S up at the Cape, where he’d spend the final week before launch. He’d been staying at the Holiday Inn, wearing dark glasses and disguises to sneak in and out past the press. Henri Landwirth tried to help, telling reporters and intrusive strangers that Shepard wasn’t there, spiriting him in and out through the kitchen.

Louise came to visit for a few days, but they saw little of each other. “Strangers and reporters kept barging in on us,” he said later. Their longest moment together was the hourlong car ride to the airport at Orlando, during which they shared very few words. They both knew it could be the last time they saw each other.

After dropping Louise off at the airport, Shepard returned to the Holiday Inn, packed his bags, and then drove to Hangar S, where Dee O’Hara, the astronauts’ nurse, had decorated the astronauts’ air-conditioned second-floor bedroom. O’Hara was always trying to take care of “my boys” and had carefully put together a cozy bedroom, with robin’s egg blue walls, champagne-colored drapes, two couches, a recliner, and two sets of bunk beds.

Through the final days of April, Shepard had one set of bunk beds to himself while Glenn and Grissom shared the other. On May 2—just twenty days after Gagarin’s flight—the th
ree men woke early, shared a breakfast of filet mignon and eggs, and waited for NASA bosses to unveil to the American public which of them would make history. A heavy rain fell outside, and Shepard felt certain the launch would be scrapped.

NASA had even considered bringing all three men out that morning with Shepard, Grissom, and Glenn wearing
hoods
to keep the secret alive until one man rode the elevator up to the capsule. Shepard thought it was a stupid idea but agreed to the backup plan: to emerge from Hangar S fully suited and wade through a crowd of awaiting reporters and photographers on his way to the launch pad.

But when rain washed out the day’s scheduled launch and it was postponed for another three days, NASA decided it was time to unmask the man who had been picked. The press, which had expected all along that John Glenn was going to be America’s first spaceman, pestered Shorty Powers for an explanation. Shorty tried to diplomatically explain that Shepard “had what all the others had, with just enough to spare to make him the logical man to go first.” Whatever that meant.

That afternoon Shepard soothed his frustration over the scrubbed launch with a big shot of brandy, a long run on the beach, and a brief visit to the top of the gantry to peer inside his capsule, followed by three more simulated practice missions in the procedures trainer and then finally a fifteen-minute nap. (Shorty noted later that the brandy was his idea, that Shepard didn’t really need it—“I needed it more than he did.”)

Two days later, Shepard and Glenn—who had been inseparable for weeks—jogged together out to a deserted, off-limits beach near the launch pad. They chased some crabs along the edge of the surf, just the two of them talking about the flight plans, far from the prelaunch preparations and tensions that began escalating that afternoon.

Shepard and Glenn returned to Hangar S, and Shepard called Louise, his daughter Laura at her school in St
. Louis, and his parents in New Hampshire. Then he and Glenn sat down for a roast beef dinner with the other five astronauts and their agent, Leo D’Orsey.

The beef, one of the astronauts was explaining to D’Orsey, was part of NASA’s “low-residue” diet. Along with dry toast, skinless potatoes, and white chicken meat, it was designed— with the bathroom-less space capsule in mind—to create very little “output.”

“No shit?” D’Orsey asked.

“Exactly,” Shepard said, and the table cracked up.

After dinner Shepard thanked Glenn for all his hard work. “John’s been most kind,” he said, and offered a toast. He still liked teasing Glenn by referring to him as “my backup.” And Glenn still considered himself Shepard’s superior, both morally and professionally. But it was clear to the others at the dinner table that night that the two men had drawn surprisingly close, that a mutual antagonism had been replaced by something akin to friendship.

Over the previous three months Shepard and Glenn had spent more time together than either had ever spent with another man. “I don’t think two people could have worked more closely together than we did,” Glenn recalled many years later. As Shepard’s backup—“Al’s alter ego, his virtual twin”—Glenn often attended meetings and took phone calls that Shepard couldn’t handle, and Glenn forced himself to get inside Shepard’s head, to try thinking like Shepard so that he could ask the right questions.
What would Al do?
Glenn asked himself.

Shortly after 10 P.M., without bothering to shower or change, the two men lay down in their bunks, and within fifteen minutes both were asleep. During three fitful hours of slumber, Shepard awoke once and walked to the window to check on the weather. Happy to see stars, not clouds, he returned to his bunk, a few feet from where Glenn soundly slept.

14

“Light this candle!”

At 1:30 A.M., May 5, 1961, after a quick shower and shave, Shepard and Glenn sat down to another breakfast of filet mignon wrapped in bacon, eggs, juice, and coffee.

