The Right Stuff (53 page)

The X-20 and the MOL were not yet operational, of course. In the meantime, it seemed to be highly important that Air Force pilots be chosen as NASA astronauts. The prestige of the Astronaut absolutely dominated flying, and the Air Force was determined to be the prime supplier of the breed. Four of the nine new astronauts selected in 1962, before ARPS was instituted, had been from the Air Force; that was not considered good enough.

To tell the truth, the brass had gone slightly bananas over this business of producing astronauts. They had even set up a "charm school" in Washington for the leading candidates. The best of the young test pilots from Edwards and Wright-Patterson flew to Washington and were given a course in how to impress the NASA selection panels in Houston. And it was dead serious! They listened to pep talks by Air Force generals, including General Curtis LeMay himself. They went through drills on how to talk on their feet—and that was the more sensible, credible part of the course. From there it got right down to the level of cotillion etiquette. They were told what to wear to the interviews with the engineers and the astronauts. They were to wear knee-length socks, so that when they sat down and crossed their legs no bare flesh would show between the top of the socks and bottom of the pant cuffs. They were told that to drink at the social get-togethers in Houston: they should drink alcohol, in keeping with the pilot code of Flying & Drinking, but in the form of a tall highball, either bourbon or Scotch, and only one. They were told how to put their hands on their hips (if they must). The thumbs should be to the rear and the fingers forward. Only women and interior decorators put the thumbs forward and the fingers back.

And the men went through it all willingly! Without a snigger! The brass's passion for the astronaut business was nothing compared to that of the young pilots themselves. Edwards had always been the precise location on the map of the apex of the pyramid of the right stuff itself. And now it was just another step on the way up. These boys were coming through Chuck Yeager's prep school so they could get a ticket to Houston.

The glamour of the space program was such that there was no longer any arguing against it. In addition to the chances for honor, glory, fame, and the celebrity treatment, all the new hot dogs could see something else. It practically glowed in the sky. They talked about it at beer call at every Officers Club at every air base in the land. Namely, the Astronaut Life. The youngsters knew about that, all right. It existed just over the rainbow, in Houston, Texas… the
Life
contract… $25,000 per year over and above your salary… veritable
mansions
in the suburbs, custom-designed… No more poor sad dried-up asbestos-shingle-roof clapboard shacks rattling in the sandstorms… free Corvettes… an enormous free lunch from one side of America to the other, for that matter… and the tastiest young cookies imaginable! One had only to reach for them!… The vision of all the little sugarplums danced above the mighty ziggurat… You bet! A veritable Fighter Jock's Forbidden Dream of
the goodies
had been brought to life, and all these young hot dogs looked upon it like people who believed in miracles…

It really made some of the older pilots shake their heads. If a man got a piece of tail every now and then, the world wasn't going to come to an end. But to dream of a goddamned aerial nookie circus… What was worse, however, was the
Life
contract. The way any true Blue-Suiter saw it, to let an experimental test pilot exploit his job commercially was only asking for trouble. If a man had the opportunity to fly machines with incalculable millions of dollars' worth of resources and facilities and man hours built into them, if they put him in a position to make history—that was more than enough compensation.

Yeager had flown the X-1 at straight pay, $283 a month. The Blue Suit!—that was enough for him. The Blue Suit had brought him everything he had in this world, and he asked for nothing else.

And what would all of that mean to these boys, even if someone said it? Not a hell of a lot, probably. Not even the fact that the X-15 project was in its finest hour, right here, for all to see, affected the new order of things. In June the X-15, with Joe Walker at the controls, had achieved Mach 5.92, or 4,104 miles per hour, which brought the project close to the optimum speed—"in excess of Mach 6"—it had been aiming for. In July Bob White had flown to 314,750 feet, or 59.6 miles, 9.6 miles into space (50 miles was now officially regarded as the boundary line) and well above the project's goal of 280,000 feet. These and many less spectacular flights of the X-15 were bringing back data concerning heat buildup (from air friction) and stability upon which the design of all the supersonic and hypersonic aircraft of the future, commercial and military, would be based. The X-15's XLR-99 rocket had 57,000 pounds of thrust. The Mercury-Redstone had 78,000; the Mercury-Atlas had 367,000 pounds; but soon there would be the X-20, and the X-20 would have a Titan 3 rocket's 2.5 million pounds of thrust, and it would be the first ship to go into orbit with a pilot at the controls from beginning to end, a pilot who could land it anywhere he wanted, eliminating the tremendous expense and risk of the Mercury ocean-rescue operations, which involved carriers, spotter planes, helicopters, frogmen, and backup vessels strung halfway around the world.

