The Right Stuff (11 page)

Some of the most righteous of the brethren weren't even eligible for the preliminary screening for Project Mercury. Yeager was young enough—still only thirty-five—but had never attended college. Crossfield and Joe Walker were civilians. Not that any of them gave a damn… at the time. The commanding officer at Edwards passed the word around that he wanted his top boys, the test pilots in Fighter Ops, to avoid Project Mercury because it would be a ridiculous waste of talent; they would just become "Spam in a can." This phrase "Spam in a can" became very popular at Edwards as the nickname for Project Mercury.

Pete Conrad, being an alumnus of Princeton and the Philadelphia Main Line, had the standard E.S.A. charm and command of the proprieties. E.S.A. was 1950's Princeton club code for "Eastern Socially Attractive." E.S.A. qualities served a man well in the Navy, where refinement in the officer ranks was still valued. Yet Conrad remained, at bottom, the Hickory Kid. He had the same combination of party manners and Our Gang scrappiness that his wife, Jane, had found attractive when she met him six years before. Now, in 1959, at the age of twenty-eight, Conrad was still just as wirily built, five feet six and barely 140 pounds, still practically towheaded, and he had the same high-pitched nasal voice, the same collegiate cackle when he laughed, and the same Big Weekend grin that revealed the gap between his two front teeth. Nevertheless, people gave him room. There was an old-fashioned Huck Finn hickory-stick don't-cross-that-line-or-I'll-crawl-you streak in him. Unlike a lot of pilots, he tended to say exactly what was on his mind when aroused. He couldn't stand being trifled with. Consequently he seldom was. That was Conrad. Add the normal self-esteem of the healthy young fighter jock making his way up the mighty ziggurat… and the lab rat's revolt was probably in the cards from the beginning.

The survivors of Group 20's
bad string
had just completed their flight-test training when the orders arrived. Conrad received them, and so did Wally Schirra and Jim Lovell. "Shaky" Lovell—he was stuck with the nickname Conrad had given him—had finished first in the training class. The orders were marked "top secret." That already had half the base talking, of course. There was nothing like issuing top-secret orders for a whole batch of officers in the same outfit to make the grapevine start lunging about like a live wire. They were supposed to report to a certain room at the Pentagon disguised as civilians.

So on the appointed Monday morning, February 2, Conrad, along with Schirra and Lovell, arrives at the Pentagon and presents his orders and files into a room with thirty-four other young men, most of them with crew cuts and all of them with lean lineless faces and suntans and the unmistakable cocky rolling gait of fighter jocks, not to mention the pathetic-looking civilian suits and the enormous wrist watches. The wristwatches had about two thousand calibrations on them and dials for recording everything short of the sound of enemy guns. These terrific wristwatches were practically fraternal insignia among the pilots. Thirty-odd young souls wearing Robert Hall clothes that cost about a fourth as much as their watches: in the year 1959 this just had to be a bunch of military pilots trying to disguise themselves as civilians.

Once inside the room, the boys realized that they were part of a secret gathering of military test pilots from all over the country. That was rather righteous stuff. Two of the highest ranking engineers of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Abe Silverstein and George Low, started briefing them. They had been brought to Washington, they were told, because NASA needed volunteers for suborbital and orbital flights above the earth's atmosphere in Project Mercury. The project had the highest national priority, comparable to that of a crash program in wartime. NASA intended to put astronauts into space by mid-1960, fifteen months from now.

A pilot could tell, if he listened carefully to the briefing, that an astronaut on a Project Mercury flight would do none of the things that comprised
flying
a ship: he would not take it aloft, control its flight, or land it. In short, he would be a passenger. The propulsion, guidance, and landing would all be determined automatically by the ground. Yet the slender engineer, Low, went out of his way to show that the astronaut would exercise some forms of control. He would have "altitude control," for example. In fact, this meant only that the astronaut could make the capsule yaw, pitch, or roll by means of little hydrogen-peroxide thrusters, just as you could rock a seat on a Ferris wheel but couldn't change its orbit or direction in the slightest. But when a capsule was put into earth orbit, said Low, controlling the altitude would be essential for bringing the capsule back in through the atmosphere. Otherwise, the vehicle would burn up, and the astronaut with it. If the automatic control system malfunctioned, then the astronaut would have to take over on the manual or the fly-by-wire. In the fly-by-wire system the apparatus of the automatic system could be commandeered by the astronaut for manual control. The astronaut might also have to override the automatic system, in the case of a malfunction, to fire the retrorockets to reduce the capsule's speed and bring it out of orbit.
Retrofire! Fly-by-wire
! It was as
if
you really would be flying the thing. The stocky engineer, Silverstein, told them that obviously the Mercury flights might be hazardous. The first men to go into space would be running considerable risk. Therefore, the astronauts would be chosen on a strictly volunteer basis; and if a man did not volunteer, that fact would not be entered on his record or held against him in any way.

