Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (28 page)

A month later, Sputnik II reached orbit, carrying a dog named Laika. The space race had begun and all the world knew this: if the Soviets could put a dog into orbit, couldn’t they put a nuclear bomb up there? Or maybe a man?

Sputnik was an alarming wake-up call. While the baby boom had boomed and families bought televisions, new cars, and new homes, the threat of communism had stealthily grown, and now here it was, beeping overhead. To make matters worse, the first U.S. response—a Navy-built Vanguard rocket, launched in December of 1957—exploded, and the four-pound grapefruit-sized satellite it had meant to boost into space plopped down amid the wreckage, strewn among the Florida palmettos surrounding the launch pad, intact and still beeping. A newspaper columnist wished aloud that someone would “go out t
here, find it, and kill it.” Foreign newspapers called the United States’ failed satellite effort “Kaputnik” and “Flopnik” and “Stayputnik.”

More failures followed, usually at a top-secret military base on the Florida coast called Cape Canaveral, where experimental rockets named Thor, Hound Dog, and Matador were launched. Associated Press reporter Howard Benedict, who was sent there to cover missile launches after Sputnik, recalled that at the time they were launching eight or nine rockets a week. “And most blew up,” he said.

One rocket—an IRBM, or intermediate-range ballistic missile—veered inexplicably off course one night and splashed into the Banana River, where it exploded and shot a geyser of water into the night sky. Benedict and the few other reporters dubbed it an IBRM—an Into-the-Banana-River Missile. The reporters began running out of ways to describe exploding rockets, and the successes were so infrequent that the engineers would get wildly drunk on the rare night one of their rockets actually flew. It would be another few months before the United States finally launched its own satellite, Explor
er I, atop one of Wernher von Braun’s rockets, on January 31, 1958.

President Eisenhower, who in his second term had refused to issue a blank check for his nation’s increasingly costly satellite program, was by then a crotchety, cynical, and sickly old man. He seemed unable to combat the virulent taunting of Khrushchev, making it clear to the American public that the time had come for young men to replace old, a time for leaders who were born during and shaped by the twentieth century.

Sputnik was not the opening shot of the cold war, but it was a turning point, a catalyst for a new direction for the country. It would lead to the creation the following year of a new space agency and would inspire the post–World War II generation of military men and politicians to direct their talents, the country’s money, its defense systems, its best brains, and its deepest emotions to reclaiming the sky.

That night in 1957, as Sputnik arched across the sky and as Louise and the girls slept inside, Alan stood in the backyard of his cottage at the Naval War College, smoking a cigarette and looking to the southwest. Earlier in the day he had read in the newspaper that the Russian satellite could be seen on a clear night, so he stayed up late to see it for himself. And for a brief moment, standing there in the backyard, he was the family man
he sometimes yearned to be, in the pose of millions of other suburban dads. He could never have guessed what an impact the Soviet satellite would soon have on his life.

Finally he saw the small glow of Sputnik crawl slowly across the night sky. “That little rascal,” he said to himself—not amused, but angry.

Alan considered the Soviets to be “technologically inferior” to the United States. He couldn’t believe a communist nation that had trouble building washing machines and refrigerators could create this. That fact “gnawed at his insides.” Years later, when asked to reflect back on that night, “little rascal” was the term he’d use. But in truth, he had saltier nicknames for the world’s first satellite. He wanted to swat the little fucker out of the air
—his
air.

But it was more than just anger that Alan felt that night. Almost as if it seduced him, Sputnik would lure Alan off his admiral-bound career path. Though he had missed his chance to be a combat pilot in World War II or Korea, maybe he could at least fight on the front lines of this strange, high-tech new war. Maybe everything he had accomplished so far had led him perfectly to this moment in history.

Part II

INTO SPACE

9

“We made them heroes, the first day they were picked”

One day in January 1959 Shepard was reading the
New York
Times and came across an article about a new space agency that had been created a month earlier.

The political hysteria that had followed Sputnik resulted in the creation of an umbrella organization for the nation’s best scientists and engineers: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a government-funded civilian agency whose primary goals would be to regain ground lost in the cold war, prove to the world that Sputnik was a fluke, and beat the Russians into outer space. NASA absorbed a number of scientific agencies, including the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which had been a driving force behind many of the rocket-powered Mach 2 and Mac
h 3 jet flights of the 1950s. Rocket scientists and their visions of launching missiles into space had been commandeered as soldiers in the cold war, and instead of sending satellites aloft, their new mission would be to send an American man. NASA was unveiled on December 17, 1958—the anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight.

In the
New York Times,
Shepard read that NASA planned to invite 110 of the military’s top test pilots to volunteer for a special mission—to become what NASA chose to call an “astronaut,” which is Greek for “space sailor.” Shepard read how, after ruling out daredevils and acrobats, race car drivers and mountaineers, NASA had decided it wanted steely, technology-savvy test pilots—who were also optimal choices because they happened to be on the government payroll. The candidates had to be shorter than five foot eleven (so they could fit into the tiny space capsule NASA was designing) and be
tween twenty-five and forty years old—NASA wanted mature pilots who’d been around, been tested, and stuck it out. “Not,” said an Air Force doctor who would help choose the astronauts, “those who would be enamored of the project at the outset then lose interest when the luster became worn by very hard work.”

