Falling to Earth (13 page)

At first, we new guys were clearly considered apprentices, not yet part of the group. When I joined the program, I thought, “Oh, man, this is great. I am now an astronaut.” It didn’t take me long to figure out that I wasn’t. The pilots who were already in the program didn’t really look on us as astronauts until we’d made a spaceflight.

I felt a little like a West Point plebe again, or a novice back at Moore Air Base. I was at the bottom and had to work my way up. The feeling was nothing new: it happened every time I started in a new direction or made a new step in my career.

My sense of being the “new kid” was particularly strong around the original seven astronauts, who had been selected back in 1959. By the time I joined the astronaut corps, six remained with NASA, and only four were on flight status. John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, had left in 1964. I also never really got to know Scott Carpenter, who flew the next mission after Glenn, since he left within my first year. The other five, however—Slayton, Shepard, Grissom, Schirra, and Cooper—were kings of the hill. A mystique surrounded them, which they happily cultivated. In their minds, we new guys hadn’t yet proved ourselves. That was fine by me, because it was true: we hadn’t.

This mystique, I learned, extended to generous car dealers. Many of the astronauts were friends with Jim Rathmann, a fun guy who had a Chevrolet dealership just down the coast from Cape Canaveral, Florida, where NASA launched its rockets. Jim, in turn, was a close friend of Ed Cole, the president of General Motors. Rathmann acted as the go-between for the astronauts and General Motors, leasing cars to us. General Motors would send the cars to Jim, he’d lease them to us on a six-month basis for a small amount, and at the end of the six months we’d turn them back in and get another one. General Motors would take the cars back and resell them as astronaut-driven vehicles. They didn’t lose any money, and it didn’t hurt their image for the astronauts to be seen driving shiny new Corvettes. It was smart business sense, and Ed and Jim also did it out of admiration and respect for the spacefarers.

I assumed the deal had also been okayed with the NASA administrators, or that they had decided it was out of their control. To be honest, I am not sure. I know that the first astronauts organized it back in the early days. Was there any official resistance behind the scenes? I don’t know. Certainly by the time I showed up, no one officially seemed to care about it.

My reaction, naturally, was to ask one of the original astronauts how I could also get a Corvette. He slapped me down so fast it shocked me. “You new guys won’t be part of that,” he barked at me. “You don’t deserve that.” I got the point: I was being put in my place and reminded that I didn’t yet count for jack. I later became friendly with this guy, eventually talked about the deal again, and discovered that General Motors didn’t restrict their offer to certain astronauts. This guy had no power over the choice. Yet, in my first few months on the job, I wasn’t supposed to know that.

Deke assigned all of us new guys to one of the more senior spacefarers while we found our feet and our place in the program. It was a good arrangement. He assigned me to Wally Schirra, a respected former navy test pilot who had commanded both Mercury and Gemini space missions, including the first-ever space rendezvous. As I shook his hand, Schirra looked me right in the eye. “You know, Worden,” he told me sternly, “you’ve got to understand something from the start. You don’t count for anything around here.”

I knew he was testing me. I remembered a flippant saying from West Point that the only people whom the students outranked were the superintendent’s pet cat and anyone serving in the navy. Taking a risk, I stared right back at him and said, “Sir, I realize I am only a captain in the air force, but I know for sure that I outrank a captain in the navy.”

Schirra paused for a split second, and I wondered if I had made a terrible mistake. Then he broke into a loud, booming laugh and clapped me on the shoulder. “You don’t have to report to me?” he continued. “Screw that—go and get me a cup of coffee!” I’d had my first experience with Wally the prankster; he never took himself too seriously. From then on we were great friends.

I was one of nineteen guys chosen for the fifth astronaut group, the largest ever selected at the time. NASA had told Deke Slayton that the forthcoming Apollo program could result in dozens of flights and that he should select enough people to fly them. He, therefore, took everyone he felt was qualified from the top group of finalists. It’s no wonder that some of the older astronauts didn’t warmly welcome us, and in fact resented us showing up. Once you were in the program, Deke often said, you were as qualified to fly into space as anyone else already there. More competition for seats meant fewer flights for the older guys, and for at least the first year they kept us a little isolated from the rest of the team.

