Shoot for the Moon

by James Donovan

  He was also a master of the art of sniveling. The term was used among pilots to describe “maneuvering”—working yourself into a program or flight whether it was your job or not. In a sense, Glenn had sniveled his way into the Mercury program without even knowing he was doing it. One of the requirements was a college degree, which he didn’t have—after Pearl Harbor was hit, he had quit college to enlist—and Glenn was dropped from the pool of candidates. But a former Marine Corps officer showed NASA’s selection board Glenn’s academic records, which included a surplus of credits from night school and his technical flight-test reports. Convinced that Glenn had more than the equivalent of a college degree, the administrators put him back on the list.

  But his latest attempt at sniveling had been a failure.

  Since their selection, all seven of the astronauts had vied to pilot the first flight into space. They worked well as a team, but each man thought he was the best and should be the first one to go up. That confidence—not arrogance, but a hard-earned faith in his own abilities—was hardwired into every test pilot, especially these seven: “Maybe just a little arrogance,” Glenn would write later.

  After the April 9, 1959, press conference to introduce the astronauts to the world, Glenn had decided to move to Langley AFB, where Mercury was located, and live there Monday through Friday so he could better focus on the program. While the other six commuted from their nearby homes, he returned to his family in Arlington, a hundred and eighty miles away, only on the weekends. To make up for his lack of engineering experience, he worked diligently to master the Mercury systems. He spent more time on the testing programs than the others, and his scores in most cases were slightly higher. He ran two miles before breakfast every day to lose twenty-five pounds and get himself into his best shape ever. As the oldest astronaut—thirty-seven at selection—Glenn felt he had to train harder than the others, and he did.

  Although all of the Mercury Seven lived for competition, only one was as competitive as Glenn—Alan Shepard. As a kid, he’d been slow and scrawny, and he’d had to fight to keep up with others. He hadn’t lost any of that scrappiness. When he saw how Glenn charmed the press and the public and how his hard work impressed the NASA brass, he decided to beat Glenn at his own game. If Glenn ran two miles every morning, so would he. Shepard started lifting weights, and he even quit smoking for a while. Glenn may have been the smoothest at that first press conference, and his open, smiling freckled face was certainly more camera-friendly than Shepard’s snaggletoothed, slightly bug-eyed visage. But Shepard, despite a personal loathing for the media, strove to improve his relations with journalists, and soon he could work a press conference as well as Glenn. That competitive spirit carried into the classroom and every training exercise. No one studied more or worked harder than Shepard, and he was focused. “You tell him one time, and that was it,” recalled one engineer. “He was really sharp.” And he was not shy about his ambition. When a reporter asked him why he wanted to be the first man in space, his answer—“I want to be first because I want to be first”—was a marvel of tautology. Glenn was a fierce competitor, but Shepard was cutthroat. He would do anything to fly the first mission.

  Shepard’s hard work paid off. Early in 1961, Bob Gilruth called the seven astronauts together in their shared Langley office and announced that Al Shepard—later nicknamed the Ice Commander for the colder side of his Janus-like personality—was to pilot the first flight. The second would go to Grissom and the third to Glenn, who would also back up the first two missions. Six men were disappointed, four of them more than the other two. But each of them walked over to Shepard, shook his hand, and congratulated him. Shepard struggled to keep a huge grin off his face.

  The choices would be kept secret from the press and the public until just before the first mission. The media was told that one of these three would be picked for the first flight, which created some awkwardness between them and the other astronauts, whom the press dubbed “the Forgotten Four.” But the Clean Marine refused to accept his third-place finish. The next day, he wrote Gilruth a letter lobbying for a change—he felt he was the better choice. The Space Task Group director was unmoved and unpersuaded, and he ignored Glenn’s plea. Inconsolable, Glenn began to withdraw into himself. “He was real, real shook,” remembered an acquaintance. “It was the only thing Johnny ever lost in his life.” It wasn’t until his next-door neighbor, a close friend, told him his funk was hurting his family that he pulled out of it—somewhat. He swallowed his pride, shook off his disappointment or at least managed to hide it, and did the best job he could of backing up Shepard.

