Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (46 page)

According to Williams’ unpublished memoirs, the police never stopped him, and he went fishing after lunch and brought the Corvette back late that afternoon. But when he learned that Shepard had tried to have him arrested, he decided to return the gotcha by having an engineer rig a small
explosive to the Corvette’s ignition. The explosive didn’t detonate, but smoke from the fuse damaged two of the car’s eight spark plugs.

“Did the car seem to run rough?” Shepard asked Williams the next day.

“Oh, no,” Williams said. “It seemed to be running all right to me.”

“Well, it’s sure running rough,” Shepard said, his eyes spotlighting into Williams’. Shepard later opened the hood and found Williams’ failed pyrotechnics.

The morning before his launch Cooper learned that a small adjustment had been made to his pressure suit. Technicians had cut into it to insert a new medical probe. He felt that the last-minute alteration had violated an unwritten rule against modifying suits that had been custom-made for each astronaut. “What if the new fitting leaked?” Cooper said later. He was angry that no one had consulted with him and in a very uncharacteristic display of frustration hopped into an F-106 jet and began looping and rolling above the Cape. Then, to be sure NASA really knew what he thought of their suit ad
justment, he took the supersonic jet down for an unauthorized and
very
low flyover.

Roaring past Faith 7 and down atop Hangar S and the NASA complex, Cooper scared the juice out of a number of NASA officials—Walt Williams among them. He flew so low that Williams, from his second-floor office in the NASA administration building, looked
down
on the passing jet. Williams dropped a stack of papers and grabbed his throat, presumably to keep his heart from leaping out of it. The Cape was restricted airspace, and the switchboard immediately lit up with frantic calls. Cooper had hoped to get away with the stunt, but it didn’t take long for NASA to track down who’d r
ecently checked out one of its F-106 jets.

With all the reservations he already had about Cooper, Walt Williams was the wrong guy to scare. When he learned the flat-hatter was Cooper, he screamed that he wanted his “ass on a plate” and immediately called Shepard.

“Is your suit ready?”

“Of course my suit’s ready,” Shepard said.

Williams said he was pulling Cooper off the flight and that Shepard would replace him the next morning. It would be a daylong mission—the longest to date. Shepard, who was somewhat familiar with low flyovers, told Williams it was the right decision. He felt that Cooper “showed unusually bad judgment” flying so low. (Actually, it wasn’t the height Shepard thought was dumb; it was buzzing the administration building.)

A flurry of phone calls followed, with Slayton taking the lead in Cooper’s camp. The other five astronauts backed Cooper, too. But Williams spent the entire day refusing to give in. Finally, at 10 P.M.—less than twelve hours before blastoff—he relented and gave Cooper back his flight. Four hours later, after a preflight breakfast with Cooper, Shepard—in response to the emotional turbulence of the countdown to Cooper’s flight—indulged in some mischief.

Shorty Powers had arrived with two cameramen who were trying to set up their gear to film some behind-the-scenes footage of Cooper. They found that none of the overhead lights was working and none of the electrical outlets had power. It took Shorty fifteen minutes to discover that someone—apparently someone with too much time and energy on his hands—had cut the wires to the electrical outlets, removed all the overhead lightbulbs, put thick tape into the sockets, and then replaced the bulbs. Shorty also noticed that Shepard seemed to be hovering around, wearing “a grin that is typical of him
when he has a mouse under his hat.” Shepard never admitted to being the culprit, but Shorty knew one of Shepard’s gotchas when he saw o
ne. He even admitted the gag was a fairly creative “tension reliever,” although maybe a little mean-spirited.

At dawn Cooper climbed into his capsule. On the seat he found a suction-cup pump called a “plumber’s friend.” Etched into the metal handle was an inscription: “Remove before launch.” It was a small gift from Shepard, a joke about the new urine-collection system they’d placed in Cooper’s capsule, a system that would allow him to urinate without having to void into his suit and become a “wetback” the way Shepard had.

Finally Shepard took his seat at Mission Control, and as Cooper blasted off and entered the first of a scheduled twenty-two orbits, Shepard radioed Cooper, telling him
“everything looks beautiful.” And for the first twenty orbits, the flight was beautiful. At one point, as Cooper passed above Cape Canaveral, he reported to Shepard that he was using very little oxygen (which he’d later attribute to being one of the few nonsmoking astronauts), and Shepard joked that he could “stop holding your breath and use some oxygen if you like.” The flight was going so smoothly, Shepard had no instructions for his colleague. “You son of a gun, I haven’t got anything to talk about,” Shepard said. “We’ll let you have some quiet time. Have a good ball.”

Cooper then ate a brownie, fruitcake, and some bacon, followed by the first nap in space. He transmitted the first TV images of the earth, pictures so clear that Shepard radioed he could see the fly on Cooper’s nose. In a dig at the psychologists who once fretted about astronauts experiencing “separation anxiety”—a psychotic wish to stay in space forever—Cooper reported that he was “thinking very much about returning to earth.” He then whispered a touching prayer into his microphone: “Father, we thank you, especially for letting me fly this flight. Thank you for the privilege of being abl
e to be in this position, to be in this wo
ndrous place, seeing all these many startling, wonderful things that you have created.”