Following his year at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, Shepard had been transferred to the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, where the family had relocated and where he now served as aircraft readiness officer, working with the commander of the Navy’s Atla
ntic Fleet. Though he was not currently a test pilot, Shepard figured his name would be near the top of NASA’s list. But by Friday of that week, he’d heard through the grapevine and in the halls of his Norfolk office that many of his test pilot colleagues had received invitations to come to the Pentagon for a secret briefing. Where the hell was his invitation? If they were looking for test pilots, he thought, shouldn’t they be asking the Navy’s best test pilot? He left work that night angry and a little chagrined, the start of what he’d later call a “miserable weekend.” He’d joke years later that he went
home and “kicked the dog, spanked the children. It was a terrible weekend. It really was.”

Louise could tell her husband was in a funk, which was rare for him. So when he asked her what she thought of the whole astronaut thing, she tried to be upbeat. “
How would you feel if I
was
one of the hundred and ten?” he asked. “It doesn’t really matter because you’re not,” she said. “But if you were, I’d say, ‘Just go right ahead.’ I think it sounds wonderful.”

Then, first thing Monday morning, a young staffer came up to Shepard and handed him an envelope. Inside was NASA’s invitation. It had arrived the previous week. “Somehow it got misplaced,” the sheepish young officer said, and Shepard didn’t know whether to punch him or promote him.

He rushed home for lunch to tell Louise, who knew before he opened his mouth because Shepard was beaming from ear to ear. That night he and Louise had a long talk about what this meant, for him and for the family. And he asked her what they should do if he actually got selected. “Why are you asking me?” she said. “You know you’ll do it anyway.”

The 110 test pilots were divided into three groups, and the first two groups were told to come to the Pentagon—secretly, and in civilian clothes—for a briefing on their potential role in a top-secret mission; the third group was put on hold. The selection committee was looking for men “who were not only in top physical condition but had demonstrated that they had the capability to stay alive under tough and dangerous assignments.” Skeptics— notably the famed test pilot Chuck Yeager, an early and snide critic of the astronauts and their NASA bosses—would snicker that what NASA really wanted
were guinea pigs. But Shepard didn’t see it that way. He saw aviation at “a crossroads, and space was the new turning point . . . something new and important.”

Following the Pentagon briefing, each of the sixty-nine candidates was asked whether or not he wished to volunteer for the astronaut program. A young Navy psychologist, Robert Voas, conducted many of those brief interviews and expected many of the men—especially those who, like Shepard, seemed entrenched in their military careers—to decline. To Voas’
surprise, nine out of ten said yes. One man had even recently been offered a four-year scholarship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and after saying no repeatedly, he returned to Voas’ office to say, “The hell with MIT—yes.”

Shepard also said yes, and was called back a few days later for a more extended interview. At the end of that interview he sat in Voas’ office, growing impatient as the psychologist ruffled through some papers. Finally Voas asked Shepard if he’d like to continue on to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for some physical and psychological tests. Voas thought Shepard was going to jump up and kiss him. He then handed Shepard a phone and told him to call his wife, but Shepard said he already knew she was “all for it.” Secretly Louise hoped that the odds were too great. When a friend asked Louise if s
he was worried, she said she wasn’t because “he’s only one out of a hundred.”

NASA had expected a quarter of the 110 to volunteer, but when nearly 90 percent of the first two groups said they were interested, the third group that had been on hold was cut loose. Then the initial sixty-nine volunteers were pared to thirty-two, who proceeded to the next level of testing. Each was assigned a number—no names were to be used, everything was hush-hush— and told to wear civilian clothes when he reported to Albuquerque. There the candidates would experience one of the more ridiculous and, for some, degrading weeks of their lives.

The degradation could be blamed on a few of the doctors who had been appointed to President Eisenhower’s scientific advisory committee, men who had started making noisy predictions about the likely effects of space travel and zero gravity on the human body: blindness, brain damage, heart attack, inability to eat or swallow. To shut those critics up, NASA hired Dr. W. Randolph “Randy” Lovelace to conduct some of the most intense medical experiments ever inflicted on a willing human subject. Lovelace’s New Mexico clinic was home to the nation’s best aerospace doctors, experts in an em
erging field who soug
ht answers to such questions as: What happens to a man’s body and mind at five thousand miles an hour?

Questions about the medical side effects of flight had been around since 1784, when the first humans left the earth’s surface in a balloon. But in the 1950s the rapid evolution of high-speed flight led to the specialized field of aerospace medicine, which studied the physical effects of rapid acceleration and deceleration and whose doctors contributed such advances as pressurized suits worn in high-altitude flights and restraint systems in jets. Lovelace himself was hard-nosed and well respected in his field, but test pilots harbor a built-in enmity for doctors, who have it i
n their power to ground a flyer for some previously undetected medical defect. The astronaut candidates would ultimately consider Lovelace and his stoic, lab-coated assistants ghouls.

