The Right Stuff (25 page)

Inside NASA, however, this position was no longer tenable. From a sheerly political or public relations standpoint,
the astronaut
was NASA's prize possession, and the seven Mercury astronauts had been presented to the public and the Congress as great pilots, not as test subjects. If they now insisted on
being
pilots, great or otherwise—who was going to step in and say no? The boys sensed this; or as Wally Schirra put it, they realized they had "a fair amount of prestige around the country." So next they began whittling down the number of medical and scientific experiments they were expected to take part in—the guinea-pig stuff—simply by characterizing them as useless or stupid and cutting them out of their schedules. Here they tended to have the support of Gilruth's chief of operations, Walt Williams. Williams was a big hearty powerful-looking engineer who had been one of the true geniuses of the X series at Edwards, the man who had turned supersonic flight test into a precise and rational science. Williams was a flight-line engineer; he didn't have much patience with matters of flight test that were not
operational
. The one engineer who didn't mind letting it be known that Astropower, as it came to be called, was getting out of hand was one of Williams's lieutenants, Christopher Columbus Kraft, Jr. Chris Kraft was a hard-driving young man, thirty-six years old, urbane and sharp-witted, as aeronautical engineers went, and he was scheduled to be flight director for Mercury; but he didn't yet have the clout to do much of anything where the astronauts were concerned. The seven men pressed on. They were tired of the designation of "capsule" for the Mercury vehicle. The term as much as declared that the man inside was not a pilot but an experimental animal in a pod. Gradually, everybody began trying to work the term "spacecraft" into NASA publications and syllabuses. Next the men raised the question of a cockpit window for the spacecraft. As it was now designed, the Mercury capsule had no window, just a small porthole on either side of the astronaut's head. His main way of seeing the outside world would be through a periscope. A window had been regarded as an unnecessary way of inviting rupture due to changes in pressure. Now the astronauts insisted on a window. So the engineers went to work designing a window. Next the men insisted on a hatch they could open by themselves. The hatch, as currently designed, would be bolted shut by the ground crew. In order to leave the capsule after splashing down, the astronaut would either have to slither out through the neck, as if he were coming out of a bottle, or wait for another crew to unbolt the hatch from the outside. So the engineers went to work designing a hatch with explosive bolts so that the astronaut could blow it off by hitting a detonator. It was too late to incorporate the new items into the capsule—the
spacecraft
—that would be used for the first Mercury flight. That vehicle was already badly behind schedule as it was. But they would be in each craft thereafter…

And why? Because
pilots
had windows in their cockpits and hatches they could open on their own. That was what it was all about: being a
pilot
as opposed to a guinea pig. The men hadn't stopped with the window and the hatch, either. Not for a moment. Now they wanted…
manual control of the rocket
! They weren't kidding! This was to take the form of an override system: if the astronaut believed, in his judgment, as captain of the ship (not
capsule
), that the booster rocket engine was malfunctioning, he could take over and guide it himself—like any proper pilot.

How could they be serious!—the engineers would say. Any chance of a man being able to guide a rocket from inside a ballistic vehicle, a projectile, was so remote as to be laughable. This proposal was so radical the engineers knew they would be able to block it. It was no laughing matter to the seven pilots, however. They also wanted complete control of the re-entry procedure. They wanted to establish the capsule's angle of attack manually and fire the retro-rockets themselves without any help from the automatic control system. This suggestion made the engineers wince. Slayton even wanted to redesign the hand controller that would activate the hydrogen peroxide thrusters to make the capsule pitch, roll, or yaw. He wanted the hand controller to operate the pitch and roll thrusters only; yaw would be controlled by pedals which the astronaut would operate with his feet. That was the conventional setup on aircraft: a two-axis stick plus pedals. That was the way
pilots
established attitude control.

Life
magazine and the worshipful public and the worshipful politicians and all the others who had already exalted the seven astronauts did not care in the slightest whether they functioned like pilots or not. It was enough that they were willing to climb atop the rocket at all, in the name of the battle with the Soviets for the high ground, and be exploded into space or to the harp farm. It was not enough for the men themselves, however. All of them were veteran military pilots, and five of them had already reached the higher elevations of the invisible ziggurat when Project Mercury began, and they were determined to go into space as pilots and as nothing else.