  But the Mercury-Redstone was still experiencing delays, and its plodding progress elicited criticism from several quarters. At the program’s first unmanned launch on November 21, 1960, Faget and the Seven had watched from an outside viewing area at the Cape. In the blockhouse, with its thick concrete walls and slot windows, von Braun joined several members of his German team and a mix of former army technicians and booster contractors as they prepared to launch. Save for a few brief holds to fix minor problems, the countdown went smoothly. When the clock reached zero, the booster lifted off amid heavy clouds of smoke. Everyone in the viewing area was impressed at how quickly the Redstone accelerated and disappeared. “My God, that was fast!” said Faget, but when the smoke cleared, the rocket was still there. It had risen about four inches from the launchpad, but then the engine had shut off, and the rocket had settled back unsteadily on its fins on the launch cradle. The only thing that had launched was the escape tower, which self-destructed four thousand feet in the air. Mechanics and technicians near the launchpad ran to hide under trucks and behind cars as debris rained to the ground as far away as a quarter of a mile from the viewing area.

  In the blockhouse, the frantic Germans reverted to their native language as they tried to find out what happened. They communicated with a German booster engineer in the control center. Flight director Chris Kraft, a man with little patience for anything less than perfection, was not happy with how the first mission had gone; just about everyone had been working heavy overtime for months to get ready, and it certainly hadn’t been his team’s fault. He stormed over to the engineer, ripped his headphones out of the console jack, and yelled, “Talk to me, dammit!”

  The cause of the misfire was soon found and fixed. But there was still plenty of work to do before the Mercury-Redstone was ready to carry a man into space. Amid growing concerns and pressure from government officials and the press, Gilruth insisted there wouldn’t be a manned flight until it was safe, but privately, he was worried. “If we get those first three guys back alive, we’re going to be damn lucky,” he told one of his engineers. A month later, on December 20, they finally achieved a successful unmanned mission.

  On January 31, 1961, the final Mercury-Redstone suborbital flight carrying a primate, the charismatic young Ham, was launched. (The thirty-seven-pound chimpanzee’s original name was Chang; it was changed to Ham, an acronym for Holloman Aerospace Medical, and the name would be released only if he returned to Earth alive.) Ham was strapped into a Mercury capsule atop a Redstone rocket and launched into space. He survived despite several mishaps with the rocket and with Ham’s protocol; he experienced sixteen g’s, twice as many as expected, and instead of getting banana pellets when he pulled the correct levers of a psychomotor box in sequence with cueing lights, he received mild electrical shocks. This continued until splashdown, when water began leaking into the capsule. By the time the recovery copters fished the half-drowned chimp out of the sinking spacecraft, Ham was not in a good mood. But the life-support systems had worked fine, and the mission was deemed a success. Ham’s sixteen-and-a-half-minute whirl showed that manned spaceflight was possible and that pulse and respiration rates and blood pressure were not adversely affected by weightlessness or under heavy g’s.

  The successful mission also meant that Ham, an immigrant from Cameroon, was the first hominid—and the first American—in space. A newspaper carto
on at the time portrayed a pair of apes walking away from a successful spaceflight. One says to the other: “I think we’re behind the Russians but slightly ahead of the Americans.” Which they were, thanks to Ham.

  Ham’s human counterpart, Al Shepard, was also ready. He’d been ready for a while, spending many hours on the various procedure trainers and simulators. He’d flown a hundred and twenty simulated flights, working through every possible emergency and failure mode and learning to cope with them all. He’d also endured more time on the malevolent MASTIF, six hours and ten minutes, than anyone else. Glenn, too, was ready if need be—over the previous three months, he’d been Shepard’s training partner and shadow, and the two had achieved a mutual respect and even friendship, though Shepard still liked to tease Glenn by calling him “my backup.”

  The two astronauts might have been prepared for the real thing, but Wernher von Braun’s team at Huntsville was not. Ham’s Mercury-Redstone had flown much higher and farther downrange than planned. Over the objections of Gilruth and most of his staff—including the astronauts—the conservative von Braun insisted on an additional unmanned flight. On March 24, 1961, it launched successfully, which officially made the Mercury-Redstone “man-rated.” But it pushed Shepard’s mission to early May.