The ghouls didn’t deny it: “We were trying to drive them crazy,” one doctor said.

For twelve or more hours a day, at all hours of day and night, over the course of one week, Lovelace’s team measured and sampled every spot on the thirty-two astronaut candidates’ bodies. No muscle, bone, or gland went untouched. Shepard had his throat scraped, gave stool and semen samples, had jolts of electricity zapped into his hand, and had a probe nicknamed the “steel eel” shoved into his rectum. He wasn’t alone in feeling like a lab rat beneath the microscope of these all-too-serious doctors with their air of superiority. One frustrated astronaut candidate, who had a diff
icult time producing big enough stool samples, left an enema bag on a general’s desk in protest. Another candidate called the tests “an embarrassment, a degrading experience . . . sick doctors working on well patients.” Yet another called the doctors “sadists.”

One day Shepard the prankster decided to mess with them. As a bespectacled young doctor slowly inserted the “steel eel” into Shepard’s rectum, Shepard began moaning and slowly rocking his hips back and forth. “Oh, yeah,” he said in a low whisper. “
Mmmm, that’s good. More . . . give me more.” Another astronaut candidate who was in the room—John “Mitch” Mitchell, Shepard’s former flying partner from the USS
Oriskany—
shook with laughter as the stone-faced young doctor turned cherry red.

At the end of that week, the candidates were sent to another Frankensteinian medical facility, the Wright Aeromedical Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio (named for the Wright brothers), for equally bizarre psychological, psychiatric, and physical tests. There Shepard withstood cold water pumped into his ears, stuck his feet in a bucket of ice water for an hour, and sat for two hours in a 135-degree sauna. He was strapped into the seat of a maniacal machine that jackhammered his body, and then sat for many h
ours in a darkened, soundproof isolation chamber. He had more probes stuck inside him. They took pictures of his naked body from every conceivable angle; he even had to squat over the camera for what was surely the most humiliating photograph of his career. “Nothing is sacred anymore,” one astronaut candidate said. Indeed, the scientists went so far as to wonder if the candidates’ interest in flying jets might be related to feelings of sexual inadequacy, and therefore spent a considerable amount of time reviewing what they could of each candidate’s adolescence.

Shepard at least understood the point of the physical tests: The doctors wanted to make sure they picked the unbreakable ones. “We looked for real men,” a NASA official said at the time. Onto their clipboards, the doctors scribbled notes not only on the results of the specific tests but also about the candidates’ reactions to the test. How did they respond when told to stick their feet in ice water? How did they interact with the testers—angrily or with self-control? Those who seemed to exhibit “emotional stability,” said psychologist Voas, “came out with a few extra points.” In this pur
suit of flawless all-around males, candidates lost points for the most minor imperfection; a Navy pilot named Wally Schirra wa
s told to have a lump surgically removed from his throat before he could proceed through the tests. “We wanted perfect physical and emotional and aesthetic specimens,” Voas said.

Still, what really perplexed Shepard were the personality questions, such as the analogy tests (“light is to dark as pleasure is to . . . ?”) and the annoying true-or-false quizzes. “I often worry about my health—true or false?” or “Sometimes I feel like cursing—true or false?” That day the answer to the latter was clearly true. The psychological tests were excruciating and maddening for him.

Among the 566 personal questions asked of each man were: “What was your true motivation for joining the program? Are you too egocentric to work with a team?” One exercise required him to express his “real feelings” by completing sentences such as “I am sorry that . . .” and “I can never . . .” Finally Shepard was told to submit twenty different answers to the question “Who am I?” Guys like John Glenn—an amateur poet who wrote poems while locked in the isolation chamber—had no trouble. Glenn started scribbling, “I am a man, I am a Marine, I am a flyer, I am a husband, I am an off
icer, I am a father . . .”

For Shepard, being asked about himself, his emotions, was painful and awkward. “It is always difficult for me to analyze my own feelings or to figure out exactly what is going on in my brain and why,” he said at the time. Had he been forced to answer the “Who am I?” question with brutal frankness, he might have included such responses as “I am an egotist, I am a hard-drinking liberty hound, I am an insubordinate flat-hatter, I am a philanderer . . .”

Shepard believed a man’s actions, his military record, and his reputation should speak for themselves. He didn’t see the relevance of the doctors’ questions about who he was and what he wanted. “Al thought it was a bunch of nonsense,” John Glenn recalled. Fortunately for Shepard, he kept his complaints to
himself and showed only good-natured compliance. The doctors, in turn, came to think of Shepard as “motivated.”

In addition to the medical responsibility the doctors felt in administering their tests was a broader sense of the historical responsibility involved—these tests, they reasoned, could ultimately decide who becomes the first man in space. The sense among the doctors was that they were, in effect, choosing the next Lindbergh—or Columbus. “Everyone had in mind that these would probably be famous people,” said Voas. “And we wanted those who’d be good representatives.”