Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (33 page)

One G is the equivalent of the earth’s gravitational pull. Two Gs is essentially gravity times two. So under two Gs of gravitational pressure, a 175-pound man would feel as if he weighed 350. As the centrifuge rotated faster and faster, the astronauts would be pushed into their couches beneath hundreds of pounds of pressure, pummeled by G loads more excruciating than any fighter pilot had ever felt.

NASA engineers had calculated that during their explosive launch from earth, the astronauts would experience at least five or six Gs—the equivalent of about half a ton of pressure for a 175-pound man. But there were unanswered questions about how many Gs they’d experience during their capsule’s plunge from the emptiness of space into the thick, friction-inducing air of the earth’s atmosphere. Ten? Fifteen? No one knew for sure, so the doctors decided to give the astronauts a taste of the worst.

At five or six Gs in the centrifuge, it was still possible—but just barely—for the astronauts to lift their arms and flip a few switches on the mock dashboard in front of them. At seven Gs they were slammed into the couch and incapable of movement, as if bags of cement had been stacked on their chest, legs, and arms. They had to tense their muscles to keep the blood from draining out of their head and causing them to black out.
With some practice, they reached inhumane G loads of sixteen; the record, achieved (on a dare) by an unassuming Navy lieutenant, was an astonishing 20 Gs. Such spins would smoosh back the skin on their face like Play-Doh. After such sessions, they’d find their backs splotched and red from broken blood vessels.

The technicians called the machine the “County Fair Killer.” Shepard called it an “oversize cream separator” that either “whips you or you whip it.” And Glenn, after one sixteen-G run, said, “It’s something I never want to do again.”

Another NASA film shows Shepard in late 1960 riding inside the centrifuge, flipping switches and talking into a microphone to a technician. While watching this film footage, it’s easy to tell when the capsule and its occupant have begun spinning faster and the Gs have begun building, because the flesh on Shepard’s face smears back from his cheekbones and his already buggy eyes get buggier and buggier.

As if such spinning wasn’t bad enough, NASA engineers then devised an even more gruesome exercise with the centrifuge. They had asked themselves: What if the astronaut’s capsule lands on its nose, instead of its behind? To test their assumptions, the engineers decided to measure the astronauts’ capacity for “reverse Gs.”

While the centrifuge arm was spinning and the astronaut was being shoved back into his contour couch, the engineers would rotate the capsule 180 degrees so that the man inside was abruptly thrown into his shoulder straps. They called it the EI/EO test, for “eyeballs in, eyeballs out,” which is exactly what happened. Shepard once told a reporter that it was a “real pleasure” to go from spinning forward to backward. But Glenn wasn’t the only one who found the test “sadistic.” One of NASA’s doctors tried the EI/EO and emerged hacking uncontrollably, unable to catch his breath; thro
ugh some testing the other doctors determined that his heart had slammed into one of his lungs and deflated it.

Much more enjoyable were the exercises that offered a few thrilling moments of weightlessness. The engineers knew at least this much about outer space: A capsule in orbit around earth is in constant “freefall,” and its occupants would also be “falling” in such a way that they’d be capable of swimming in air; if an airplane could simulate that free fall, the astronauts would experience weightlessness. The astronauts, wearing crash helmets, would sit in the padded cargo bay of a wide-body C-135 transport plane. The plane would fly in a steep ascent and then arc over into a steep descent. These “
parabolic” flights would give the astronauts about fifteen seconds of weightlessness, and they often goofed in front of the on-board cameras like school kids, wrestling with each other and doing back flips.

The weightlessness could sometimes come to an abrupt halt, however, and the men would slam into the padded floors and walls of the airplane.

As a group or in pairs, the astronauts also regularly visited the various plants where pieces of their spaceships were being built. Development of the capsules and rockets was proceeding more or less in tandem with the results of the astronauts’ training exercises, so that the findings of those exercises could be incorporated into design modifications. For example, the EI/EO test led to the development of stronger shoulder harnesses. Shepard and the others treasured their small role in the design of their capsules. The sense of empowerment was similar to what they all had fel
t as test pilots, informing manufacturers about how to correct defects in their airplanes.

But the astronauts soon discovered that their role in the capsule design was smaller than they had realized. One particularly distressing discovery was made when they all visited the McDonnell Aircraft plant in St. Louis in charge of manufacturing the capsules. The astronauts hadn’t realized until that day t
hat there would be no window in the little metal teepee. They were training to go on the greatest journey humans could have imagined, but except for a periscope that offered a blurry view of the outside of the capsule, they wouldn’t be able to see a goddamn thing.

Glenn called the oversight “unthinkable,” and all of them had to quietly wonder if Chuck Yeager had been right after all; they would just be guinea pigs in a windowless can. Such feelings inspired Shepard and the others to fight harder for design changes that they felt were crucial. Except for the first three capsules, which were too far along, all future capsules would have a window. And, in a battle that the astronauts considered their most important victory, all the capsules would be rigged with a guidance system (including the hand control) that allowed them to manually “fly”
the capsule. That victory was the result of their own what-if: What if all this fancy, automated equipment failed while they were in space and they had to bring the capsule back down themselves?

Some days the astronauts called “gee whiz days” because everything was new. They were learning things (about stars, constellations, and planets) and doing things (such as scuba diving in the Gulf of Mexico) that were exciting and challenging.

