Shoot for the Moon

by James Donovan

  In May 1959, the astronauts visited the McDonnell plant in San Diego to inspect a mock-up Mercury capsule that was radically different from any craft they had ever flown. Deke Slayton stated the obvious: “The thing ain’t got no wings!” They were surprised to find that there was no front window, just two small portholes that were too far away from the astronaut to be useful. Pilots needed a front window—at least, they had since Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic without one and had to use a periscope to see around his extra-large fuel tank—and after they insisted, one was added, though it wouldn’t be available for the first mission. Another problem was the door—there wasn’t one, or not one that could be opened from the inside, since the hatch would be welded shut after the astronaut wedged himself into the capsule. That was fine for the structural integrity of the spacecraft but not for the man inside, especially if he wanted to egress quickly. So the hatch was redesigned with explosive bolts that allowed the astronaut to open it should that become necessary. There were other design problems the astronauts noted—the instrument panel and switch accessibility, for instance—that led to major changes. But the Seven didn’t agree on everything. For example, Deke Slayton didn’t like the three-axis attitude-control stick, which enabled a pilot to manage yaw, pitch, and roll with one hand. Slayton lobbied for an aircraft’s stick-and-rudder foot pedals, but the other astronauts didn’t join him, so the hand controller stayed.

  Weight issues, and the brevity of the first few flights, dictated a meager reserve-fuel capacity. No one expected that to be a problem.

  One factor dominated all spacecraft-design decisions and always would: the unforgiving equation involving weight, gravity, and thrust. The Atlas, which would be used for orbital missions, was over four times more powerful than the Redstone, but it would not be available for manned use for some time. The Redstone’s limited thrust of eighty thousand pounds dictated that the capsule be small and relatively light. Every pound, every ounce, was important.

  The Mercury Seven began training, and so did another group of American spacefarers. They underwent similar tests, and they would face the same mortal dangers, though they hadn’t volunteered.

  The job of astronaut was hazardous, but it was safer than the job of astrochimp. In the earliest days of space exploration, other life-forms had been hurled into the void atop primitive boosters: rabbits, mice, fruit flies, and so on. But as it became increasingly clear that Homo sapiens would at some point journey into space, nonhuman simians quickly became the standard passengers. (In Russia, dogs preceded humans, since they were frequent medical-research subjects and easier to work with than chimps.) Many nonhuman spacefarers had to give their lives for their hominid cousins before a spacecraft was officially “man-rated”—that is, deemed safe to transport a human into space and back to Earth.

  The army had been investigating the biological effects of space travel on primates since April 1948, when a small rhesus named Albert was rocketed thirty-nine miles into the atmosphere in a capsule aboard one of von Braun’s V-2s; his oxygen supply failed, and he suffocated. The next year, in June 1949, another rhesus, Albert II, rode a rocket eighty-three miles into the stratosphere—technically becoming the first Earthling in space—and survived, at least long enough to die on impact after a parachute failure. In September 1949, Albert III, a cynomolgus monkey, died when his V-2 exploded at thirty-five thousand feet, and in December, Albert IV, another rhesus, perished on impact after another parachute failure, which was also what happened to Albert V in April 1951.

  Not until September 1951 did a primate launched into space survive the impact. A rhesus named Albert VI and eleven mice shipmates reached an altitude of forty-five miles and returned safely, though Albert VI died two hours later, as did two of the mice, from overheating in the sealed capsule while waiting for their recovery team. Eight months later, two cynomolgus monkeys named Patricia and Mike survived a quick jaunt fifteen miles into the atmosphere.

  By that time, two Russian dogs had survived suborbital flights and returned to Earth safely. The Soviets flew so many animals that one orbital launch, in August 1960, carried two dogs, a rabbit, forty-two mice, two rats, many flies, and several plants and fungi. (One NASA engineer called it “the herd shot ’round the world.”) They all survived the journey.

  After the Mercury project became official, monkeys continued to be sent into space in capsules atop various rockets, and most survived; in May 1959, aboard a Jupiter, Able, a rhesus monkey, and Baker, a squirrel monkey, penetrated three hundred miles into space and survived thirty-eight g’s during deceleration. The Mercury capsule and its planned booster, von Braun’s Redstone, would be next.

