The Right Stuff (23 page)

Glenn and Carpenter were even willing guinea pigs for the two psychiatrists who had just come on board, Sheldon Korchin from the University of California and George Ruff, who had been in charge of the psychiatric testing at Wright-Pat. Both men were likable enough as individuals, but this thing of submitting to psychiatric study seemed dispensable to some of the boys, particularly Schirra and Cooper. The two psychiatrists were continually having you urinate into bottles so that they could analyze your urine for corticosteroid levels, which supposedly were an index of stress. But Carpenter thought this was terrific stuff, too. He even
talked
to them about it!

What some of the other five found eccentric in Carpenter was what Glenn (and the doctors) found interesting. Scott was about the only one you could sit down with and talk about the broader and more philosophical sides of Project Mercury and space exploration. Scott was the only one with a touch of the poet about him, in the sense that the idea of going into space stirred his imagination. He would even go out at night and prop a telescope up on top of his car on a tripod and just stargaze and let himself drift into the most profound speculation of astronomy:
What is my place in the cosmos
?

Just try to imagine Grissom doing that! If Gus had a telescope, he might use the small end of it to try to whack a turkey joint out of the maw of the Disposall if the thing was stuck, but that would be the end of that. Gus and Deke were the duo at the other end of the spectrum. The main thing was to ride the bird up there into space and get the job done and get back, and let's hold the Mickey Mouse down to a minimum.

Shepard and Wally Schirra were paired somewhere in between. It was not that they were inseparable pals or even buddies, however. Shepard had no intimates, so far as anyone knew, and Schirra probably spent as much time wondering what made Shepard tick as the rest of them did. It was just that they came into the astronaut corps with similar backgrounds. There was no particular advantage to forming a clique in this seven-man corps, because only one man could win the competition, i.e., get the first flight, and it wasn't a voting situation, in any case. Nevertheless, if any such situation came up, Al and Wally would probably tend to side with Deke and Gus… As for Gordon Cooper, he seemed to be regarded as the odd man out. One got the impression that he was not in the running. As far as Gordo himself was concerned, however, he sided with Gus and Deke and Al and Wally on most of the pertinent questions, from the business of medical experiments to life after hours.

They were all beginning to realize that the stakes were tremendous. With the first flight into space, the holy first flight, one of them would become not only the pre-eminent
astronaut
… but also the True Brother at the top of the entire pyramid. The first American into space—who might very well be the first human being to go into space—would have an eminence that not even Chuck Yeager had ever enjoyed, because he would belong not just to the history of aviation but to world history.

And who would this one man be? Well… who else would it be but John Glenn! Glenn was just pouring it on. He was even assuming the role of natural group leader—giving them a little moral lecture at the séances!

The begrudging consensus that had developed from the Konakai séance was that, yeah, Glenn was right; they ought to watch themselves a little more carefully. But Al Shepard, for one, was not the type to let Glenn get away with it unmarked. Al kept putting the needle in. If there was anyone else around to enjoy it, Al would say to Glenn: "John, I think you need to loosen up a little bit, boy. What you need is a sports car. Why don't you get rid of that junk heap you're driving and do a little rat-racing. It'll do you good, John."

Al never missed an opportunity to stick it to Glenn about his terrible-looking underpowered Prinz and his need to get a car with a little more juice and loosen up. It became a refrain. Glenn knew how to roll with this kind of ribbing and grin through it. At the same time, you could tell it was getting under his skin. You couldn't help but get the feeling that the piece of equipment Al was really saying Glenn should loosen up and turn on the juice with was not an automobile.

One morning, when they came into the Astronaut Office, there was a big inscription up on the blackboard:

DEFINITION OF A SPORTS CAR: A HEDGE AGAINST THE MALE MENOPAUSE.