  By the end of February 1961, the Americans appeared to have drawn even with the Russians in the space race. After the program had repeatedly failed to attain its mission objectives, the schedule had slipped by a year, and the Mercury-Atlas program had undergone an exhaustive review over the past six months. Finally, three weeks after Ham’s Redstone flight, a successful Atlas flight on February 21 boosted not only the Mercury capsule but the spirits of everyone in the Space Task Group. Since Kennedy’s first days in office the previous month, rumors had swirled that the Mercury project—still considered a stunt by some in Washington—would be canceled or somehow handed over to the Pentagon. An in-depth examination of the program in April by a presidential committee had not improved morale. But the Atlas flight, combined with the Russian failures of one Sputnik in December 1960 and two more in February 1961, had NASA flying high and looking forward to putting the first man in space in just a few months.

  On April 12, 1961, from a top secret cosmodrome on the desolate steppes of southern Kazakhstan, thirteen hundred miles southeast of Moscow, a young Soviet air force lieutenant named Yuri Gagarin was boosted into space. The cosmodrome’s name, Baikonur, was deliberately misleading for security reasons. A real mining town of Baikonur was two hundred miles to the northeast; the rocket complex was actually near Tyuratam, a small village with a convenient rail station. Despite the ruse, the United States had known of the complex since 1957, when an American U-2 spy plane had discovered it.

  In a type of spherical spacecraft called Vostok (“East”), Gagarin not only traveled beyond Earth’s atmosphere but orbited the planet. The sphere shape was chosen for its inherent dynamic stability, though that required it to be completely covered with an ablative heat shield. The stocky Gagarin was the son of a peasant farmer and of pure Russian stock—the better to trumpet the superiority of the ordinary socialist worker. Another reason he was picked was his height; the five-foot-two pilot could eject safely through the hatch, the cover of which would be blown clear of the spaceship just two seconds before ejection.

  Gagarin had been chosen from a half a dozen cosmonaut candidates. He was less than four years out of flight school and had only two hundred and thirty flight hours under his belt, and he was a passenger in every sense of the word during his 108-minute ride; the entire mission was controlled from the ground and automatically. There were manual controls, but the numeric code to unlock them was placed onboard in an envelope to be opened only in an emergency, since Gagarin’s superiors weren’t sure how a human would react to extended weightlessness. He didn’t need the instructions, but because his capsule came down over land, Gagarin ejected at about twenty thousand feet and parachuted the rest of the way, a detail that would remain hidden until 1971. (The French organization that judged and maintained world aeronautical records required a pilot to land with his craft for the flight to be considered official, and the group did certify the flight.) And as with all previous Soviet rocket launches, the flight was kept secret until after the fact, when it was announced triumphantly. Major Gagarin—he was promoted even before his capsule landed—would soon embark on a worldwide publicity tour of non-aligned nations to help persuade them to hitch their wagons to the superior Soviet star.

  America’s reputation was further damaged by the response of Colonel John “Shorty” Powers, Mercury’s press officer, when he was awakened in the middle of the night by a reporter calling for a response to the Gagarin flight. “We don’t know anything about it,” Powers snapped. “We’re all asleep down here!” Everyone at NASA had been working long hours, most of them without a day off, but Powers’s groggy response gave the wrong idea when it was paraphrased in a headline the next day: “Soviets Send Man into Space. Spokesman Says U.S. Asleep.”

  The manned mission shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Over the previous eleven months, the USSR had released details of five orbital flights, all carrying some kind of biological specimens ranging from mice to guinea pigs to dogs—and, on the final two, mannequins. To anyone paying attention, the Soviets’ goal was obvious.

  The United States officially congratulated the Soviet Union, but Shepard and the other astronauts were furious. Not only had they been beaten into space, but Gagarin’s flight was an extraordinary propaganda coup, producing roughly the same effect on the world and on the American public as Sputnik had. It was another momentous first for the USSR—not only the first man in space, but the first to orbit the Earth. NASA was several flights away from that—at least a year. But the Russians had already set their sights much higher. One of their leading scientists was quoted as saying that the flight “completes halfway the effort of sending man to the moon,” and Gagarin echoed that. Who knew what Soviet space “first” would occur next?