The message had a particular ring to it; but coming, as it did, from a civilian, it took a while for it to register.

Conrad and the rest of the Pax River contingent were staying at the Marriott motel near the Pentagon, and after dinner they got together in one of the rooms and had a long discussion. Schirra was there, and Lovell, and Alan Shepard, a veteran test pilot who had recently been reassigned from Pax River to a staff position in Norfolk, and a few others. What they talked about was not space travel, the future of the galaxy, or even the problems of riding a rocket into earth orbit. No, they talked about a rather more urgent matter: what this Project Mercury might do to your Navy career.

Wally Schirra had a lot of reservations about the thing, and Conrad and everybody else listened. Schirra was farther up the pyramid than anybody else in the room. Alan Shepard had more flight test experience, but he had never been in combat. Schirra, at thirty-five, had an outstanding combat record and was the sort of man who was obviously going places in the Navy. He had graduated from the Naval Academy, and his wife, Jo, was the stepdaughter of Admiral James Holloway, former commander of the Pacific Theater in the Second World War. Wally had been on ninety combat missions in Korea and shot down two MiGs. He had been chosen for the initial testing of the Sidewinder air-to-air missile out at China Lake, California, he had tested the F-4H for the Navy at Edwards itself—all this before joining Group 20 to complete his flight test training. Wally was quite popular. He was a stocky fellow with a big wide open face who was given to pranks, cosmic winks, fast cars, and all other ways of "maintaining an even strain," to use a Schirraism. He was a practical joker of the amiable sort. He would call up and say, "Hey, you gotta come over here! You'll never guess what I caught in the woods… A mongoose! I'm not kidding—a mongoose! You gotta see this thing!" And it would sound so incredible, you'd go over and take a look. Up on a table Wally would have a box that looked as if it had been converted into a cage, and he'd say: "Here, I'll open the top a little, so you can see him. But don't put your hand in, because he'll take it off for you. This baby is
vicious
." You'd lean down to take a look and—bango!—the lid flies open and this huge gray streak springs toward your face—and, well, my God, veteran aviators would recoil in terror, dive for the deck—and only then realize that the gray streak was some sort of fox-tail rig and the whole thing was a jack-in-the-box, Schirra-style. It was a broad joke, strictly speaking, but the delight Wally took in such things came in a wave, a wave so big that it swept you along in spite of yourself. A smile about a foot wide would spread over his face and his cheekbones would well up into a pair of cherub bellies, St. Nicholas-style, and an incredible rocking-druid laugh would come shaking and rumbling up from his rib cage, and he'd say: "Gotcha!" Schirra's "gotchas" were famous. Wally was one of those people who didn't mind showing their emotions, happiness, rage, frustration, whatever. But in the air he was as cool as they made them. His father had been an ace in the First World War, shooting down five German planes, and both his father and his mother had done barnstorm stunt flying after the war. For all his cutting up, Wally was absolutely serious about his career. And that was his mood now that this "astronaut" business confronted them.

