Shoot for the Moon

by James Donovan

  The flight of Schirra’s Sigma 7 on October 3, 1962, was nominal, as expected—in virtually every way, a textbook flight. Over nine hours, he used his thrusters sparingly, drifting unpowered for three full orbits, and ignored the spectacular view as much as possible. He was lauded for his professionalism and even forgiven for referring to flying in automatic control as being in “chimp mode.” He splashed down just a half a mile from the navy’s recovery ship.

  After five Mercury flights, the decision to use test pilots as astronauts had been vindicated. Every mission so far had involved its share of errors and malfunctions; even Schirra’s Atlas had made an unplanned clockwise roll after liftoff. Indeed, each astronaut had to deal with problems, some larger than others. The craft’s attitude thruster jets were a constant headache, and NASA technicians had modified them yet again.

  Before the next mission, though, a Cuba-related crisis occurred. Ironically, it was in part a response by Russia to the United States placing forty-five of von Braun’s Jupiters—equipped with nuclear tips—within easy range of Soviet targets.

  After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Fidel Castro had requested nuclear missiles from the USSR to deter future invasions. Nikita Khrushchev had agreed, particularly in view of America’s nuclear-tipped Jupiters in Turkey, on the Russian border, and in Italy, just a hundred miles across the Adriatic Sea. Construction of launch facilities in Cuba began as Soviet ships started transporting missiles. Rumors of their arrival began filtering into the U.S., and on October 14, 1962, photographs by an air force U-2 spy plane confirmed them. After several days of carefully weighing the available options, on the evening of October 22, Kennedy delivered a televised address to the nation. He announced the discovery of the missiles and their range of up to two thousand miles, which put most of the United States within reach, and blamed it all on the Soviet Union. He vowed that the U.S. would not hesitate to use military action. He invoked the Monroe Doctrine—the policy stating that if any nation fired a missile in the Western Hemisphere, it would be considered an act of war against the United States—in his decision to blockade any and all offensive military equipment on any ship bound for Cuba. He euphemistically called the naval blockade a “quarantine.”

  Sixteen months before, in June 1961, Khrushchev and Kennedy had met in Vienna to discuss ways to solve some of the world’s problems. Little progress was made, and the Soviet premier appeared to have gotten the better of the young president; he believed him to be weak and callow. But Khrushchev would have a different estimation of Kennedy after this crisis. Few countries had approved of the strategy behind the Bay of Pigs debacle, but most of the free world supported America’s decision to blockade the Russian missiles. Several days of bluster and posturing by both countries followed, and the situation escalated dramatically. While the United Nations tried to broker a truce, Strategic Air Command bombers, many armed with nuclear weapons, were put on high alert.

  Six days after Kennedy’s announcement, the two countries reached an accord. The Soviets would remove the missiles from Cuba under UN watch, and the Americans would lift the blockade; in private, they also agreed to remove their Jupiters from Italy and Turkey. (The missiles had been declared obsolete and were scheduled to be taken down anyway, but the Russians didn’t know that.) The Soviets also decided to remove 162 other nuclear warheads on Cuba that the United States was unaware of—they didn’t trust Castro not to start a nuclear war.

  For thirteen days in October of 1962, the world had teetered on the brink of nuclear disaster—Kennedy would later estimate the odds of escalation to war as having been “between one in three and even.” Though both leaders took great pains to avoid conflict, it appeared to the world that Khrushchev had backed down while Kennedy had refused to yield. Both Kennedy and the United States regained the stature and respect lost at the Bay of Pigs.

  By January 1963, most of Gilruth’s creative people had moved on to Gemini and Apollo, and Mercury was being run largely by operational personnel. The end of the program was in sight, but there was one last mission, and it would be a doozy.

  The flight was to be twenty-two orbits—more than a full day—with plenty of experiments and procedures loaded into the schedule. Gordon Cooper, at thirty-six the youngest of the Mercury Seven and the only completely healthy one yet to fly, was Slayton’s pick to pilot the spacecraft, which was beefed up with extra batteries, extra oxygen tanks, and extra water. No one questioned Gordo’s piloting skills. He had been flying since he was six, when his father let him take over the controls—only once they were in the air—of the family’s small plane. Those who dismissed him as a hick and mistook his soft-spoken, laid-back style for laziness were surprised at the sharp insights delivered in his Oklahoma twang. But he often seemed to be more interested in racing cars and speedboats and having off-hours fun than in training. And Cooper couldn’t keep from infuriating management with his flying stunts and flat-hatting—that time-honored maneuver of flying close to the ground at dangerously high speeds. There had been doubts all along that he would be able to focus on the mission, which was why he was the last active astronaut to fly. But he’d finally settled down, and he’d done excellent work as Schirra’s backup.

  Al Shepard, however, saw a chance to get into space again. He began lobbying to be given Cooper’s flight, insisting that he’d do a better job. But NASA, impressed with Cooper’s newfound focus, decided to stay with him—and made Shepard his backup. They gave Shepard a sop: one more long, possibly three- or four-day Mercury mission was being considered, and if it happened, it would be his.