  No one in the free world did. The Soviet program, completely military, operated behind a veil of secrecy. Information about it was maddeningly meager, since little of it was conducted out in the open, and few details were released—and when they were, it was only after a successful flight. Occasional rumors made their way through the Iron Curtain, sometimes through so many informants that the final intelligence was highly questionable. Not even the Russian people knew much about their space program or could say where it was located, and few outside the program knew who headed it. His name was Sergei Korolev, and his position corresponded roughly with von Braun’s. The Soviets feared assassination attempts from the West, and so Korolev and his most valuable assistants were kept anonymous. He was referred to only as Chief Designer in press stories. The U.S. intelligence community knew little more; a few fragmentary conversations intercepted when he called his office from his car had yielded nothing substantive.

  Korolev’s route to becoming Chief Designer had been a rough one. Born in 1907, he had been a brilliant young aviation and rocket engineer; he had founded the premier Soviet rocketry group in 1931 and seen it taken over by the military in 1933. He continued his work with rockets, specializing in design, but in 1938 he was found guilty of trumped-up charges of treason and disruptive activities. After severe beatings and torture, he was persuaded to confess and sentenced to ten years of hard labor—a victim of Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge. He spent six years in the Soviet prison system, including a stint in a Siberian labor camp, where starvation almost killed him and scurvy resulted in most of his teeth falling out. But when World War II began and missile development became a national priority, he was released with the rest of the unexecuted rocket specialists and commissioned a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet army; his country needed his expertise. In 1945 he was sent to Germany to evaluate the V-2 work done by von Braun’s rocket team. The Soviets co-opted those rocketeers who hadn’t aligned themselves with the United States. The Germans moved to the U
SSR, but after five years, the Soviets had learned all they could from them, and they sent them packing. A few years later, Korolev was appointed to lead the Soviet space program. Like von Braun, he had a genius for management and strategy and a knack for inspiring his people to believe they could do anything if they worked hard enough.

  In 1953, soon after Nikita Khrushchev came to power after Joseph Stalin’s fatal stroke in March, Korolev met him to discuss his space plans. For all Khrushchev’s outward rusticity, he was intellectually curious, and Korolev secured his support—as long as it didn’t interfere with priority number one: the safety of the Soviet people. The success of Sputnik had further solidified Khrushchev’s power.

  The Sputniks and Lunas might not have put bread on a single Russian table or provided a car to any Russian family. But the Soviet people gloried in their space triumphs and, in the words of one Russian rocket designer, “felt proud and were thrilled to be citizens of the country that was blazing the trail for the human race into the cosmos.”

  At a press conference right after Gagarin’s flight, President Kennedy told the nation that America would not try to match the Soviets in space but would instead choose “other areas where we can be first and which will bring more long-range benefits to mankind.” But this second, much-ballyhooed defeat in the space race did not sit well with the president—or his military advisers. Beyond the question of prestige, it meant that the enemy might soon be able to intercept the increasing numbers of American spy satellites that had begun flyovers of the USSR the previous year.

  Glenn, the press favorite, spoke candidly about the flight and put the best face possible on it. “They just beat the pants off us, that’s all, and there’s no use kidding ourselves about that,” he told reporters. “But now that the space age has begun, there’s going to be plenty of work for everybody.” He and the other astronauts extended their personal congratulations to the Soviet program. In private, they were disappointed, none more so than Shepard. His suborbital flight had originally been scheduled for three weeks before Gagarin’s, but von Braun’s cautious approach had prevailed. Now he would be second, and that was a place the ultracompetitive Al Shepard hated. He consoled himself with the fact that he’d still be the first American in space, if you didn’t count Ham. As the May 2 launch drew near and hundreds of newspeople invaded the Cape Canaveral area, spirits at NASA were buoyed—a cancellation at this point would be a fiasco.