Shoot for the Moon

by James Donovan

  The next flight was supposed to be a virtual repeat of John Glenn’s three-orbit mission, this time with salty-tongued Deke Slayton the man in the can. But plans, like rockets, have a way of going awry.

  For almost two decades, the Wisconsin farm boy had been flying planes on dangerous missions, including sixty-three combat sorties over Europe and Japan in World War II. Slayton was probably the best stick-and-rudder man of the Mercury Seven, and they were all damn fine pilots. He was also as tough as they come, so when NASA doctors told him a few months after he’d been selected that they’d detected a minor heart arrhythmia called idiopathic atrial fibrillation, Slayton just shrugged. He was in superb physical shape. To him, it was no big deal—about every two weeks, his pulse would, as he put it, “act up,” and eventually, especially if he went for a run, it would return to normal. But just to make sure his condition wasn’t an issue, he quit smoking, stopped drinking coffee, and started jogging every morning.

  Though air force regulations stated that anyone with atrial fibrillation could not fly high-performance aircraft, the physicians assigned to the Mercury program had decided that the condition didn’t affect Slayton’s flying, and they recommended that he be accepted into the spaceflight operations. That lasted until a few months before Slayton’s mission, when Jerome Wiesner, the president’s top science adviser—who had opposed manned space exploration from the start—got involved and advised Jim Webb not to let Slayton fly. What if something happened, anything, and then it got out that the astronaut had a heart condition? Atrial fibrillation could cause fainting or a stroke, and if that happened while a pilot was flying, it could lead to catastrophe. In addition, the condition could affect his heart rate and blood pressure, making it impossible to accurately assess the effects of spaceflight on humans—a main purpose of the Mercury program. They had plenty of men in perfect physical shape ready to go. Why take a chance if they didn’t have to?

  Webb convened a panel of flight surgeons; they found Slayton fully qualified. But two days later, three eminent civilian cardiologists examined him and disagreed. On March 15, 1962, the NASA higher-ups told the astronaut he was grounded indefinitely. When they insisted that the devastated Slayton attend a news conference about his grounding the next day, he didn’t think he could—“I could have killed everyone in that room,” he would remember later. But somehow he got through it, and publicly and privately he vowed he would support the program in any way possible. Most of the other astronauts were on his side and personally asked President Kennedy to reinstate him, but without success.

  To make things more complicated, Slayton’s backup pilot, wavy-haired Wally Schirra, wouldn’t be taking his place. Bob Gilruth decided that since Scott Carpenter, who had backed up Glenn on his flight, had more simulator time than Schirra, he would be a better fit for the mission. Now the Irish-Italian Schirra got his Irish up—and he became even angrier when he was named Carpenter’s backup. Schirra, a fighter pilot, being replaced by a bomber pilot—he didn’t think that was right. (Carpenter had actually flown patrol planes in Korea.) But Gilruth calmed him down with the news that the next mission, more of an engineering flight with even more experiments, would be his.

  Slayton, meanwhile, continued making lifestyle changes, even giving up alcohol and, in his words, “everything that was fun.” But the periodic arrhythmia continued, so when NASA began looking for someone to run the astronaut office—it had been decided by this time that more astronauts would be needed for post-Mercury programs—Al Shepard suggested his buddy Deke, and the rest of the Mercury Seven approved. If they had to have a boss, it might as well be one of them, not an outsider with little understanding of the job.

  In September 1962, Gilruth made it official: Slayton would become coordinator of astronaut activities. His first assignment would be to pick a new group of spacemen. Though he would never completely get over his failure to fly into space on a Mercury mission, Slayton would take to his new career with relish. And when his job description came to include choosing crews, he swore to himself that he would be scrupulously fair in his selections. And he stuck to that vow—for the most part.