Control—in the form of overrides at the very least—was the one thing that would neutralize the recurring taunt within the fraternity:
A monkey's gonna make the first flight
. In his speech before the brotherhood Slayton had brought that out into the open with his crack about the "college-trained chimpanzee." That had seemed like a Slayton sortie into sarcasm and hyperbole. He made no reference to the fact that such a college actually existed.

But in the deserts of New Mexico, about eighty miles north of El Paso and the Mexican Border, at Holloman Air Force Base, which was part of the White Sands missile-range complex, NASA had set up a Project Mercury chimpanzee colony. There was nothing secret about it, but it attracted little notice. The chimpanzee program had been devised mainly to satisfy "the medical Cassandras." From the moment a Joint Armed Forces-National Research Council Committee on Bioastronautics had visited the new NASA facility at Langley in January 1959, there had been doctors warning that the weightless state or high g-forces, or both, could be devastating and that animal flights should be mandatory. So NASA had twenty veterinarians training forty chimpanzees in a compound at the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman. Eventually one of the beasts would be chosen for what amounted to a dress rehearsal of the first manned flight. The idea would be not only to see if the chimpanzee could stand the strain but also to see if he could use his brain and his hands normally throughout the ride.

Chimpanzees were chosen as much for their intelligence as their physiological similarity to humans. They could be trained to do fairly complex manual tasks, on cue, particularly if one got hold of them when they were young. Once they were trained to do the tasks on the ground, it would be possible to give them the cues to do the same tasks during a space flight and see if the weightless condition impeded them. Early in the game the vets decided that rewards, mere positive reinforcement, would not be sufficient for the job at hand. The only sure-fire training technique was
operant conditioning
. The principle here was the avoidance of pain. Or, to put it another way, if the ape didn't do the job right, he was punished with electric shocks in the soles of his feet.

The Holloman veterinarians, like most veterinarians, were compassionate men who were interested in relieving pain in animals and not in inflicting it upon them. But this was war! The chimpanzee program was an essential part of the battle for the high ground! It was no time for halfway measures! As congressmen told you every day, national survival was at stake! The veterinarians' brief was to get the job done with the utmost speed and efficacy. There were several ways of training animals, but only
operant conditioning
, based on concepts developed by B. F. Skinner, seemed anywhere near foolproof. In any case, the "psychomotor stimulus plates" were attached to the beasts' feet and they were strapped into chairs, and the process began… And when the apes did well, you gave them hugs and nuzzles, to be sure, first taking the precaution of making certain they weren't in a mood to bite your goddamned nose off.

Oh, the apes knew a thing or two! Their intelligence was only just below that of man. They had memories; they could figure out the situation. At an early age they had been seized in West Africa and separated from their mothers by this new species, the humans, and removed from all familiar surroundings and put in cages and shipped to this godforsaken alien landscape, the New Mexico desert, where they remained in cages… when they weren't in the hands of a bunch of human ball-breakers in white smocks who strapped them down and zapped them and put them through insane exercises and routines. The beasts tried everything they could think of to escape. They snapped, snarled, spit, bit, thrashed at the straps, and made runs for it. Or they bided their time and used their heads. They would go along with a training task, seeming to cooperate, until the white smocker seemed to let his guard down—then they'd make a break for it. But the resistance and the wiles were of no avail. All they got for their struggles was more zaps and blue bolts. Some of the brightest apes were also the most intractable and resourceful; they would take the electric shocks and then seem to give up and submit to fate—and
then
try to tear the white smockers a new asshole or two and make a run for it. With these implacable little bastards it was sometimes necessary to give them a tap or two with a rubber hose, or whatever.