NASA’s confident prediction of dozens of Apollo flights was wrong: eventually the budget was slashed, flights were canceled, and money siphoned into the development of the space shuttle. Some of the guys in my group had to wait two decades before their first flight into space. That’s a hell of a long time to wait until you are allowed to do the job you trained for, and I doubt I would have waited that long.

Amongst the nineteen were pilots I knew well from Edwards. Charlie Duke, Ken Mattingly, Stu Roosa, and Ed Mitchell had all been at the Aerospace Research Pilot School with me. Fred Haise had attended, too, although he had left to do other test pilot work by the time I arrived. While at Edwards, we used to have parties at Stu Roosa’s house every weekend, some of the craziest drunken parties I have ever been to. We’d wake up in the morning, find that we’d set fire to objects on his front lawn, and have no memory of doing so. The five of us already knew each other well, and our camaraderie continued when we moved to Houston. We socialized for a while before we were absorbed into the wider program, and we were bad boys—really bad. In the end, all of us flew to the moon during the Apollo program.

Then there was Joe Engle. He’d been at Edwards, too, but I didn’t know him too well because he’d been off flying the X-15 rocket plane. Unlike most of us, Joe already knew all of the senior astronauts before he arrived in Houston. He had even flown in space before he became a NASA astronaut. As an X-15 pilot, he’d taken that rocket plane higher than fifty miles three times, each considered a suborbital spaceflight by air force definitions, and had earned air force astronaut wings.

Joe Engle is the best formation pilot I have ever seen. He’d chosen a different career specialty than me, flying in close combat formation in a tactical fighter squadron. He could do a tight barrel roll around me from one wing to another, and then gently drop right back into position right off my wingtip. The first time he performed that maneuver with me, on a flight out to Edwards, I was in awe—I had no idea airplanes could
do
that.

By far the most experienced aviator in our group, Joe was kind of the big man on campus. When he narrowly missed out on flying during Apollo, many people were surprised. He served on an Apollo backup crew, but then had to wait until a space shuttle flight in 1981. It went to show, no one could assume anything when it came to getting a spaceflight assignment.

In the end, fewer than half of my group would fly to the moon. Most of the others trained to fly there, but budget cuts meant that they would fly in later programs instead. In addition to my Edwards friends, fellow group members Ron Evans, Jim Irwin, and Jack Swigert made it onto missions to the moon. PJ Weitz, Jack Lousma, Jerry Carr, and Bill Pogue missed out on lunar flights but did fly to the Skylab space station. Pogue was the officer who had greeted me when I arrived in England a few years before, and I knew by reputation that he was an exceptional pilot.

Vance Brand ended up with a seat on the last Apollo mission in 1975, Apollo-Soyuz, the first joint mission with the Russians. Others had to wait even longer. Along with Joe Engle, both Bruce McCandless and Don Lind did not make their first flights until the space shuttle was operating. Don ended up flying his first, and only, mission in 1985, a full nineteen years after he became an astronaut.

I guess, for some, the lure of flying in space kept them in the program for so long. Many of my group of nineteen stuck around for a long time even after making a first flight. Fred Haise did some shuttle test flying. Ken Mattingly, PJ Weitz, and Jack Lousma all stayed to fly the shuttle into orbit. And Vance Brand flew until 1990, making his fourth spaceflight that year. In fact, until his retirement in early 2008, he still worked for NASA, albeit in a management role. He was the last of our group still on the roster.

Two of my group never had the chance to fly in space. John Bull was quiet and modest, yet highly skilled. He had been a navy test pilot before joining the program. I believe Deke considered him one of the top guys in our group. However, in 1968 the doctors discovered that he had a rare pulmonary medical condition. He had to leave the astronaut corps, and there was also no place for him back in the navy. He found a job as a flight test researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. Years later, when I had to leave the astronaut group and wound up at Ames as well, John was still there. It was a strange irony.