  If there was a dreamer among the seven astronauts, it was Scott Carpenter, the self-described indifferent student, former shoplifter, and “no-good” youth from Boulder, Colorado, whose parents had separated when he was two. His mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis and placed in a sanatorium, and Carpenter’s maternal grandparents had largely raised him. At the age of twenty-one, he had a near-fatal auto accident—he fell asleep at the wheel after a night of partying and drove off a Colorado mountain road. He spent four days in a coma and two more weeks in the hospital, and after that, he decided to settle down. He enrolled at the University of Colorado and married a smart, attractive, green-eyed blonde named Rene (pronounced “Reen”). In the fall of 1949, with a pregnant wife and lacking one heat-transfer course for an aeronautical engineering degree, he dropped out of college to join the navy. This fact had somehow been overlooked when the NASA administrators were looking for astronaut candidates. They’d just assumed he’d graduated before he joined up.

  He came into his own in the military, eventually flying a patrol plane in the Pacific during the Korean War, then jumping to test-pilot school when it was over. Though he had the weakest test-pilot credentials of the Mercury Seven and only three hundred hours of flying time in jets (the others had from seventeen hundred to twenty-one hundred), he had excelled at many of the physical tests at Albuquerque’s Lovelace Clinic. He had also flown a photo-reconnaissance fighter whose advanced camera was similar to a device planned for Mercury, and he had experience in celestial navigation and communications. All of these assets—and his keen, curious intelligence—had outweighed his relatively meager jet time.

  By the time he became an astronaut, the wiry, movie-star-handsome Carpenter and his wife had four children. He was the most introspective of the Mercury Seven, though some NASA officials considered him “flaky” or “vague and detached.”

  The new guy in Mercury Control was anything but flaky. Sitting next to Kraft in the control room for the first time, in the new position of assistant flight director, was twenty-eight-year-old Gene Kranz, a former air force fighter pilot. After a couple of years as a flight-test engineer with McDonnell, in October of 1960 the crew-cut Kranz had hired on with the Space Task Group. Two weeks after Kranz started, and shortly before the first Mercury-Redstone launch, Chris Kraft needed someone to do an important job and found only Kranz available. He sent him down to the Cape to talk to the test conductors and write up a countdown procedure and some mission rules—what to do if a given thing went wrong, covering every situation. Kraft knew that in a world where rockets flew fifty to sixty times the speed of airplanes, there would be little time for the controllers to discuss the next steps if something went awry. They had to be prepared in advance.

  Kranz spent weeks on that job, talking to virtually everyone involved in a launch. He combined information from the control center, the blockhouse, and the tracking stations into an effective and thorough countdown procedure and wrote a thirty-page summary of mission rules. Kraft, impressed, had made him procedures controller, in charge of coordinating communications between the tracking network and Mercury Control, for the first three Mercury flights. Kranz’s good work had been rewarded by his promotion to assistant flight director for Carpenter’s flight.

  Carpenter would be boosted into space on another Atlas rocket, make three orbits, and dive back into the atmosphere at almost 18,000 miles per hour—easy enough, even if Carpenter had only a couple of months to prepare for the flight and his job would be complicated by a host of science experiments.

  At least one man in Mercury Control had doubts. Kraft had had problems with Carpenter while getting him up to speed as CapCom during Shepard’s launch; he’d become convinced that Carpenter wouldn’t do a good job as CapCom, and when he shared his concerns with Slayton, Deke replaced Carpenter. Kraft had also objected to Carpenter being nam
ed to pilot this flight, claiming he might jeopardize himself and the mission. He knew Carpenter had little experience as a test pilot and felt that he was of no help as an engineer; Kraft believed he’d somehow slipped through the astronaut selection process. (If true, Carpenter’s superior athletic ability and superb conditioning had probably swayed the administrators, since the NASA doctors were obsessed with the potential physiological hazards the astronauts might endure.) On the morning of May 24, 1962, after a smooth liftoff and orbit insertion, Carpenter made his first questionable decision. When he put his capsule into automatic control mode, he found that the pitch control wouldn’t function properly. But he didn’t tell Mercury Control for fear that they’d bring him down early.

