Shoot for the Moon

by James Donovan

  Shepard was expected to experience six g’s during launch and between twelve and fourteen upon reentry. A man sitting in a can atop a powerful rocket built to carry a warhead to the battlefield—despite Gagarin’s survival, those rigors, combined with the unknown hazards of weightlessness, convinced some physicians consulted by NASA that “subjecting a human body to such stresses is practically equivalent to sending the astronaut on a suicide mission,” wrote Walt Williams, Mercury’s operations director, and that opinion was shared by many Americans. A tragedy would shatter national morale and might jeopardize the entire program, but Bob Gilruth and his Space Task Group were guardedly optimistic.

  Bad weather scrubbed the mission, and it was postponed to May 4, then to May 5. The night before, Shepard and Glenn slept in bunk beds in the Cape’s crew quarters on the second floor of Hangar S, three miles from the launch site. While they were sleeping, technicians began loading the propellants—kerosene in the lower tank, the pale blue, cryogenic liquid oxygen, kept below its boiling point of negative 297 degrees F, in the upper. When the tanks were full, to prevent them from bursting, the Redstone began venting plumes of liquid-oxygen vapor that swirled around the rocket. Other members of the pad crew filled the capsule’s thruster jets with hydrogen peroxide.

  In the spartan crew quarters, flight surgeon Bill Douglas woke the astronauts at about one a.m. to shower and shave. Then a cursory medical examination was made by nurse Dee O’Hara, who helped attach six biomedical sensors to Shepard. At 3:30 a.m., after a breakfast of bacon-wrapped steak and eggs with orange juice and coffee, Shepard was helped into his aluminum-coated pressure suit (a modified version of the high-altitude suit worn by navy pilots) by suit technician Joe Schmitt, a tall, quiet former aircraft mechanic who had been with the NACA since World War II. At 5:20 a.m., Glenn—who for almost two hours had been checking over every one of the capsule’s 165 switches, dials, and meters—helped shoehorn Shepard into the tight confines of Freedom 7, the name Shepard had chosen for his Mercury capsule. Glenn wished him luck, reached in, shook his gloved hand, said, “Happy landings, Commander,” and watched as the hatch was closed at 6:10 a.m. The launch was scheduled for 7:20, but it was delayed due to cloudy weather, then later because of a faulty computer.

  The capsule would be blasted about a hundred miles into space, reach five thousand miles per hour, then fall back to Earth in a curving ballistic trajectory several hundred miles downrange. The flight was expected to last fifteen minutes, so no one thought a urine-collection system was necessary. But after Shepard had been sitting on the launchpad for more than three hours, the orange juice and coffee he had consumed made its presence felt. On the radio he asked Gordon Cooper, assigned as his voice contact in the nearby blockhouse, to check if he could get out and urinate. Cooper got back to him a few minutes later. “No,” Cooper said, and then, imitating von Braun’s clipped German accent: “Ze astronaut shall stay in ze nose cone.” Shepard warned them that he would go in his suit if he could not get out for a minute—since he was on his back, the liquid would follow gravity and seep into his long cotton underwear. But that might mean a short circuit in his suit’s biomedical sensors, and Mercury Control refused again. Shepard suggested they turn off the power to his suit. They did. He relieved himself. The liquid was eventually absorbed and mostly evaporated in the 100 percent pure oxygen atmosphere.

  A short while later, there was another delay—the pressure in the liquid-oxygen fuel system was too high. While technicians tried to turn some of the valves by remote control, an impatient Shepard snapped, to no one in particular, “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?” For some reason, that seemed to do the trick. The countdown soon resumed, and it was not interrupted again. As it hit the two-minute mark, flight director Chris Kraft asked each position in Mercury Control for a go/no-go opinion on whether to proceed. This would become standard operating procedure on every mission for every important decision, and only when all systems were go would the flight continue. Each flight controller and doctor asked replied, “Go, Flight,” using the shortened version of Kraft’s job title. He gave the okay to continue. The atmosphere in the room was tense, and Kraft himself, sporting a small Mercury lapel pin he would wear during every flight, was shaking so hard that his microphone fell off. The Redstone was nicknamed “Ol’ Reliable” for its dependability, but anything could happen with a rocket. Fortunately, Max Faget had designed a fourteen-foot rocket-powered escape tower that was painted bright red and sat atop the black capsule, and it would lift the capsule far enough away, it was hoped, to protect the astronaut from a fireballing rocket explosion.