“Is there anything else I can do?” Glenn asked after breakfast. Shepard told him no, he was fine, he was ready. The two men parted; Glenn went out to check on Shepard’s capsule, and Shepard walked down the hall to the doctor’s exam room. Bill Douglas, the astronauts’ physician, told Shepard to take off his bathrobe so he could conduct one last checkup, a detailed exam for the record books.

Douglas found a loose nail on the fourth toe of Shepard’s left foot—where someone had stepped on him—and clipped it off. Shepard’s back was sunburned and peeling in spots from recent afternoons beside the Holiday Inn pool. A blister rose beside one of the four tattoo marks on his chest that the technicians used to mark where their bio-medical sensors attached. Shepard murmured “ninety-nine, ninety-nine” while Douglas listened to his chest. His ear canals were clean, his thyroid was “smooth and symmetrical,” and he showed “slight apprehension”
about his pending flight, Douglas noted. “I tried to play it cool,” Shepard would confess years later. “But there were some butterflies.”

At 2 A.M. Alan called Louise once more. She had been waiting to hear from him and told him to wave when he took off. Alan laughed and told Louise that he loved her. Then he squeezed into his tight silver space suit—an exhausting process that took 15 minutes, due to all the zippers and complicated connections on the twenty-pound rubber and aluminum-coated nylon creation. (The suit would surround his body with pressurized oxygen; without such protection, the low-pressure atmosphere of space would cause his bodily fluids to literally boil up through his skin.) Finally, Shepard s
trapped on his helmet and attached a hose to his suit, the other end of which connected to a portable oxygen and air-conditioning unit that he carried in his hand, like a briefcase.

The adrenaline began pumping—“there were butterflies in my stomach again,” Shepard said later—as he and Douglas left Hangar S and climbed into an awaiting transport van. As Shepard rode out to the launch site, leaning back in a reclining chair, he seemed to relax a bit. Adopting his pitiful Spanish accent, he tried a bit of a José Jiménez routine. Gus Grissom sat beside him during the short drive out to his rocket.

“Hey, Gus, you know what it really takes to be an astronaut?”

“No, José, tell me.”

“You should have courage and the right blood pressure and four legs.”

“Why four legs, José?” Grissom asked, accustom
ed to the part.

“Because they really wanted to send a dog, but they decided that would be too cruel.”

Grissom had intended to tell Shepard to “go blow up”—a gruff old test pilot’s line that he hoped would relax his friend. But for some reason, at that moment it didn’t feel right. Grissom kept it to himself, and Shepard stepped out of the van.

A waning half moon glowed above, sliding i
n and out of some clouds. Batteries of searchlights bathed the Redstone rocket in a bluish haze as liquid oxygen spewed from vents and turned to wisps of steam that rolled down the sides of the rocket. Shepard thought his rocket—“the bird”—looked beautiful.

But the more beautiful sight was Shepard himself, standing at the base of his bird looking dramatically up toward his capsule. Reporters and photographers, technicians and engineers, physicians and psychiatrists . . . everyone who was nearby that morning would recall how profoundly moved they were as they watched America’s first spaceman standing self-assuredly beside his spaceship and realized:
We’re really going to do it.

At that moment Shepard had planned to say a few words to the rocket crew and to the reporters standing behind a barrier. But he was unexpectedly overcome with emotion; his throat closed in on itself, and he found himself unable to speak. So he just waved.

Then he rode the elevator seventy feet up to the green-walled room atop the gantry that surrounded the opening to the capsule. Glenn, wearing white coveralls and a white cap like a butcher’s, greeted Shepard as he exited the elevator and then helped him squeeze through the two-foot-square opening of the capsule’s hatch. Months earlier he had named the capsule
Freedom 7.
The press would give him credit for honoring the Mercury Seven, but it was actually named
7
because it was the seventh capsule produced by the McDonnell Douglas assembly team in St. Louis.

As he settled into the couch, Shepard noticed a sign taped to the instrument panel: No Handball Playing in This Area. Taped beside it was a centerfold ripped from a girlie magazine. Shepard laughed and looked out the hatch into Glenn’s grinning face.
I’ll be damned,
he thought.
He’s becoming a damn prankster.

Shepard planned to leave the centerfold taped up, but Glenn reached in and grabbed it and the handball sign. Shepard guessed Glenn didn’t want the cameras inside the capsule— which would soon begin rolling—to film his joke.

For the next hour or so, various heads and hands reached into the capsule, attaching sensors, adjusting straps, shaking his hand. Shepard watched some of the commotion through the screen of the periscope that would be his primary window on the brief journey ahead. Every subsequent capsule would contain windows, but Shepard’s had only two small portholes and the fish-eye view transmitted through the lens of the periscope onto a circular screen in front of his face.