  As he circled a hundred miles above the Earth, Carpenter ran through the tasks on his checklist—releasing a balloon, photographing terrestrial features, eating solid food, and a few others—and began to admire the view. He stopped focusing on his flight plan and started experimenting with the craft’s attitude thruster jets, which changed the direction it faced. He also began paying more attention to the view than to the spacecraft and its systems, ignoring his decreasing fuel levels, prompting several requests from Mercury Control for him to switch to unpowered drifting flight to conserve fuel; he didn’t. After he’d maneuvered Aurora 7 every which way as if it were a bumper car for two orbits, Mercury Control again ordered him to go into drifting mode. He did, but when he became fascinated by sparkling “fireflies” that were produced every time he smacked the spacecraft’s side with his hand, he began using the jets again to swing around and see where they came from. (The fireflies, which Glenn had noticed also, were really just vaporized drops of moisture vented from the capsule that instantly froze into ice particles.) And when Carpenter was asked to help with recordings of his blood pressure, he declined; “I’ve got the sunrise to worry about,” he said.

  During his final orbit, he fell behind in making the necessary preparations for reentry, such as storing equipment and aligning the craft to enter the atmosphere at the correct angle—critical to help Aurora 7 slow down. Then he realized his automatic control wasn’t working properly, so he took over the controls manually to reposition the craft. Time was becoming tight. He soon switched to the semiautomatic fly-by-wire but forgot to turn off the manual control, which wasted precious fuel. Some of the tracking stations reported that Carpenter sounded “tired” and “confused”; Kraft thought he sounded delirious.

  Another component of the automatic control system failed, and Carpenter was forced to manually turn on the retro-rockets. He did it, but he was three seconds late—enough to change his reentry attitude and thus his trajectory and landing point. Mercury Control didn’t know if he had reentered at the correct attitude. If the blunt end of the capsule was pointed at too shallow an angle, Aurora 7 might bounce off the thick atmosphere and circle the Earth in a slowly deteriorating orbit until its power and oxygen gave out—a few hours, tops. Most of the men working in the control room expected to lose one or two astronauts on the Mercury project—after all, that was the usual number of fatalities when pilots were testing a new airplane. The crisis in Glenn’s flight, the supposedly loose heat shield, had turned out not to be a crisis at all, but this mission looked like it might end badly.

  The angle was off by about ten degrees. That was good enough for a successful reentry, albeit a sloppy and shaky one that necessitated the early release of the drogue and main chutes to steady the wildly oscillating capsule. By the time the capsule dropped softly into a gently swelling sea, Carpenter was two hundred and fifty miles farther downrange than expected and out of radio contact. The recovery forces in the area knew roughly where he was—two planes had received the capsule’s beacon signal—although no one knew whether he was alive or dead. To make matters worse, the last telemetry from his heart monitor had shown an irregular EKG; Kraft thought he might have had a heart attack.

  Word of his downrange splashdown leaked out to the press, and the nation held its collective breath. Millions returned to their TVs, and CBS newsman Walter Cronkite told his audience, “We may have…lost an astronaut.” Finally, a navy copter spied Aurora 7’s green dye marker in the water and the bright orange life raft attached to the capsule containing a very relaxed Scott Carpenter, contemplating his situation while he ate a Baby Ruth candy bar. He was oblivious to his rescuers until two frogmen parachuted into the sea and swam over. When one called to him, Carpenter nearly jumped out of the raft. Safely choppered to the recovery carrier USS Intrepid, he said the frogmen “broke up his tranquility.”

  Flight director Chris Kraft was livid. Despite his steely demeanor during a mission, he had developed an ulcer he self-treated with a pint or two of milk before every launch, and during this one he had barely controlled his fury. Anxiety had been high in Mercury Control as they all waited for news of Carpenter, and John Glenn was on the phone with Rene Carpenter, trying to keep her updated and calm.

  Kraft hadn’t been the only one with reservations about Carpenter’s readiness; Walt Williams had also been concerned. His worries were confirmed. Carpenter had joyrode, neglected to inform Mercury Control of a problem, paid scant attention to his instruments, and ignored instructions from the ground.