But the “gee whiz” days were balanced out by plenty of “oh shit” days when they realized, to their shock, how little NASA knew about its task. Sometimes it seemed that NASA and its contractors were making things up as they went along. That wasn’t far from the truth. “We were inundated with the newness of everything,” Christopher Kraft, NASA’s flight director, would later write.

In addition to the rocket boys—men like von Braun, who’d been building rockets their entire life—many of NASA’s first engineers came from the same world as Shepard, the aviation world. They were the men who had built and designed the planes and jets that Shepard once flew. But now, as partners with the rocket boys, many of the aviation engin
eers had to learn the basic theories of rocket propulsion; some engineers learned such lessons sitting in a high school classroom near Langley. “We were airplane people,” Kraft recalled. “I wasn’t the only engineer who was stunned at how much I didn’t know and how much I had to learn.”

Trickiest of all was turning ballistic rockets, which had been designed as bomb-carrying man-killers, into man-carriers. But as the hoped-for late 1960 or early 1961 manned launch drew closer, NASA’s engineers continued to frighten the astronauts with how much more they apparently still had to learn. Shepard and the others assembled at the Cape one night to watch the test launch of another one of Von Braun’s Redstones. As the countdown reached zero, fire and smoke erupted from the rocket’s base and quickly engulfed the entire Redstone. A projectile then shot straight up from the smoke and se
emed to zip out of view and into the night sky quicker than the eye could follow. “Look at the acceleration on that son of a bitch,” Kraft yelled.

But when the smoke cleared, they all saw that it wasn’t the booster rocket that had shot from the smoke—the Redstone was still standing on the launch pad. All that had zipped toward space was the rocket-propelled escape tower attached to the top of the capsule. A malfunction had caused it to ignite, but instead of pulling the capsule with it and away from the rocket—its sole purpose—the escape tower blasted away all alone.

A few seconds later, a huge orange parachute popped out of the top of the capsule, which remained bolted atop the failed Redstone. Seconds later, as the huge orange parachute billowed in the breeze, a poof of green stuff spewed out from the capsule’s tip—the dye that was supposed to mark the capsule’s spot and assist recovery crews when it landed in the ocean. The rocket stood mocking them, and the steady ocean breezes threatened to catch hold of the parachute, fill it with wind, and pull down the entire missile, which was still swollen, tick like, with highly explosive liquid fuel.

Kraft overheard some other engineers discussing how to release the pressurized fuel. Someone suggested getting a rifle-man to shoot a couple of holes in the side of the rocket to bleed off the pressure. Kraft couldn’t believe his ears. The slightest spark from a bullet could ignite the volatile mix of liquid oxygen and kerosene. Finally a brave McDonnell Aircraft employee crawled to the base of the rocket and shut down the ignition systems. “That was a hell of a mess,” Kraft said afterward.

Later they learned how a few millimeters could mean the difference between life and death for an astronaut. A cord ran from the base of the Redstone, which fed the rocket a steady supply of electricity right up to the moment of launch. When the rocket began to ascend, it would snap the cord and begin supplying its own electricity. But one prong on this rocket’s cord had been manufactured a fraction of an inch too short. The rocket lifted four inches off the ground but then the imperfect electrical cord disconnected a few milliseconds too soon, which automatically shut down the engines.

Such failed launches weren’t uncommon at a time when the success rate of certain American rockets hovered around an appalling 50 percent. Shepard’s response to such failures:
What
do you expect from rockets built by the lowest bidder?

By mid-1960, as the astronauts passed their first anniversary as a team and the training and traveling routine reached full speed, the seven were on the road constantly, hundreds of days a year— so much traveling that Gordo Cooper’s accountant told him he could pick any state he wanted as his residence for tax purposes.

When the pressure cooker weirdness, the interviews, and instant fame weighed too heavily, or when the ceaseless internal competition became too intense, the men sought out some form of escape. Sometimes that meant playing a crafty practical joke. Sometimes it meant purely physical distraction:
water-skiing, handball, fishing, hunting. Or hauling ass in a sports car. Or a few drinks with a female fan. “We were always looking for ways to let off steam,” Slayton once said.

One victim of such steam letting was Stanley White, an Air Force doctor who had helped NASA select the astronauts and worked with them at Langley. White was part of the astronauts’ medical team. A jovial, balding man with a proud streak of practicality, he had just purchased one of the bulbous new Volkswagen Beetles and bragged annoyingly to the astronauts about its performance and incredible gas mileage. The astronauts, led by Wally Schirra, also a car enthusiast (and the lead practical joker of the group), decided to humble the man. He and Shepard began adding a quart of gas to White’s Vo
lkswagen every other day, and White began to rave that his gas mileage was even better than he thought. Then Schirra and Shepard began siphoning off a quart here and there, and loved it as White came into the office bewildered and, day by day, “went berserk.” Such “gotchas” would become one of the favorite pastimes of the Mercury Seven, and they would occur more frequently when a man named Shorty entered their lives.

Five-foot-six-inch John A. “Shorty” Powers was a brusque Air Force colonel who took over as NASA’s chief of public information. Shorty had been a combat pilot in World War II and Korea before switching to public information jobs with the Air Force. He had an impish grin and a deep, honeyed voice that be-lied his small physical stature. When he joined the astronauts at their headquarters at Langley, right from the start he felt as if he was a “whippersnapper” whom none of them “respected.” “They were leery of me and I was scared to death of them,” Shorty admitted a decade later. “I
had been a military combat aviator for years, had been to Edwards [Air Force Base], had seen flight tests. But these guys just plain scared me.”