  A few days after their April 1959 press conference, America’s human astronauts reported for training to Langley Research Center—a large, ordinary-looking World War I–era building they shared with the Space Task Group. They were given a single large office to use; seven steel desks and chairs were wedged into it in a U shape. Their nineteen-year-old secretary sat at a desk outside. Most of her job consisted of handling their mail, a task that would soon become overwhelming due to the sheer volume of it.

  For the rest of 1959, the men took crash courses in everything space-related. These were airplane pilots who knew little about rockets and missiles. They received graduate-level instruction from scientists and engineers on astronomy, meteorology, geography, aviation biology, physiology, rocketry, and more. None of their teachers had ever taught astronauts before, so the lectures were wide-ranging, though the basic format drew heavily from traditional flight training and test-pilot methods. They spent endless hours becoming familiar with every phase of their spacecraft’s planned flight and every one of its systems. Because the actual vehicles had not yet been built, the astronauts had to settle for reviewing design drawings and blueprints. Eventually the Mercury Seven would employ simulators, but since no one knew what the controls of their spacecraft would look like, they couldn’t practice flying it, so most of their early training was environmental rather than procedural.

  Scientists attempted to familiarize the men with various conditions of spaceflight, such as weightlessness, heat, pressure, acceleration and deceleration forces—in short, every aspect of what an astronaut might experience during a ride on a rocket into space. Training sessions involved heat and pressure chambers and many hours riding the unforgiving centrifuge, in which they endured as many as sixteen g’s and learned techniques to build up their tolerance. Another training rig was a gimbaled, caged whirligig with the ominous acronym MASTIF (Multiple-Axis Space Test Inertia Facility). It consisted of three cages made of aluminum tubes, one inside the other and each hinged to the next, that rotated independently and on different axes. This fiendish device could spin a man at thirty revolutions a minute in three axes, and testing had determined a human tolerance of about thirty seconds, beyond which even the most experienced pilot would toss his cookies. A red “chicken switch” button set off a loud klaxon that told technicians to kill the machine. One ride on the MASTIF was enough for the Seven—“You even felt like getting sick if you just stood there and watched another astronaut take his turn,” said Gus Grissom. Then there was the Slow Rotating Room, designed to accustom its occupants to a spinning spacecraft. Finally, they spent valuable time learning to deal with weightlessness while flying in a zero-gravity-inducing ballistic parabola in an F-100 trainer. C-130 and C-135 cargo planes could do the trick for thirty seconds, allowing them to float and do flips in the much larger cabin cleared out for just that purpose. Those sessions, at least, were pain-free and enjoyable.

  The men were expected to keep themselves in top physical shape but were not told how to do it, so each one decided on his own regimen. John Glenn ran every morning—he felt he had to, to combat a weight problem. Scott Carpenter lifted barbells and exercised on a trampoline. Wally Schirra and Gus Grissom played a lot of handball, and the others joined in now and then, with Alan Shepard emerging as the best player. A quick, strenuous game of handball would b
ecome the favorite workout of the astronaut corps.

  Although NASA employed a team of physicians, a twenty-three-year-old air force nurse named Dee O’Hara was assigned to monitor their health, at first only when they visited Cape Canaveral for a mission, then later on a regular basis. Initially she was intimidated by them—they had become major celebrities, and there were few women in the world of spaceflight—but the astronauts put her at ease right away, and they soon came to trust the always cheerful and very capable O’Hara. Before a flight, she was the only one they would allow to draw their blood. Pilots as a rule avoided doctors—physicians had the power to ground a pilot for any one of a seemingly endless list of reasons—but O’Hara made a deal with the astronauts: if one of them came to her with a medical problem, she would keep it private unless it compromised a mission.