  Even though he had spent enough time on the procedures trainer that he could go through an entire simulated mission with his eyes closed, Cooper almost lost the flight anyway. On the day before his launch, in a fit of pique over a minor pressure-suit alteration he hadn’t been told about, he climbed into an F-106 fighter jet and proceeded to perform loops and rolls through Cape Canaveral’s restricted airspace—and he finished off by flat-hatting the NASA administration building. An enraged NASA official told Shepard that the flight was his. Only after Slayton and the other astronauts objected to the change was Cooper, properly contrite, reinstated.

  Mercury Control began making final preparations. This flight needed round-the-clock monitoring, meaning an additional shift—another team of controllers and another flight director. Kraft picked a young, capable, British-born Canadian named John Hodge, who had been hired in 1959 after a fighter jet program called Avro Arrow had been canceled. Each shift would work ten or twelve hours. Several tracking stations had also been added, since the Earth would spin appreciably during the day-and-a-half mission, meaning Cooper’s path over it would change significantly on each orbit.

  Early in the morning of May 15, 1963, Deke Slayton knocked on the door of the crew quarters in Hangar S to wake Cooper. As the chief astronaut, Slayton felt it was his duty to do so. At 8:04 a.m., a short while after a relaxed Cooper took a brief nap on the launchpad during a delay, his Faith 7 lifted off. He was scheduled for twenty-two orbits—at ninety minutes an orbit, almost a day and a half. The first eighteen orbits were nominal, and he took another short nap before his second orbit was even finished, though when he awakened, he was startled to find his arms floating before him with his hands dangerously close to the many switches on his control panel. Cooper remained cool as a cucumber, and his oxygen consumption was so low that CapCom Shepard told him, “You can stop holding your breath.”

  Despite his laid-back attitude, he was sharp and focused when he needed to be—as well as surprisingly eloquent. He used a recorder to tape his observations, and critics couldn’t complain, as they had about other astronauts, that his descriptions were unimaginative:

  As the sun begins to get down toward the horizon, it is very well-defined…it is a very bright white, almost the bluish-white color of an arc lamp.…The sky begins to get quite dark…the light spreading out from the sun is a bright orange color which moves out from under a narrow band of bright blue.

&nb
sp; After checking on the eleven experiments he’d been tasked with doing, Cooper slept on and off over the next several revolutions, sometimes waking and marveling at the sight of Earth from a hundred miles above, often photographing what he saw. During the nineteenth orbit, recurrent surges of electricity began playing havoc with the spacecraft. Two orbits later, a short circuit shut down the automatic control system. Cooper would have to take complete control of the capsule and hold it steady in all three axes, and he would have to manually line up the capsule’s angle of attack by hand and fire his retro-rockets at the exact right second. While Mercury Control went into a frenzy of activity trying to find out what was happening, Cooper remained so calm, despite the increasing level of carbon dioxide in his suit—“We probably could not have made another revolution,” said a NASA life-support systems engineer afterward—that they told him to take a go-pill (an amphetamine). That was just about the point when part of his automatic reentry system failed, and then another.

  “Things are starting to stack up a little,” Cooper radioed on his twenty-second and final orbit, sounding like an unconcerned commercial-airline pilot circling for a landing, then he drily proceeded to list the systems that had conked out. “Other than that,” he said when he’d concluded, “everything’s fine.”

  Everything wasn’t. Cooper lined up a scribe mark etched on his window with the visible horizon to time the firing of each retro-rocket. He performed a completely manual reentry—the first time in the Mercury program—and Faith 7 splashed down just four miles in front of the recovery ship Kearsarge. The flight was more proof that people could function well for long periods in space—a capability, some newspapers pointed out, that would be important when the air force developed a “space patrol,” one of the many half-baked aerospace projects floated by the military.

  Later, NASA engineers tore Faith 7 down to its skin, and they found the reason for the many failures experienced on the mission: Cooper’s urine-collection system had leaked, penetrating and short-circuiting several systems. The Mercury capsule had only just survived thirty-four hours in space, limping home barely functional. “If it hadn’t been for Cooper’s superb piloting job,” said Kraft, “the mission would have failed.”

  In hindsight, the decision to use test pilots made eminent sense. In emergencies, they did not panic or freeze—they acted. Besides their coolness under pressure and ability to deal with real-time problems under the most difficult conditions, they were familiar with the experience of evaluating an aircraft from the ground up, one step at a time, and expressing that evaluation in terms that an aeronautical engineer could understand. And their skill and knowledge were even more essential in these first days of manned space exploration, when NASA was inventing the spacecraft much like the Wright brothers had invented the airplane a half a century before—by repeated trial and error. That knowledge, experience, and skill had been invaluable on the Mercury flights. On every mission but one—Schirra’s—the pilot found it necessary to take manual control of the attitude during reentry, and each mission saw its share of systems failures that required human interaction.