There were some obvious problems. One, Project Mercury was a civilian program; two, NASA had not yet developed the rockets or the capsule to carry it out; three, it involved no flying, at least not in the sense a pilot used that word. The Mercury capsule was not a ship but a can. Not only did it involve no
flying
, there wasn't even a window to look out of. There wasn't even a hatch you could egress from like a man; it would take a crew of swabbos with lug wrenches to get you out of the thing. It was a
can
. Suppose you volunteered and got tied up in the project for two or three years, and then the whole thing fizzled? That was entirely possible, because this rocket-and-capsule system was novel and had a lot of Rube Goldberg stuff in it. Any test pilot who had ever been to the Society of Experimental Test Pilots convention, to one of those sessions where they show movies of Great Ideas that never made it out of the test stage, would know what he meant… the Sea Dart, a ten-ton jet fighter that was supposed to take off and land on water skis (up on the screen it keeps hopping up out of the waves, like a rock skipping across a pond, and the audience roars with laughter)… the single-engine plane, with a 25-foot propeller, that was propped up on its tail to take off vertically, like a hummingbird (it hangs in the air, suspended at forty feet, tail down, its engine churning furiously, not realizing that it has turned from an airplane into a cockeyed helicopter, and the audience roars with laughter)… In the history of flight these well-meant farces took place all the time. And where would you be then? You would be three years behind in flight test. You would be three years off the line in the general jockeying for promotion. You would be giving up whatever brownie points you had built up over the past four or five years. For somebody like Wally this was no joke. He was at the point in his career where you really start to climb—or you go off on some ill-advised tangent. He was in line to command his own fighter squadron. That was the route to the top, to admiral rank, for a Navy flier.

They talked for a long time. Someone Schirra's age had more to lose than Conrad, who was only twenty-eight. But as every officer knew, it was never too early to screw up your career in the Navy by getting involved in what was known, with some sarcasm, as "innovative duty."

From the beginning George Low and others in the NASA hierarchy had been afraid that the pilots would react in precisely this way. As a result, they were amazed. They had briefed thirty-five test pilots on Monday, February 2, Conrad, Schirra, Lovell, and Alan Shepard among them, and another thirty-four the following Monday; and of the total of sixty-nine, fifty-six volunteered to become astronauts. They now had so many volunteers they didn't even call in the remaining forty-one men who fit the profile. Why bother? They already had fifty-six grossly overqualified volunteers. Not only that, the men seemed so gung-ho about the project, they figured they could get by with seven astronauts instead of twelve.

Pete Conrad had ended up volunteering, and so had Jim Lovell. In fact, every man who had been in that room at the motel had volunteered, including Wally Schirra, who had been the most dubious of all. And why? That was a good question. Despite all the pondering, all the discussions, all the career-wrestling, all the toting up of pros and cons, none of them could give you a very clear-cut answer. The matter had not been decided by sheer logic. Somehow, in that briefing in the inner room at the Pentagon, Silverstein and Low had hit every button just right. It was as if they possessed a blueprint of the way the fighter jock was wired.

"The highest national priority"… "hazardous undertaking"… "strictly volunteer"… so hazardous that "if you don't volunteer, it won't be held against you"… And they had all gotten the signal, subliminally, in the solar plexus. They were being presented with the Cold War version of
the dangerous mission
. One of the maxims that was drilled into all career officers went:
Never refuse a combat assignment
. Moreover, there was the business of "the first men to go into space."
The first men to go into space
. Well… suppose it happened just that way? The rocket aces at Edwards, from their eminence, might be able to look down upon the whole scheme. But within the souls of the rest of the fighter jocks who came to the Pentagon was triggered a motivation that overrode all strictly logical career considerations: I must not get…
left behind
.

That feeling was magnified by the public reaction. No sooner had the first group of men been briefed than the news that NASA was looking for Mercury astronauts made its way into the press. From the beginning the reporters and broadcasters dealt with the subject in tones of awe. It was the awe that one has of an impending death-defying stunt. The question of whether an astronaut was a pilot or a mere guinea pig never entered into it for a moment, so far as the press was concerned. "Are they really looking for somebody to go into space on top of a rocket?" That was the question and the only one that seemed to matter. To almost anyone who had followed NASA's efforts on television, the odds against the successful launch of an American into space seemed absolutely dreadful. For fourteen months now the Eisenhower Administration had adopted the strategy of openly publicizing its attempts to catch up with the Russians—and so people were being treated to the sight of the rockets at Cape Canaveral and Wallops Island, Virginia, either blowing up on the launch pad in the most ignominious, if briefly hilarious, fashion or else heading off on crazy trajectories, toward downtown Orlando instead of outer space, in which case they had to be blown up by remote control. Well, not all of them, of course, for the United States had succeeded in putting up some small satellites, mere "oranges," as Nikita Khrushchev liked to put it, in his cruel colorful farmboy way, as compared to the 1,000-pound Sputniks the mighty Integral was sending around the earth loaded with dogs and other experimental animals. But the only obvious American talent was for blowing up. They had many names, these rockets, Atlas, Navaho, Little Joe, Jupiter, but they all blew up.