But despite the prayer, his flight soon devolved into a mess.

During his sixteenth orbit, after a full day in space, a green light on the control panel that measured the earth’s gravitational pull blinked on, indicating that Cooper was reentering the earth’s atmosphere, which he was not. Mission Control expressed its alarm that Cooper had prematurely begun the reentry procedure. “Like hell,” Cooper responded.

While Mission Control searched for an explanation for the light that had blinked on, other systems began malfunctioning, one after the other. First, Mission Control reported that Cooper’s telemetry—the data electronically relayed from his capsule back to earth, which showed the position and speed of his capsule on Mission Control computer screens—was blinking on and off their screens. Mission Control sent instructions for Cooper to try flipping switches and resetting the computer system, but then an electrical inverter short-circuited, killing power to the automated control system that w
ould guide him back through the atmosphere. He would now have to steer the capsule home manually, just as Scott Carpenter had, with near-deadly results.

Moments later the cooling system bit the dust, causing temperatures and—more dangerously—carbon dioxide levels to rise. Because the cooling system also filtered out the carbon dioxide of Cooper’s exhaled breath, those gases would begin to fill the capsule and in no time could cause Cooper to black out.

Next, the gyroscopes, which helped control the angle of the capsule, went dead. Seconds later his clock stopped—no small matter on a space flight in which every maneuver is timed down to the second. Little by little his capsule was dying, but Cooper remained calm. “Well, things are beginning to stack up a little,” he said in his laconic Okie drawl, and then listed all the potentially fatal problems in his wounded capsule, in
cluding the fact that the carbon dioxide level had already risen to the maximum. “Other than that, things are fine.”

Finally Mission Control determined what was happening: a total power failure. The only thing to do was bring Cooper home as quickly as possible, but no previous astronaut had reentered the atmosphere with such a disabled capsule. Without his automatic control system, he would have to reenter using manual controls. But without his gyroscope and clock, he would have no electronic information telling him whether he was lined up at the correct angle. He would have to use the earth’s horizon to align himself, by looking out his window and using a horizontal line etched across it. Once
he had the capsule lined up horizontally, he would use a star in the distant sky to align the capsule vertically. It was the spaceman’s equivalent of a dead-stick landing on an aircraft carrier, except Cooper was surrounded by poisonous gas, with the temperature in his pressure suit now at 110 degrees, traveling seventeen thousand miles an hour in a dying capsule. Cooper was about to prove the astronauts’ argument that the best people for such dangerous missions were steely, highly skilled test pilots.

John Glenn kept Cooper apprised of the exact time, and Cooper used the second hand on his wristwatch to count down to the precise moment for firing his retro-rockets. After the rockets fired, Cooper twitched his hand control slightly, back and forth, front to back, to keep the capsule stable and aligned at the right angle. Glenn, stationed on a ship in the Pacific, asked Cooper about the capsule’s attitude, and Cooper reported that it was “right on the old gazoo.”

Cooper managed to keep his cool and manually fly the capsule through the atmosphere, keeping it aligned at the required 34-degree angle. Because of the damaged electronics system, he had to reach up and pull the parachute’s toggles himself and moments later splashed safely into the ocean. Incredibly, he landed only four miles from the USS
Kearsage—
the closest any astronaut had ever landed to the recovery ship.

The problem, they learned later, had been Cooper’s piss. He had taken many sips of water during the flight; Shepard had once asked if he passed any urine, and Cooper responded, “Boy, did I ever!” But at some point late in the flight the urine collection system sprang a leak. Blobs of urine floated up behind the capsule’s control panel and little by little short-circuited the electronics.

Walt Williams—“my nemesis,” Cooper had called him— was waiting for him when a helicopter delivered Cooper to Hawaii. “Gordo,” Williams said as he shook his hand. “You
were
the right guy for the mission.” But it would not be the last time NASA would have to decide between Gordon Cooper and Alan Shepard.

Following Cooper’s flight, the astronauts were invited once again to the White House. It was another morning of ceremony, with Cooper parading through Washington’s streets, meeting with congressmen, and receiving a medal from President Kennedy. During the White House ceremony Jackie Kennedy pulled Louise aside and asked if she and the other wives had any plans that night. “Why don’t you all drop by for cocktails this evening, since you’re in town,” the First Lady said.

The president invited the astronauts, too. That night Shepard—drink in hand, man to man—would take his quest for another space flight to the highest authority in the land.

During Cooper’s flight, NASA’s new administrator, Jim Webb, had announced that Cooper’s would be the last of the Mercury flights—even though many NASA engineers were hoping to launch one of the three Atlas rockets they had left. That was Shepard’s hope, too, and before going to the White House that night, Shepard stopped by Webb’s house in suburban Washington to argue his case.