As the space race became increasingly public and competitive, so did Gilruth’s Space Task Group’s search for engineers, the people who would take the calculations and theories of scientists and turn them into reality. In the summer of 1960, the Space Task Group had seven hundred employees. Two years later, that number would grow to over two thousand. At the same time, NASA was setting up recruitment offices in major cities that would help swell the ranks to sixteen thousand.
Such aggressive efforts were necessary if the Americans were to have any hope of competing with the Russians. At the time, there was such an engineer shortage in America that on one Sunday in 1958, the New York Times ran 728 want ads for engineers and scientists, and most of the ads were for multiple openings. Across the board, these missile, aircraft, and electronics companies lured new grads with good salaries, bonuses, and various amenities.
But it was hard to beat the appeal of NASA, whose message, sometimes in these exact words, was “We’re going to the moon. Want to come along?” NASA recruited on college campuses, by word of mouth, and through referrals and ads in trade journals like Aviation Week and Missiles and Rockets. “Destination Moon!” shouted one such ad, and another began “You can be sure to play an important part in the exploration of space when you join NASA.” Few engineers could resist this siren call. For a generation of young men raised on Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon; the smart, hard science fiction that began appearing in the forties; the sci-fi films of the fifties; and, of course, the writings and appearances of von Braun in books, magazines, and TV, it was nearly impossible to walk away from NASA. But even without the lure of romance, in the old-fashioned sense of adventure, the attraction was immense. The pay there was decent, around five thousand dollars for a young man with an aeronautical engineering degree. That was less than the private industry paid but still a good starting salary for a young, single college grad, especially a small-town boy from a midwestern school, as so many of them were, kids whose families didn’t have much money and who had had to work hard to afford college. But more important, the program promised to be the largest engineering project since the Panama Canal, and a successful flight to the moon would be the greatest technological achievement in history.
It didn’t take the kids fresh out of college long to figure out the culture of NASA, which was sink-or-swim—the ones who didn’t blend in or who didn’t learn fast enough were there one day and gone the next.
Early on, the engineers ran into the astronauts quite often. One young man had been miserably pursuing his master’s degree when he noticed a NASA recruiting booth in the library. He signed up, quit school, and, four months later, after background checks, was told to report to Cape Canaveral. At the end of his first day, one of his co-workers drove him over to see a simulator, and the new hire was invited to take a spin. He did. When he climbed out, everyone was gone except Gus Grissom, who offered him a ride back to the main building. They jumped in Grissom’s new blue Corvette and roared off half a mile up a gravel road at eighty-five miles an hour. Then the astronaut veered onto a two-lane paved road and floored it to a hundred and twenty. He turned to the engineer with a grin and said, “Are you having a good time?” Then he entered the freeway and pushed it to a hundred and forty. Just having fun with the new guy.
As America’s seven instant heroes took a crash course in the brand-new job of astronaut, other areas of the program worked through various problems and difficulties. After more than a year of political infighting between the air force and the army—the latter reluctant to give up its Germans, who had been anointed great patriots after the successful Explorer launch—and of lobbying by NASA administrator T. Keith Glennan, the genteel former president of the highly regarded Case Institute of Technology, Eisenhower finally approved the Redstone Arsenal’s transfer. Von Braun would be director, of course, and though his administrative heads were American-born, all of his sixteen technical department leaders had worked with him since Peenemünde except for one who had been a Luftwaffe pilot during the war. Many of the German specialists had been wooed by private industries, most of them defense-oriented, but they were happy at Huntsville and intensely loyal to von Braun, their savior. He had rescued them from almost certain death and brought them to the promised land to prosper and devote their lives to their truest love—rocketry. They all felt the same way he did about spaceflight. “We’d really like to go to the moon instead of aiming at puny targets two hundred miles away,” one said, off the record.
Von Braun had initially considered NASA a “baby agency” that wouldn’t be around for long, and he seemed to be favoring the air force as his next employer. “All I really want is a rich uncle,” he told a colleague. The air force was not yielding the high ground easily. Why shouldn’t it handle the exploration of space, which was after all just an extension of the airspace it already had dominion over? Von Braun’s army team at Huntsville had been working on design studies for a super-booster since the spring of 1957, six months before Sputnik was launched. Von Braun was sure of America’s future among the stars and confident there would be a need for a rocket powerful enough to launch heavy payloads—astronauts, probes, space-station components, and so forth—into space. Sputnik’s launch had gotten those plans funded in August of 1958. But when Saturn’s rising costs led to rumors of the project’s cancellation and the likely loss of 75 percent of the Redstone Arsenal’s jobs, NASA suddenly became a much more attractive home. Von Braun had come around, and when Eisenhower finally approved the transfer of his team and its facilities, he was convinced it was the right decision and that NASA would be well financed. Von Braun breathed easier in January of 1960, when his Saturn became a national priority and Eisenhower reluctantly agreed to a large increase in the booster’s budget.