Yeager's students had a chance to experience something close to what such space piloting would be like. They went "booming and zooming" in the F-104. The F-104 was a fighter-interceptor that had been built to counter the MiG-21, which the Russians were known to be developing. The F-104 was fifty feet long and had two razor-thin wings, each only seven feet long, set far back on the fuselage, close to the tail assembly. The pilot and his guy-in-back were in two seats way up in the nose. The F-104 was built for speed in combat, period. It could climb at speeds in excess of Mach 1 and it could achieve Mach 2.2 in level flight. The faster it went, the steadier it was; it was unstable at low speeds, however, and oversensitive to the controls, with an evil tendency to pitch up and then snap into rolls and spins. At glide speed it seemed to want to fall like a length of pipe. After practicing on an F-104 simulator, Yeager's students would take the ship up to 35,000 feet and open her up to Mach 2 (the boom), then aim her up at about forty-five degrees and try to poke a hole in the sky (the zoom). The g-forces slammed them back in their seats and they shot up like shells, and the pale-blue desert sky turned blue-black and the g-forces slid off and they came sailing over the top of the arc, about 75,000 feet up, silent and weightless—an experience like unto what the brethren themselves had known!—

—and these boys thought that was neat. Maybe it would be nice to fly the X-15 or the X-20, if you didn't make astronaut…

Yeager liked to take the ARPS students up for mock dogfights, hassling, just to… keep the proficiency up… Few of the lads had ever been in combat and they knew little about the critical tolerances of fighter aircraft during violent maneuvers. They knew where the outside of the envelope was, but they didn't know about the part where you reached the outside and then
stretched
her a little… without breaking through… Yeager waxed their tails with regularity, but they took that in stride. These days the way to the top—meaning the road to test-pilot astronaut—involved being very good at a lot of things without necessarily being "shit-hot," to use the beer-call expression, at anything. A balance of pilot skills and engineering; that was the ticket. Joe Walker's backup pilot in the X-15 project, Neil Armstrong, was typical of the new breed. A lot of people couldn't figure out Armstrong. He had a close blond crew cut and small pale-blue eyes and scarcely a line or a feature in his face that you could remember. His expression hardly ever changed. You'd ask him a question, and he would just stare at you with those pale-blue eyes of his, and you'd start to ask the question again, figuring he hadn't understood, and—
click
—out of his mouth would come forth a sequence of long, quiet, perfectly formed, precisely thought-out sentences, full of anisotropic functions and multiple-encounter trajectories, or whatever else was called for. It was as if his hesitations were just data punch-in intervals for his computer. Armstrong had been preparing for an X-15 launch from the Smith's Ranch dry-lake bed last year when Yeager, who was director of flight test operations, told him the lake bed was still too muddy from the rains. Armstrong said the meteorological data, considering the wind and temperature factors, indicated the surface would be satisfactory. Yeager received a call from NASA asking him if he would take a small plane over to the lake bed and make a ground inspection. "Hell, no," said Yeager. "I've been flying over these lakes for fifteen years, and I know it's muddy. I'm not going to be responsible for disabling an Air Force plane." Well, would he fly a NASA plane up there? Hell, no, said Yeager; he didn't want that on his record, either. It was finally arranged that he would fly up there backseat, with Armstrong at the controls and therefore responsible for the mission. As soon as they touched down, Yeager could tell that the mud was going to suck up the landing gears like a couple of fence posts, which it did. Now they were hopelessly mired in the muck, and a range of hills blocked radio contact with the base. "Well, Neil," said Yeager, "in a few hours it'll be dark, and the temperature's going down to zero, and we're two guys standing out here in the mud wearing windbreakers. Got any good ideas?" Armstrong stared at him, and the computer interval began, and it ended, and nothing came out. A rescue team from the base, alerted by the loss of radio contact, retrieved them before nightfall—and brought back the story, which entertained the old-timers for a few days.