  The pad rescue team—amphibious vehicles, armored tanks, helicopters, asbestos-suited firemen, divers, and boats—were all at full alert and ready to rush to Shepard’s aid if need be. Douglas, the astronauts’ personal physician, sat in an idling helicopter a safe distance from the launchpad with a medical pack strapped to his back. Next to the chopper was a small one-patient hospital. Farther afield, the navy’s recovery fleet—an aircraft carrier, eight destroyers, a radar tracking ship, Marine copters, and pararescue and frogmen teams—was deployed in the anticipated recovery zone, in the Atlantic Ocean five hundred miles southeast of Cape Canaveral.

  As a last line of security, just in case the main and reserve parachutes failed, Bob Gilruth had insisted that a personal-chute chest pack be placed on a shelf inside the crowded cockpit, the idea being that before he crashed into the Earth at an obscene speed, Shepard might somehow disentangle himself from several harnesses, hook on the chest pack, open the hatch, and maneuver himself out of the capsule while avoiding the dysfunctional parachutes above him. It was a situation that a circus contortionist might be better able to handle.

  Forty-five million Americans—about 25 percent of the country’s population—watched the launch of the black-and-white Redstone booster on a black-and-white live television broadcast, carried on each of the three nationwide networks. The president’s chief science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, had suggested that the launch be held in secret, like the Soviets’, to prevent a potential national embarrassment occurring in front of the entire world, but Kennedy had nixed the idea. America’s space program would operate, at least for the most part, out in the open. At the White House, Kennedy and his wife, the vice president, and a few advisers followed the launch on a small TV. At 9:32 a.m., more than three hours after the capsule’s hatch had been sealed, the countdown reached zero and liftoff commenced.

  “Freedom Seven is still go!” Shepard said a few seconds later, and viewers across the nation shouted and screamed, “Go! Go! Go!” as one of their countrymen sat in a small capsule at the tip of a slender rocket that spewed out white-hot flame that then changed to a blinding yellow, and the Redstone slowly and loudly roared straight up into the sky. It shot higher and higher and vanished behind a large cloud, then reappeared, a white contrail behind it, and finally disappeared from sight completely. A thin white trail arced down behind the rocket, an indication that the red escape tower had jettisoned, meaning enough speed and altitude had been achieved by Freedom 7 that it wouldn’t be needed. In the reinforced-concrete blockhouse some two hundred and fifty yards from the launchpad, where the rocket’s launch and functioning were controlled, the only guest permitted that day allowed himself a small sigh of relief. His Redstone had done its job, and Wernher von Braun knew the most critical part of the flight was over.

  Two miles away, in the Mercury Mission Control building, Kraft and fifteen other men sat at three banks of consoles in a square space not much larger than an average college classroom, about sixty feet by sixty feet. Each console position was supplemented by a group of experts on that particular system, all of them sitting in another room, and they would be consulted if a problem arose. On a large animated world map on the wall of the main room, the location and status of every tracking station and navy recovery ship were displayed, and the path of the spacecraft was plotted by a toylike plastic replica of the capsul
e that would move on wire tracks, powered by servos emitting a steady whine. Above the map, several clocks showed various times: Greenwich mean time, countdown, elapsed time, time to retrofire, and so on. Data derived from telemetry was displayed on boards on each side of the map. The individual consoles featured black-and-white TV monitors, analog meters and displays, and the occasional rotary phone. Kraft and his team—each wearing the uniform he had decided on, a short-sleeved white shirt with a thin tie—followed every facet of the flight, including Shepard’s biomedical readings and the status of the life-support systems. A doctor in the first row could call for an abort, at least in the first few seconds, if the astronaut’s life became endangered. Near him sat Deke Slayton, capsule communicator (CapCom), the primary contact between Mercury Control and Shepard, with Glenn and Grissom on either side. The idea was that another astronaut—and the CapCom was always an astronaut, usually a backup to that particular mission—would best understand the situation in both the capsule and on the ground and would be able to pass on information clearly. The Mercury Seven also felt that one of their own could argue with anyone who wanted to abort the mission—for instance, if a doctor decided a random biomedical reading looked suspicious and pronounced the astronaut in medical distress.