In the eyes of the engineers assigned to Project Mercury the training of the astronauts would be the easy task on the list. Naturally you needed a man with the courage to ride on top of a rocket, and you were grateful that such men existed. Nevertheless, their training was not a very complicated business. The astronaut would have little to do in a Mercury flight except stand the strain, and the engineers had devised what psychologists referred to as "a graded series of exposures" to take care of that. No, the difficult, the challenging, the dramatic, the pioneering part of space flight, as the engineers saw it, was the technology.

It was only thanks to a recent invention, the high-speed electronic computer, that Project Mercury was feasible at all. There was an analogy here with the great Admiral of the Seas himself, Columbus. It was only thanks to a recent invention of his day, the magnetic compass, that Columbus had dared to sail across the Atlantic. Until then ships had stayed close to the great land masses for even the longest voyages. Likewise, putting a man into space the quick and dirty way without high-speed computers was unthinkable. Such computers had not been in production before 1951, and yet here it was, 1960 and engineers were already devising systems for guiding rockets into space, through the use of computers built into the engines and connected to accelerometers, for monitoring the temperature, pressure, oxygen supply, and other vital conditions of the Mercury capsule and for triggering safety procedures automatically—meaning they were creating, with computers, systems in which machines could communicate with one another, make decisions, take action, all with tremendous speed and accuracy…

Oh, genius-engineers!

Ah, yes, there was such a thing as self-esteem among engineers. It may not have been as grandiose as that of fighter jocks… nevertheless, many was the steaming enchephalitic summertime Saturday night at Langley when some NASA engineer would start knocking back that good sweet Virginia A.B.C. store bourbon on the patio and letting his ego out for a little romp, like a growling red dog.

The glorification of the astronauts had really gotten out of control! In the world of science—and Project Mercury was supposed to be a scientific enterprise—pure scientists ranked first and engineers ranked second and the test subjects of experiments ranked so low that one seldom thought about them. But here the test subjects… were national heroes! They created a zone of awe and reverence wherever they set foot! Everyone else, whether physicist, biologist, doctor, psychiatrist, or engineer, was a mere attendant.

At the outset it had been understood—it didn't even require comment—that the astronauts would be just that: test subjects in an experiment. Mercury was an adaptation of the Air Force's Man in Space Soonest concept, in which you would attach biosensors to your human subject, seal him up in a capsule, propel him into space ballistically—i.e., like an artillery shell—and bring him back to earth with completely automatic guidance and see how he made out. In November 1959, six months after the seven astronauts were chosen, Randy Lovelace and Scott Crossfield presented a paper at an aerospace medical symposium in which they said that biomedical research was "the sole purpose of the ride," so far as having an astronaut on board was concerned. They added that an aerodynamic space vehicle, such as the proposed X-15B or X-20, would require "a much more highly trained pilot." Since he was involved in the X-15 project, Crossfield had his own ax to grind, but what he and Lovelace were saying was perfectly obvious to any engineer who knew the difference between ballistic and aerodynamic space vehicles. In short, the astronaut in Project Mercury would not be a pilot under any conventional definition.

Even as late as the summer of 1960, at an Armed Forces-National Research Council conference- at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, on "the training of astronauts," various engineers and scientists from outside NASA thought nothing of describing the Mercury rocket-capsule vehicle as a fully automated system in which "the astronaut does not need to turn a hand." They would say, "The astronaut has been added to the system as a redundant component." (A
redundant component!)
If the automatic system broke down, he might step in as a repairman or manual conductor. Above all, of course, he would be wired with biosensors and a microphone to see how a human being responded to the stress of the flight. That would be his main function. There were psychologists who advised against using pilots at all—and this was more than a year after the famous Mercury Seven had been chosen. The pilot's, particularly the hot pilot's, main psychological bulwark under stress was his knowledge that he controlled the ship and could always
do something
("I've tried A! I've tried B! I've tried C!"…). This obsession with active control, it was argued, would only tend to cause problems on Mercury flights. What was required was a man whose main talent was for
doing nothing
under stress. Some suggested using a new breed of military flier, the radar man, the Air Force Strategic Air Command radar observer or the Navy radar intercept officer, a man who had experience riding in the rear in high-performance aircraft under combat conditions and doing nothing but reading the radar, come what may, abandoning all control of the craft (and protection of his own life) to someone else, the pilot ("I looked over at Robinson—and he was staring at the radar like a
zombie!")
. An experienced zombie would do fine. In fact, considerable attention had been given to a plan to anesthetize or tranquillize the astronauts, not to keep them from panicking, but just to make sure they would lie there peacefully with their sensors on and not
do something
that would ruin the flight.