On July 1, 1960, the Redstone Arsenal was renamed the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, after the chief of staff of the army under Roosevelt and Truman. Finally, von Braun and his rocketeers would be free of military supervision—in his words, they’d be working on “spaceflight for spaceflight’s sake.” Although some at NASA were cool to von Braun—Chris Kraft despised his “Teutonic arrogance” and his celebrity, and the two had almost come to blows at a party—Gilruth was glad to have him, or at least have his rocketry expertise. Privately, he told Kraft, “He doesn’t care what flag he fights for.” (After a few clashes early on, as each man jockeyed for more control within NASA, von Braun and Kraft worked well together and came to respect each other. But Gilruth never quite accepted the former SS member; after a few drinks, he would complain about “our damned Nazi.”)
The astronauts, for their part, overlooked their former enemy’s equivocal allegiance. Impressed with his passion for manned spaceflight and won over by his charisma, they had bonded with von Braun on a visit to Huntsville just a few months after their selection. He had only recently given up a longtime desire to voyage into space himself, and he took a liking to these men who would go in his place.
As the space program evolved, the astronauts endured long workdays, and much of their time was spent on the road. They frequently traveled and trained together, except for the week or so each month that they devoted to keeping up with their specific areas of responsibility. It was a busy schedule, and it would get even busier, for politicians, contractors, businessmen, and just about everyone else wanted to be seen with them, so the astronauts tried to oblige. Sometimes that meant accommodating a congressman or business leader supportive of the program; at the request of a Missouri senator, Scott Carpenter once appeared at a supermarket opening in St. Louis. The astronauts quickly became popular guest speakers for civic groups, and NASA’s public relations department was eager to get the word out, so they developed a schedule: they would take turns, each astronaut spending a week at a time giving the same old speech and answering the same questions.
But “wine, women, and song” was part of the test-pilot credo, so the men managed to make time for after-hours carousing and, often, companionship, and since they wer
e household names and oozed testosterone, they had no problem finding companions. John Glenn, married since 1943 to pretty, dark-haired Annie Castor, whom he had known since they were toddlers in the same playpen, resisted those temptations, but most of the others didn’t. And when a local car dealer offered them all new Corvettes at ridiculously low lease prices, Glenn declined and opted for a station wagon instead. Over the next few years, stories of Shepard, Grissom, and Cooper racing their sports cars on the two-lane roads around Cape Canaveral, up and down Highway A1A, and through the small burg of Cocoa Beach, became legendary. (So did tales of their romantic entanglements.) When people saw a square-jawed guy in his mid-thirties wearing a short-sleeved Ban-Lon knit shirt and aviator sunglasses zoom past them going way above the speed limit, they knew they’d just gotten a glimpse of Cape royalty.
Before the air force began using the Cape as a missile-testing range in 1950, Cocoa Beach had been a sleepy little town with a few bars and restaurants. Even by 1959, the first year of the Mercury program, there were only a few decent-size motels in Cocoa Beach, and the Seven would often stay at the ninety-nine-room Starlite. It featured a coffee shop, a restaurant, and the space-themed Starlite Lounge, a far cry from the austere crew quarters and bunk beds on the second floor of the Cape’s Hangar S, the structure originally built for Vanguard that had been transferred to the Space Task Group. The Starlite’s manager, a gregarious Auschwitz survivor named Henri Landwirth, befriended the astronauts and went out of his way to indulge them and their friends. (When Bob Gilruth stayed there for the early launches, Landwirth made sure there was a pitcher of Beefeater martinis in his room at the end of the day.)
The motel quickly became Astronaut Central, attracting reporters, women, and anyone who wanted to get a glimpse of genuine American heroes before one of them got blown to bits atop a military rocket. Landwirth would later refer to the festive goings-on as “a giant fraternity party.” The fact that he hired the most attractive waitresses he could find and that women hung around the large pool by day and the lounge by night hoping to meet an astronaut didn’t hurt the Starlite’s popularity. But late in 1959, when new owners began making big changes at the motel, Landwirth resigned and helped open a Holiday Inn nearby. All of the astronauts said they’d follow him to his new place of business, on one condition—that he would guarantee them rooms if they were in town. He agreed, so Astronaut Central, along with just about everyone associated with the Mercury project, moved to the Holiday Inn.
Glenn was older and perhaps more mature than the rest of the Mercury Seven, and he was worried that one big slipup would endanger the entire program, which still had more than its share of doubters in the government. Some scientists and congressmen insisted that human space exploration was too expensive and that using robots and machines would be safer, cheaper, and more effective. Any ammunition against the astronauts—the sullying of their public image, perhaps—might be used to cancel the Mercury project, which would sound the death knell for the advancement of manned flights. But most of the astronauts dismissed Glenn’s worries. Only Carpenter sided with Glenn, as he did on most subjects. It wasn’t long before the Mercury Seven became, at least away from the public eye, the Mercury Five and Two.