  In Mercury Control, Shepard’s calm voice could be heard loud and clear as he reported at every phase of the flight and detailed his body’s responses to acceleration, weightlessness, and deceleration and his craft’s responses to the forces acting on it. A couple of minutes after liftoff, the spacecraft separated from the spent Redstone booster. Shepard took over manual control of the small thruster jets and changed, one axis at a time, yaw, pitch, and roll—the direction the capsule was pointing, its attitude. And at the top of his trajectory, he peered into the viewer in the center of his instrument panel—a periscope extended several inches out into space—and marveled at the breathtaking sixteen-hundred-mile-wide panorama of the Earth below him. “What a beautiful view,” he said, and he went on to describe the cloud cover over the Florida coast.

  As Freedom 7 began its ballistic arc back to Earth, he tipped his craft into position for reentry—bell-side down, so the ablative shield could burn away as it protected the capsule from the deadly heat caused by hurtling through the thickening atmosphere at more than four thousand miles an hour. The three retro-rockets strapped onto the heat shield fired and reduced the capsule’s velocity enough to allow gravity to take over. In just one minute, the capsule slowed to 341 miles per hour, and as the massive deceleration of eleven g’s slammed Shepard into his contour couch, his voice became a strained grunt: “Okay…okay…okay…”

  The small drogue parachute opened up at twenty-one thousand feet to stabilize the capsule; a few seconds later, the red-and-white main chute unfurled at ten thousand feet; and fifteen minutes and twenty-two seconds after liftoff, the gently swaying Freedom 7 and its hardy human splashed down safely in the Atlantic Ocean, 302 miles downrange from Cape Canaveral.

  The spacecraft had risen to an altitude of only 116 miles and descended immediately after, and Shepard was weightless for just five minutes, but he had performed flawlessly. After a perfect recovery, he stepped out of a copter onto the deck of the carrier Lake Champlain, unharmed and in high spirits. A few minutes later, Shepard was brought to the flag bridge for an unexpected phone call. It was President Kennedy, another navy man, congratulating Shepard on his flight. Kennedy’s pleasure at this success would help create a sea change in the American public’s formerly apathetic attitude toward the Mercury program. Now, it seemed, they got it. Bob Gilruth and everyone in his Space Task Group breathed easier. The fact that Shepard hadn’t died was not insignificant. No one knew what would come after it, but Mercury would continue.

  Though the disdainful Khrushchev compared it to a “flea jump,” Shepard’s successful flight was a soothing balm to the nation’s injured pride. And most of NASA’s medical community, previously unsure whether a human could survive the known and unknown stresses of spaceflight, relaxed a little, although the apparent safety of Gagarin’s flight had also allayed some of their fears. Perhaps man could function in space after all.

  At a press conference soon after the mission, before hundreds of reporters, Shepard was smooth as silk. And he admitted to nothing more than some “apprehension” during the flight. No one would ever get Alan Shepard to say he was scared.

  An American had penetrated the darkness of space in a rocket. And he had done it in full view of the world, live on TV, unlike the Russians. Surely that counted for something in the propaganda war. Outside the United States, it apparently didn’t count for much. A poll taken after Shepard’s flight showed that 41 percent of Western Europeans believed the Soviet Union was the stronger military power, compared to only 19 percent who believed it was the United States, and more of them thought the USSR was significantly ahead of the U.S. in overall scientific achievement.