Just before they closed the hatch, Glenn reached in and shook Shepard’s gloved hand. Shepard thanked him again, then jer
ked a thumbs-up.

“Happy landings, commander,” Glenn said as the crew standing behind him shouted good luck and goodbye. Then they closed and bolted the hatch shortly past 6 A.M., and Shepard was alone. He would learn later that his heartbeat quickened as they shut him inside. The last human face he saw was Glenn’s, wide and grinning in the distorted fish-eye image of the periscope’s screen.

Finally, after Glenn and the others had descended in the elevator, the gantry rolled back and the Redstone stood alone on the launch pad. Suddenly, without the skeletal framework hugging it, the rocket looked thin and delicate. Scores of NASA engineers would later call it the moment they truly realized there was a
man
up there.

“José?” came a voice over the radio into Shepard’s headset. “Do you read me, José?”

“I read you loud and clear, Deke,” Shepard replied.

Slayton, the capsule communicator or “cap com,” would be Shepard’s primary contact during the short flight. “Don’t cry too much, José,” Slayton said.

Shepard had been curled inside the capsule
for more than an hour, and already they were well past the scheduled 7 A.M. launch time. He began to get itchy.

“I tried to pace myself,” Shepard reported later, “which is difficult for me to do.”

As he communicated by radio to technicians during the first of the delays, Shepard complained about the static in his ear. “I can’t hear you on this goddamn phone,” he said, and Shorty Powers got on the line to warn, “Watch your language. We’re being recorded everyplace.”

When clouds rolled across the Florida coast, the countdown stopped—at 7:14 A.M.—to await the expected clearing. During that thirty-minute hold, an electrical inverter failed and had to be replaced. Following that fifty-two-minute delay, the count resumed for another twenty-one minutes, but then engineers discovered an error in the IBM computer in Maryland that would process much of the flight’s data. Again the countdown was put on hold.

As the delays mounted, so did Shepard’s anxiety. While engineers raced to fix the computer glitch, Shepard had been scrunched inside his capsule for three hours. The flight should have been completed already, but here he still was—adrenaline building, heart palpitating. Shepard told himself,
You’re building
up too fast. Slow down. Relax.
When he ran out of settings and dials to check, the tension would creep back in, and he’d force himself to look out the periscope at the mass of people and waves on the beach.

“The thought of the consequences of an unsuccessful flight were getting to me too much,” he’d admit later.

In East Derry, Shepard’s mother, Renza, and sister, Polly, had risen early and poked the American flag into the front lawn. Bart slept a little later and finally came downstairs to find his wife and daughter praying at the kitchen table.

In St. Louis, Principia’s principal took Shepard’s eldest daughter, Laura, into a separate room, where she sat on a wooden chair before a black-and-white television “without any display of emotion.”

In Virginia Beach, Louise had been up since 5 A.M., listening to the radio and looking over a copy of the countdown schedule Shepard had given her. It was Alice’s tenth birthday, but the family had agreed to wait until the next day to celebrate that.

Louise’s parents were staying with her. The family spoke little of Alan in the days before the launch, except for one night at dinner, when Julie—apropos of nothing—announced that her father loved to put salt on radishes and pop them into his mouth.

Alan had called Thursday night, then again at 2 A.M. Friday, sounding confident and relaxed. Louise barely slept after that. She kept hearing footsteps on the front porch, followed by a pause, and then more footsteps. She assumed the steps belonged to newsmen approaching, then leaving the front door, where she’d hung a note:
There are no reporters inside. I will have a statement
for the press after the flight.

After breakfast, the family moved into the living room and gathered around the television, which reported the delays in the flight. Louise sat knitting a sweater when, a little past eight, the phone suddenly rang and she jumped.

It was Shorty Powers. Shepard had radioed from the capsule and asked Shorty to call Louise and tell her that everything was okay and not to worry. “I want her to hear from us,” he told Shorty, “that I’m fine and explain that I’m going nowhere fast.”

She hadn’t seen him for two weeks, not since the day he dropped her off at the airport in Orlando. She had spent a week at the Cape, staying at the Holiday Inn, but saw little of him except early breakfasts and late dinners. On the drive to the airport, they both knew it could be the last time they saw each other, but neither of them had much to say. Shepard tried hard to stay casual, to avoid “any display of emotion.”

Louise tried to do the same. She knew it’d be easier for him if she stayed cool, so she said goodbye as if it were “a normal family parting.” But as her plane lifted off she began to weep.

Now, as the countdown resumed, Louise sat close to the TV, with a transistor radio in her hand. She felt “the power of good and of God” fill the room.