Then, at last, the sophisticated part of the training could begin. It took two main forms: the desensitizing or adapting out of the fears that a rocket flight would ordinarily hold for the animal (just confining an untrained chimpanzee in a Mercury capsule would have driven him berserk with fear); and placing the animal in a procedures trainer, a replica of the capsule he would be inside in flight, and teaching him to respond to lights and buzzers and throw the proper switches on cue—and having him do this day after day until it became a thoroughly familiar environment, as familiar, routine, and workaday as an office.

The vets took the chimpanzees by airplane to Wright-Patterson for rides on the centrifuge the Air Force had there. They would strap each ape into the gondola, close the hatch, and pipe in the sound of a Redstone rocket launch and start him spinning, gradually introducing him to higher g-forces. They took them for parabolic rides backseat in fighter planes to familiarize them with the feeling of weightlessness. They put them in the simulator for endless hours and endless days of on-cue manual-task training. Since the chimpanzee would not be wearing a pressure suit in flight, he was put inside a pressurized cubicle, which in turn would be placed in the Mercury capsule. The monkey's instrument panel was inside the inner cubicle. Therein, day by day, month by month, the monkey learned to operate certain switches in different sequences when cued by flashing lights. If he did the job incorrectly, he received an electric shock. If he did it correctly, he received banana-flavored pellets, plus some attaboys and nuzzles from the vets. Gradually the beasts were worn down. They were tractable now. The
operant conditioning
was taking place. A life of avoiding the blue bolts and gratefully accepting the attaboys and pellets had become the better part of valor. Rebellion had proved to be a dead end.

The apes had begun their training at the same time as the astronauts, i.e., in the late spring of 1959. By now, 1960, they had been through almost every phase of astronaut training, other than abort and re-entry emergency sequences and attitude control.

Some of the apes could operate their procedures trainer like a breeze, almost as rapidly as a man. The vets had every reason to be proud of what they had accomplished. On the outside the animals were as mild, tractable, smart, and lovable as the best little boy on the block, although inside… something was building up like Code Blue in the boiler room.

About eight hundred miles west of Holloman Air Force Base, in the same latitude of the great American desert, was Edwards. The X-15 program had begun to pick up some momentum. There were even journalists coming to Edwards—in the midst of this, the Era of the Astronaut—and talking about the X-15 as "America's first spaceship." There were two men on hand at the base writing books about the project; one of them was Richard Tregaskis, who had written the best seller
Guadalcanal Diary
. The X-15,
America's first spaceship
… could it be? A year ago it would have seemed impossible. But now the Mercury program was beginning to lag. NASA had talked of making the first manned flight in mid-1960; well, it was now mid-1960, and they didn't even have the capsule ready for unmanned testing.

NASA's prime pilot for the X-15 project was Joe Walker. He looked like a young towheaded version of Chuck Yeager, the country boy who loved to fly. He talked like Yeager. Well, hell, who didn't around here? But with Walker it came naturally. Just as Yeager was from the coal country of West Virginia, Walker was from the coal country of Pennsylvania, and Walker liked to do that Yeager thing where you mixed up a lot of up-hollow talk—"The mother liked to blowed up on me"—with postwar engineerese about parameters, inputs, and extrapolations. As a matter of fact, Yeager had let it be known that he thought Walker was the pick of the litter at Edwards now.

Yes, Walker looked and sounded like a younger version of Yeager—but in fact he was two years older. Yeager was still only thirty-seven, and Walker was thirty-nine. Walker was seven months older than Scott Crossfield. So aside from everything else, Walker didn't have time to cool his heels. If the X-15 and X-20 programs at Edwards got stalled while all the money and attention went to Project Mercury, it would be bad news.

Edwards had grown until it was about twenty times the size it was during the heyday of Yeager. Pancho Barnes's Happy Bottom Riding Club was long gone. The Air Force had taken her property by eminent domain for the building of a new runway. There had been a bitter fight in court, during which a base commander had accused Pancho of running a whorehouse, and Pancho had told the court that she had it on good authority that the old peckerwood had instructed his pilots to accidentally-on-purpose napalm her ranch. Pancho had gone into retirement, with her fourth husband, her erstwhile ranch foreman, over in the town of Boron, to the northeast of the base.