  Since there was no guarantee that a spacecraft would end up where it was supposed to when it returned, they also took water-, jungle-, and desert-survival courses in far-flung parts of the world. The survival trips made for great photo ops for Life magazine, which had negotiated a five-hundred-thousand-dollar deal with NASA for exclusive magazine and book rights to the stories of the seven men and their families. The money would be split among them equally over the next three or four years—the length of time the program was estimated to last. This was a boon to the men, who were each being paid only a standard officer’s salary, and would enable them to buy or build houses later.

  The Mercury Seven began to spend increasingly longer periods at the production plants contracted to build various components of the Mercury project, not only to attend design briefings and inspect and critique production for improvement, but also to inspire craftsmen and technicians there to the highest levels of workmanship. Grissom, perhaps the most introverted of the Mercury Seven and certainly the most tight-lipped, was present at a gathering of eighteen thousand employees at the Convair plant in San Diego, California, where the Atlas rocket was under construction, and he was asked to say something to the crowd. He walked up to the microphone and said, “Well—do good work!” and then turned and sat down. The workers roared their approval and adopted the phrase as their mission statement. Posters of Grissom captioned with his brief statement were produced, and a huge banner with the words was hung above the plant’s work bay.

  Each astronaut was also assigned a specific area of responsibility. Glenn was given cockpit layout, Schirra the pressure suit, and so on. Each would regularly brief the other six on developments in his specialty.

  The Seven had barely begun training when they were flown down to Cape Canaveral on May 18 to see their first missile launch—an Atlas, similar to the one that would eventually boost one of them into orbit. A minute after the rocket lifted off and just after it began to nose over toward the horizon, it exploded into a million pieces. It was the fifth straight Atlas failure. The astronauts looked at one another, and Shepard said to Glenn, “Well, I’m glad they got that one out of the way.” In December, only one-third of U.S. satellite-launch attempts reached orbit. That was a fine average in baseball but not encouraging in the field of manned spaceflight.

  As a result, the astronauts were less than optimistic about their chances. At a December press conference they were asked about the odds of their coming through alive. Oklahoma-born Gordon Cooper, the youngest one at thirty-two, answered first. “Well,” he drawled, “as the engineers say, barring any unforeseen circumstances, I’d say we’ve got one hundred percent chance of success.” Alan Shepard added, “We might lose the first guy, but the second, third, or fourth would make it.”

  In July 1960, when another Atlas exploded soon after liftoff, that booster’s failure rate reached 45 percent. Since the rocket had not met its mission objectives, an exhaustive review of the entire Mercury-Atlas program was undertaken. The Mercury-Redstone program continued, though that too was experiencing delays, which made for bad press. Despite the criticism and the fact that not a single mission had been carried out yet, Gilruth began wondering what would follow Mercury. No one knew for sure. He thought the program might be a dead end, phased out after its three-year goal was achieved. His Space Task Group had some grandiose plans, but nothing had been approved. For now, they all threw themselves into the formidable job ahead of them.

  On the other side of the globe, the Russians hadn’t sent a man into space yet, but they continued to earn headlines with various firsts. In September 1959, the space probe Luna 2 was deliberately crashed into the moon, becoming the first man-made object placed there, however violently. Three weeks later, on October 4, another probe, Luna 3, flew around the moon and sent back the first photographs of its far side. The United States was still a distant second in the prestige department, even though outside the Soviet Union, little information about the Russian space program was available. But its director—known only as the Chief Designer to the Russian public and the West—took note of the announcement of the Mercury Seven astronauts and began preparations for his own corps of spacemen.

  In mid-November of 1959, von Braun’s old mentor Hermann Oberth, who was now in the United States working as a technical consultant on the Atlas rocket, claimed to have intelligence reports that the Soviets had launched a manned spacecraft in 1958 that crashed, killing the pilot. In December, an Italian news agency announced unconfirmed reports from “most reliable sources” that four Russian cosmonauts, including one woman, had died in spaceflight. A few Soviet academicians promised a manned flight to the moon in the not-too-distant future. That seemed unlikely, but what would come next was anyone’s guess.