The scientists and engineers took it for granted that the training of the astronauts would be unlike anything ordinarily thought of as flight training. Flight training consisted of teaching a man how to take certain actions. He was taught how to control an unfamiliar craft or how to put a familiar craft through unfamiliar maneuvers, such as bombing runs or carrier landings. On the other hand, the only actions the astronauts would have to learn how to take would be to initiate the emergency procedures in the case of a bad rocket launch or a bad landing and to step in as a backup (redundant component) if the automatic control system failed to hold the heatshield in the correct position prior to re-entry through the earth's atmosphere. The astronaut would not be able to control the path or the speed of the capsule at all. A considerable part of his training would be what was known as de-conditioning, de-sensitizing, or adapting out fears. There was a principle in psychology that maintained that "bad habits, including overstrong emotionality, can be eliminated by a graded series of exposures to the anxiety-arousing stimulus." That was what much of astronaut training was to be. The rocket launch was regarded as a novel and possibly disorienting event, in part
because
the astronaut would have no control over it whatsoever. So they had devised "a graded series of exposures." They took the seven men to the Navy's human centrifuge facility in Johnsville, Pennsylvania. The centrifuge looked like a Wild Bolo ride; it had a fifty-foot arm with a cockpit, or gondola, on the end of it, and the arm could be whirled around at astonishing speeds, great enough to put up to 40 g's of pressure on the rider inside the gondola, one g being equal to the force of gravity. The high g-forces generated by combat aircraft in dives and turns during the Second World War had sometimes caused blackouts, red-outs, gray-outs, or made it impossible for pilots to lift their hands to the controls; the giant centrifuge at Johnsville had been built to explore this new problem of high-speed flight. By 1959 the machine had been computerized and turned into a simulator capable of duplicating the g-forces and accelerations of any form of flight, even rocket flight. The astronaut was helped into his full pressure suit, with his biosensors attached and his rectal thermometer inserted, and then placed into the gondola, in a contoured seat molded for his body, whereupon all the wires, hoses, and microphones he would have in actual flight were hooked up, and the gondola was depressurized to five pounds per square inch, as it would be in space flight. The interior of the gondola had been converted into a replica of the Mercury capsule's interior, with all the switches and console displays. The taped noise of an actual Redstone rocket firing was played over the astronaut's headset, and the ride began. Using the computers, the engineers would put the man through an entire Mercury flight profile. The centrifuge built up the g-forces at precisely the same rate they would build up in flight, up to six or seven g's, whereupon the g-forces would suddenly drop off, as they would in flight as the capsule went over the top of its arc, and the astronaut experienced a tumbling sensation, as he would, presumably, in flight. All the while the astronaut would be required to push a few switches, as he would in actual flight, and talk to a mock flight controller, forcing his words out into the microphone, no matter how great the pressure of the g-forces on his chest. The centrifuge could also duplicate the pressures of deceleration a man would experience during the return through the earth's atmosphere.

To get the seven men used to weightlessness, they took them on parabolic rides in the cargo holds of C-131 transports and backseat in F-100Fs. When the jet came up over the top of the arc of the parabola, the subject would experience from fifteen to forty-five seconds of weightlessness. This was the only flying scheduled for the astronauts' entire training program; and they were, of course, merely passengers on board, as they would be in the Mercury flights.