  Kraft, who would one day declare that “Flight”—meaning the flight director—“is God,” and who was called Jesus (pronounced “Hay-soos,” in the Spanish way) by some of his flight controllers and the Prussian General by others, appeared to see this mission as the first test of his control, and he responded autocratically. He was further affronted when Carpenter was quoted as saying, “I didn’t know where I was and they didn’t either.” The claim that Mercury Control—his group—had lost an astronaut even briefly was likely the final straw for Kraft, who had once snapped during a botched Redstone launch, “The damn Germans still haven’t learned who they work for. Everyone in this control room must work for me.” Once a mission began, Kraft was a general commanding his troops, and he would brook no insubordination, real or perceived. He had once come close to blows with Slayton over whose man, Kraft’s operations guy or Slayton’s astronaut, was in charge at a remote tracking station.

  Though Carpenter had made mistakes, Kraft ignored the fact that Aurora 7 ’s navigational systems had failed, that finding the right balance among the three attitude-control modes was tricky, and that anything but perfection resulted in excessive fuel consumption. A slight flick of the wrist on the three-axis control stick would initiate the powerful thruster jets, and unless that was quickly corrected, the system would gobble fuel at an exorbitant rate. (This problem would be fixed on later Mercury flights.) None of this swayed Kraft, however. After the astronaut was located, in a voice loud enough for everyone in Mercury Control to hear, he said, “That son of a bitch is never gonna fly for me again.”

  Carpenter did, finally, receive his college degree. When he returned to Boulder for a hometown hero’s welcome, the University of Colorado awarded him a bachelor’s in science on the grounds that his “subsequent training as an astronaut has more than made up for the deficiency in the subject of heat transfer.”

  Despite Carpenter’s errors in judgment, the mission was portrayed as a success in the press, and Americans began to think they were catching up to the Soviets in space. Yes, Titov’s August 1961 flight had lasted seventeen orbits to just three each made by Glenn and Carpenter, but the U.S. had now matched the USSR’s total of two men in orbit and had launched four men into space, twice the number of cosmonauts.

  That postorbital glow lasted ten weeks, until August 12, 1962, when Vostok 3 carried Major Andrian Nikolayev into orbit. The next day, Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Popovich in Vostok 4 joined him on a similar trajectory, both of them circling the Earth. Nikolayev’s sixty-four orbits and Popovich’s forty-eight far surpassed their American counterparts’ orbits. Their two capsules came within four miles of each other and landed safely in Kazakhstan six minutes apart. Though it was not a true rendezvous, the double mission proved
the Soviets were still far ahead of the American program. The United States once again issued congratulations, but the feat initiated calls in the Senate and from the press for a military program to counter the Soviet capability in space—how would America respond to a nuclear attack from Soviet satellites? But President Kennedy resisted these demands, and NASA was allowed to stay true to its plan of slow, steady, and safe development.

  Next up was Schirra, the acknowledged master of the “gotcha”—what the astronauts called the elaborate practical jokes that the seven of them were constantly pulling on one another and anyone in the vicinity to lighten up the almost unrelieved seriousness of their work. Despite his nonstop and painful punning, Schirra was all business when it came to flying, and he was the obvious choice for the next mission, which called for six orbits and a bevy of experiments. A man who thought of himself as the consummate engineering test pilot, Schirra was eager to show the positive difference an expert pilot could make, a pilot who wasn’t distracted by the sights available out the window and the poetry of the moment. In short, he would be Carpenter’s opposite.

  Though Schirra hadn’t given up his heavy smoking habit—the men who put together his survival kit included a pack of Tareyton cigarettes—he trained hard and without much help from Glenn, as Schirra made clear in a TV interview. According to him, Glenn was busy doing public appearances and had no time to talk to him. Schirra had never gotten along well with Glenn, since he thought of Glenn as a PR machine and himself as an engineer and a pilot—and certainly not as a “poet,” he said, in a veiled reference to Carpenter. Schirra being a navy man, he began taking the “captain of his ship” concept to an extreme, developing an attitude about being told what to do.