  Early in January 1961, six chimpanzees and their medical teams and handlers were moved from Holloman Aerospace Medical Center in New Mexico to Cape Canaveral. These Mercury Six primates—four females and two males—were ready, though perhaps not willing, to risk their lives for the sake of American prestige. Over the next several weeks, for hours each day, they were strapped onto small contour couches in mock-ups of the Mercury capsule, and they became accustomed to it and to the timed tasks involving a panel of red, white, and blue lights and two levers that they had been training with at Holloman. Two of them, Chang and Enos, even experienced brief spells of weightlessness on the cargo planes and trained on the centrifuge.

  The astronauts had to put up with a lot from their fellow test pilots. Part of the problem was that the men would be flying a capsule requiring little actual piloting, since it would be controlled almost entirely by automatic electronic signals. “Backing up his onboard systems and taking over in the event of malfunction”—that was how one NASA official described the job of astronaut. It sounded far removed from the stick-and-rudder work they prided themselves on, and they had to endure ribbing from other test pilots, who pointed out that they would ride the rocket, not pilot it. “Man in a can,” a popular phrase bandied about, became “Spam in a can.”

  The most vociferous critic of the program was America’s best-known test pilot, Chuck Yeager, the man who had broken the sound barrier in an X-1 experimental plane in 1947 and would soon take command of the air force’s test-pilot school at Edwards AFB. He was heard to say that the astronauts were going to have to sweep the monkey shit out of the capsule before they rode it into space. Yeager hadn’t attended college, thus making him ineligible for the program, which might have colored his opinion, and there very well might have been a degree of envy on the part of Yeager and other test pilots over the attention—and the Life magazine money, a hefty twenty-four thousand dollars a year each—the Mercury Seven were receiving. But even the folks at MIT, selected by NASA to develop the capsule’s guidance, navigation, and control systems, cracked jokes about the monkeys: “After the chimp, the chump.” The astronaut trainees tried to shrug off the ridicule, but it rankled. In October 1959, at the annual meeting of the exclusive Society of Experimental Test Pilots, Deke Slayton gave a speech specifically intended to, in his words, “defuse some of this Spam bullshit.” He made the case that experimental test pilots were necessary in spaceflight,
since the likelihood of a failure or an emergency would require their experience, knowledge, and quick reactions. The audience gave him a standing ovation.

  But the apes made everything worse. Other test pilots sneered at the primates preceding the astronauts in the capsule. If a monkey could do it, they opined, it couldn’t be much of a challenge. Did Charles Lindbergh have a monkey fly the Spirit of St. Louis first? The Mercury Seven were used to flying experimental planes before the kinks had been worked out. The increased hazards involved in a space venture made no difference to them—in their minds, they believed they had risked far greater dangers, not only during test flights but also in wartime combat missions. They understood that the simian experiments were necessary, but they didn’t like it. They would gladly have flown the risky monkey missions themselves, the dangers be damned.

  But given the complexities and inherent dangers of spaceflight, the complex calculations necessary for navigation and trajectory, the massive rocket thrust needed for liftoff, the precise in-flight adjustments required, and the perils of reentry, the creators of Mercury had known from the beginning that the spacecraft would be controlled by a group of engineers on the ground who could monitor its many systems. The pilot would be secondary to the engineer, at least for the time being. And the chimp flights would continue.

  In the summer of 1960, the astronauts started using a more sophisticated simulator, the Mercury Procedures Trainer, which provided a reasonable facsimile of actual flight in the spacecraft. The trainer featured an exact replica of the cockpit and instrumentation that used state-of-the-art computers to simulate every conceivable in-flight emergency situation—275 separate systems failures, to be exact. To further mimic an actual flight, the astronauts trained in their pressure suits until they could do entire missions with their eyes closed and still not miss flicking the right switch or pushing the right button. Eventually they began practicing in the capsule itself, each spending endless hours on his back strapped onto the contour couch Faget’s team had designed specifically for his body to help him withstand the expected fearsome pressures of liftoff and then reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere. And since there was no urine-collection device in the pressure suit—the first few missions weren’t expected to last more than a quarter of an hour or so, and it hadn’t been deemed necessary—they learned to just let go if necessary and allow their thick underclothing to absorb it.