Things came to a head in December 1960, when Glenn was awakened by a two a.m. phone call in San Diego. It was a NASA public affairs spokesman begging for his help in convincing a West Coast paper not to publish compromising photos involving another astronaut. Glenn succeeded in doing that by appealing to the newspaper staff’s patriotism. Back at Langley, Glenn called a closed-door meeting of the Mercury Seven and read his comrades the riot act. He said the next screwup could blow it for all of them. The program meant too much to the country, he told them, “to see it jeopardized by anyone who couldn’t keep his pants zipped.”
All the men except Carpenter told Glenn to mind his own business.
Dwight Eisenhower had his reasons for never warming to the idea of manned space exploration. In addition to the enormous costs projected, which would prevent him from balancing the budget, he was leery of the potential military involvement. Till the end of his administration, he was adamant that there was no need for a space race or something as far-fetched as a moon program. He hadn’t expected much out of NASA, and he wanted to spend as little on it as possible. Toward that end, he cut the agency’s budget; the money available would barely support Mercury, and nothing beyond. Only a last-minute intercession by Glennan and his deputy administrator Hugh Dryden kept Eisenhower from announcing in his final State of the Union address that the nation would be abandoning manned space exploration after the Mercury program’s first orbital flight. In the closing months of 1960, Eisenhower withheld funds needed for feasibility studies on a Mercury follow-up program and for further work on the upper stages of von Braun’s Saturn booster. The future of manned spaceflight, so dependent on funding, looked bleak, particularly if the Republicans won the upcoming election.
In November 1960, Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard M. Nixon, lost a closely contested presidential race to a young, charismatic senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. A World War II hero, Kennedy, among his many other accomplishments, had written (albeit with significant help from his speechwriter Theodore Sorensen) a bestseller entitled Profiles in Courage, a book about decisive moments in American history.
One of the campaign issues that redounded to John F. Kennedy’s advantage and may have decided the election was the ginned-up “missile gap.” In truth, there was no such thing—or if there was, it was actually in America’s favor—but Kennedy’s repeated use of the term persuaded much of the electorate that the Eisenhower administration was weak on defense and that Nixon would be too. American launch failures after Sputnik, exaggerated public claims by the Soviets of their missile capabilities, and inflated U.S. Air Force estimates of the number of Russian weapons seemed to strengthen the assertion. After Kennedy’s election, the term missile gap, and the concept, faded away.
At the time, Kennedy wasn’t much interested in space, but his vice president, Lyndon Johnson—who had been instrumental in the creation of NASA—was, and Kennedy put him in charge of the space program.
NASA’s aim was to get a man into orbit as soon as possible. After that, as far as the public knew, plans were vague. But by January 1960, the higher-ups at NASA had concluded that the long-term goal after Mercury should be getting a man on the moon—or at least in an orbit around it. Even before the agency’s formation, Gilruth’s Space Task Group had focused on what should follow Mercury, and all of NASA’s field centers had begun research toward that goal. But they had been unable to proceed without executive approval, and Eisenhower’s aim to balance the budget precluded any such frivolous expenses. As a result, the plans were limited to feasibility and design studies. Then, on July 29, 1960, NASA announced an ambitious program involving a three-man spaceship very different from Mercury. This new spacecraft was to be larger, more powerful, and maneuverable, capable of circling the Earth and perhaps flying around the moon; it was seen as an intermediate step toward the establishment of a permanent manned space station above the Earth that “should lead ultimately toward manned landings on the moon and the planets.” When it was made public, the idea wasn’t much more than a vague concept, without capital or contracts. And if the president didn’t release the funds needed to develop something of substance, it would remain that way.
Still, a name had been chosen for the as-yet-undesigned spacecraft’s project. Abe Silverstein, head of the Office of Space Flight Programs, had come up with Mercury a year earlier, and he took it upon himself to name this project also. Like most of the names for American space projects, it would come from the world of mythology, and after scouring lists of ancient deities, Silverstein settled on one. At lunch with Gilruth, Faget, and Charles Donlan, Gilruth’s deputy director, he tried it out on them. They all liked it, so the program was officially named for the Greek god of music, medicine, and knowledge, a deity often identified with
Helios, whose horse-drawn chariot transported the sun across the sky: Apollo.
Chapter Four
Man on a Missile
With Mercury we are using a device that has to work nearly perfectly the first time or somebody is taking a one-way trip.
Walt Williams, Mercury Operations Director
Besides being older than the other six astronaut trainees, John Glenn had more combat experience. He had flown fifty-nine ground-support missions in the South Pacific during World War II and another sixty-three in Korea, where he shot down three MiGs in the last nine days of the war. Glenn was one hell of a pilot. He had been known to fly his plane up alongside another Marine’s, slip his wing under the other plane’s, and tap it gently. Ted Williams, the legendary baseball player who flew as Glenn’s wingman in Korea, once said, “The man is crazy.” The “Clean Marine,” as the press dubbed him, had settled down since then, and he wasn’t the engineer that Gus Grissom or Wally Schirra was, but he could still fly anything with wings better than almost anyone else.
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