The other person in my group who never flew was a very talented air force test pilot named Ed Givens. When NASA picked him, he was working on a backpack that astronauts could use to maneuver during spacewalks. Ed was an interesting guy, but he was dead and gone before any of us got to know him. He died in an automobile accident near Houston a little more than a year after our group arrived. Because he was killed in a car instead of an airplane or spacecraft, he is perhaps the least remembered of the astronauts who died while in the program, which is a damn shame. He deserved better.

Overall, our group did well to get as many flights as we did. We’d been picked in the general hope that, after the first lunar landing, the purse strings would open and we’d keep flying there for a long time. I fully expected to make a couple of flights and to command a landing on the moon.

Once we arrived in Houston, it didn’t mean much that we had been selected as a group. We were pretty much on our own, and it was every man for himself. And some of those pilots saw this situation as a competition: a race to get selected for the best missions. Considering we were looked on as the new guys with everything to prove, that attitude was understandable.

However, that was not my style. I figured if I did the best job I could and didn’t worry about the office politics, senior management would reward me. It isn’t part of my personality to play politics. I don’t think I could do it if I tried.

It could be that the senior astronauts found me more acceptable because I’d been a test pilot instructor, but I also didn’t play any games to make friends. I did my best, and that effort seemed to elevate me to a position of respect, far more than any office politics ever could. The experienced astronauts accepted me quickly because they learned they could rely on me to do the job well. Competence was a qualification expected by those who might fly in space with you one day. They preferred to return alive.

Not everybody in my group took that route. Some guys tried to play the favorites game. They identified Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton as the two bosses to impress. Both were members of the original group of seven astronauts and both were temporarily grounded by medical conditions. Deke Slayton was the director of Flight Crew Operations, and his primary job was to select astronauts and assign them to flights. Working under him was the chief of the astronaut office, Alan Shepard, the first American to fly into space. My colleagues believed that these two made all of the important crew selection decisions. However, Deke and Al both held their cards close to their chests. Those looking for clues about how to impress them and make a spaceflight had little to go on.

I liked Deke a lot and thought he did a superb job. Even though people all around him gossiped about how to get on a flight, whom to impress, whom to flatter, Deke stayed above it all and played things straight. He’d select new groups of astronauts, put them through a training program, and then ask them to privately rate each other. Using that list, and his own observations, he’d assign people to missions. There was nothing magic about it; Deke was a straight guy—gruff, no-nonsense—but fair. He didn’t play games.

There was one pilot in my group who thought he could influence Deke by relentlessly sucking up to him, even taking on his favorite social pastimes. Deke seemed to enjoy his friendship, and they’d go off on hunting trips together, but when it came time to assign astronauts to missions, this guy didn’t fly in Apollo. I heard he hadn’t been training hard enough. With dozens of ambitious astronauts looking to impress him, I admired Deke for his unwavering professionalism. In the end, the astronauts with talent who didn’t make a big deal out of it did better than those who tried to suck up to the boss.

Al Shepard may have officially been named the chief of the astronaut office, but he was never there. Shepard had many outside business interests. He’d come to work in the morning for an hour or two, then he’d take off to do non-NASA business, and we wouldn’t see him again. He worked his way into being a millionaire, and it seemed to happen on government time, which was supposed to be against the rules. Yet I don’t think anyone ever dared question Al because of his stature at NASA. He was the first American in space and, as such, was immune to scolding.

He wasn’t the only astronaut with outside interests who skated through his NASA years without a reprimand. One astronaut was on the board of a bank when a review board slammed them for incorrect banking practices. It blew up into a huge scandal in the press, especially since the whole affair involved some of the same people who had offered the original astronauts free homes. Luckily for that astronaut, his name was generally kept out of the papers—and I won’t repeat it here. It was a good lesson for all of us: sitting on a board of directors was lucrative, but we ran the risk that our names and reputations might be used for shady business practices.