  Unlike Gagarin, Shepard had been able to adjust his craft’s attitude by using the small thruster jets on its exterior, and the press made much of the fact that he had “driven” the spaceship, the first man to do so. Not everyone considered that flying, since there was no way to power Freedom 7. (Some pointed out that the astronaut exerted about the same amount of control over his craft as a glider pilot, though that wasn’t quite true—a pilot could change a glider’s trajectory.) Still, to the American public, it was enough, at least for now.

  The president needed some good news. He’d been in office for two months, and he and the U.S. had just experienced an embarrassment as profound as any in the country’s history.

  The island of Cuba lies ninety miles off the southern tip of Florida. There, in 1959, a young, inspirational revolutionary named Fidel Castro had finally succeeded in leading a group of disaffected countrymen to oust dictator (and U.S. ally) Fulgencio Batista. As Castro quietly became a dictator himself and assumed military and political control, his country became increasingly communistic and drifted toward Russia’s sphere of influence. As a result, Cuba’s relations with the United States quickly deteriorated.

  President Eisenhower had approved a covert plan for the CIA to train and arm a small army of Cuban exiles with the goal of overthrowing Castro’s Communist government. The original plan called for guerrilla infiltration operations to gradually win over Cuban hearts and minds. But near the end of Eisenhower’s administration, the plan grew larger, and eventually it called for them to land in the Bahía de Cochinos—the Bay of Pigs—and support the amphibious assault with heavy bomber and fighter cover. The Cuban people, the Americans were sure, would rise and join this Free Cuba cadre, and if the rebels could secure a beachhead for seventy-two hours, during which period a free Cuban government would be established, other nations in the hemisphere might recognize the new government and send aid. America’s role in the invasion would be kept secret, to avoid the appearance of meddling in Latin American affairs. Despite Kennedy’s personal misgivings, his aides advised him to approve the plan, and he gave the go-ahead less than two months after taking office.

  On April 17—thirteen months after the plan’s inception and only five days after Gagarin’s orbital flight—fourteen hundred insurgents launched from Guatemala and Nicaragua on five small freighters and landed at the swampy Bay of Pigs. They waded ashore and fought courageously but after three days were overwhelmed by Castro’s defensive forces. At the last moment, Kennedy canceled a vital early-morning air strike and any further support. The rebel brigade’s fifteen B-26 bombers were effective at first but were soon disposed of by the small Cuban air force of two B-26s and five smaller fighter-bombers; these also disabled two invasion ships filled with much-needed supplies and ammo. Other supply ships were ordered to leave the scene.

  The result was a fiasco of epic proportions. Hundreds of insurgents were killed or executed, and the remaining rebels, many of them without food and ammunition, surrendered three days after the landing. Some of those captured revealed America’s complicity in the invas
ion, which was viewed as warmongering. The worldwide criticism of the United States and its young president was intense, as was the country’s humiliation. When Khrushchev had telegrammed Kennedy expressing alarm at American involvement in Cuban politics, the president had told him that the U.S. was only supporting the one hundred thousand Cubans trying to resist the Castro regime. Few were convinced by his argument. Kennedy’s standing with the American people, and his country’s standing among the community of nations, would never be lower.

  Shepard’s successful flight, brief as it was, restored some of America’s pride, and Kennedy took note of that and of the strong positive response to the mission. He decided he was not satisfied with a snail’s-pace space race with the Russians, whose booster rockets were clearly more powerful than America’s. That was a decidedly different attitude than his earlier one. Three weeks before Gagarin’s triumph, Kennedy had heard arguments from NASA for a $308 million budget. The Bureau of the Budget agreed to only $50 million. The president’s decision to increase that to $126 million—none of it for the Apollo program—hadn’t exactly been a vote of confidence. It had seemed as if U.S. space exploration would come to an end once the U.S. caught up to the Soviets in the space race. The Mercury cost overruns and delays had soured a good many government officials and representatives of the American public on the space program, and there was nothing to indicate that enough of them would commit to a long-term, monstrously expensive project with little immediate and appreciable benefits to their constituents. Apollo, at this point little more than plans, schematics, and dreams, might be stillborn.