Nevertheless, the new breed had their share of the proper righteous stuff, same as the stick'n'rudder tigers of yore. Armstrong himself had flown more than a hundred missions off carriers during the Korean War, and had done good work in the X-15. Then you had men like Dave Scott and Mike Adams, who were two of Yeager's ARPS students. They were, practicing low lift-over-drag landings one day in the F-104. In this maneuver, which simulated an X-15 landing, you gunned the afterburner for speed (and stability) and flared the flaps and tried to grease the ship onto the runway at 200 knots. As Scott and Adams neared the ground, the "eyelids" on the afterburner malfunctioned, opening too wide, cutting the thrust down to 20 or 30 percent of maximum. Visually they could tell the ship was sinking too fast. Scott, who had the controls, gunned it but got very little response. They were dropping like a brick. Adams, in back, knew that the tail would hit the runway first, due to the angle of attack they were in, if Scott couldn't regain power. He told Scott over the radio circuit that if the tail hit he was ejecting. The tail hit, and in that moment he pulled his cinch ring and ejected at zero altitude. Scott elected to stay with the ship. The belly smashed onto the runway and the ship went careening down it and off into the mesquite. When the beast finally came to a halt, Scott looked back, and the engine was jammed up into the space where Adams used to be. Both men had made the right decision. Adams had been exploded up into the air and had come down safely by parachute. Scott's ejection mechanism had been broken in the torque of the initial impact and he would have been killed had he pulled the cinch ring, either by the nitroglycerine explosion or by a partial ejection.

Yeager was tremendously impressed by those two decisions by two men in the very mouth of the Gulp. There you had it, with the ante doubled: the right stuff. And when NASA had announced several months ago that a third group of astronauts would be chosen both men immediately applied, although Adams also seemed to have a sincere interest in the X-15 project. The X-15 pilots themselves had their eyes on Houston, for that matter. Armstrong had applied as soon as civilians had been eligible and was now a Group II astronaut. He had Joe Walker's blessing, too. Walker himself had considered applying but figured that his age—he was forty-two—pretty well ruled him out.

That was the way the pyramid was now constructed. The old argument—namely, that an astronaut would be a mere passenger monitoring an automated system—didn't have much sock to it any more. The truth was that there you had a picture of the pilot in practically all the hypersonic vehicles of the future, whether in space or in the atmosphere. The Mercury vehicle had merely been one of the first. Way back in April of 1953, Yeager had made a speech in which he said, "Some of the proposed fighters of tomorrow will be able to find and destroy a target and even return to their home stations and land by themselves. The only reason a pilot will be needed is to take over and decide what to do if anything goes wrong with the electronic equipment." Talking about the Ships of Tomorrow had made it all seem far off. But now, ten years later, they were already bringing such systems into the hardware stage. They were even working on a system to land F-4s automatically on aircraft carriers; the pilot would take his hands off the controls and let the computers bring him down onto that heaving slab. The supersonic transports and airliners would be so automated they would give the pilot an override stick just so he could push on it every now and then and feel
like a pilot;
it would be a goddamned right-stuff security blanket. They were even developing an automatic guidance system to bring the X-15 back through the atmosphere at a precise angle of attack. Maybe the age of "the flyboys," the stick'n'rudder fighter jocks, was about finished.

All of that Yeager could accept. On the great pyramid there was no steady state. Sixteen years ago, when he came to Muroc, he was only twenty-four, and few other test pilots had ever heard of him, and most people in aviation thought "the sound barrier" was as solid as a wall. Once he flew Mach 1, however, it was a whole new ball game. And now there were cosmonauts and astronauts, and it was a whole new ball game once again. A man could do a pretty good job of being philosophical about it. What finally got to Yeager, however, was the Ed Dwight case.