  Even before Cooper’s return, NASA officials had pitched the longer Mercury flight—the one promised to Shepard—to administrator Jim Webb. Now that they knew that there was less cosmic radiation than the space docs had expected and that it was tolerable because of the capsule walls and the spacesuits, they wanted to learn more about the effects of long-term weightlessness. A three-day flight would contribute significant knowledge and keep the U.S. in the game, so to speak, since there were no manned spaceflights planned for at least a year. At the time, Shepard and Cooper were the only astronauts left in the Mercury program—with the end of it in sight, the others had been assigned elsewhere, to Apollo and another program in the works—so Shepard was the obvious choice after Cooper’s flight. He named his spacecraft Freedom 7 II and painted the name on its side.

  At an astronaut event at the White House, Shepard told President Kennedy how much he and the others wanted to do the extended flight. Kennedy deferred to Webb, who wouldn’t forget Shepard’s temerity in going around him to the president. On June 12, 1963, four weeks after Cooper’s flight, Webb announced that there would be no further missions. The Mercury capsule was a sophisticated machine, perhaps the most complicated ever built, but in space, its limitations and weaknesses had been revealed. To push farther into space would require a bigger, better, even more complex spacecraft.

  The program had achieved its stated goal of putting a man into orbit and returning him safely to Earth—and it had accomplished much more. The gravest medical fears had been allayed. A human could function in space and endure heavy g-forces. The effects of long-term weightlessness were still not well known—it appeared that there was some loss of muscle mass and bone density and possibly more issues—but it was clear that in limited exposure, an astronaut could work without suffering incapacitating injury.

  The astronauts had also proven the importance of the man to the machine—at least, this particular one. The man-in-a-can talk eventually died down as each successive mission demonstrated the value of a trained, experienced engineer-pilot. The Mercury Seven had captured the world’s imagination with their competence in high-pressure situations. Even Chris Kraft, who tolerated no independent pilot initiative, said, “Man is the deciding element.”

  And they had done it the way Bob Gilruth wanted to do it—carefully, step by step, with safety and reliability the program’s watchwords. Of all the program’s accomplishments thus far, Gilruth was most proud of “six men up and six men back.” The seven astronauts looked up to him, and he thought of them as his “boys.” “He died a thousand deaths every time one of those things was launched,” Kraft would remember.

  It was time to move on, to another program already in progress that would entail longer flights—much longer—and greater dangers.

  A month after Cooper’s flight, the Soviets put on another space spectacle. On June 14, 1963, Vostok 5 blasted Lieutenant Valery Bykovsky into orbit. Two days later, Vostok 6 launched another cosmonaut, or “cosmonette,” as Time magazine put it—the first woman in space, and the first civilian. A former textile-factory worker and an amateur skydiver, Valentina Tereshkova had little flying experience; she was clearly picked for her “ordinary Russian” status, since one of her backup cosmonauts was a licensed pilot with a degree from the well-respected Moscow Aeronautical Institute, a kind of NACA university.

  Tereshkova was twenty-six and almost five foot seven, taller than many of the male cosmonauts. She made forty-eight orbits during her three days in space, and Bykovsky made eighty-two in five days. The two capsules held parallel orbits, at one point coming within three miles of each other, and returned to Earth just three hours apart—yet another display of Soviet superiority in space. Tereshkova would never fly again, nor would any of the women who had trained with her; she had been space-sick and exhausted for much of the time and barely functioned, though this information was hidden from the Russian public and the West. That November, Tereshkova would marry cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev and later give birth to a healthy baby, allaying fears that exposure to cosmic radiation might cause genetic damage to human reproductive cells.

  And that was that. There would be no more Vostok flights. The Soviets, under Sergei Korolev’s shrewd and resourceful direction and propelled by Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s insatiable demand for more space spectaculars, also had something more ambitious in mind.

  Over the next few years, details about the Apollo program and its massive Saturn V rocket emerged, and Soviet leaders who had been reluctant to underwrite Korolev’s pet project, the N1—a booster even larger and more powerful than the Saturn—were finally persuaded of its necessity. Korolev sold it to them as an all-purpose launch vehicle, with thirty engines clustered on the first stage alone. But its prime use, in his eyes, was as a booster to carry a cosmonaut or two to the moon—and maybe even to Mars and Venus. The Chief Designer spent more than a year lob
bying for it and had a personal meeting at the Kremlin with Khrushchev in July 1964. Finally, after all concerned realized that the Americans were not just talking about a moon landing but proceeding to make it happen, Korolev’s proposal for funding was approved by the party’s Central Committee.

  For the first time, the Soviet program to land a man on the moon was made a top priority. The goal was to do it by late 1967 or 1968—an ambitious timetable, especially given the fact that the Americans had a three-year head start and seemingly limitless funding. But the resourceful Chief Designer had performed miracles before. Maybe he could again.

  Chapter Seven

  The Gusmobile

  It was like the Blue Angels at 18,000 miles per hour.

  Wally Schirra

  The astronauts called the Gemini spacecraft the Gusmobile, and for good reason.

  During Grissom’s Mercury mission, the hatch had blown open without warning, allowing the capsule to fill with water and sink to the bottom of the sea, and Grissom had taken the loss of the capsule hard. He and the rest of the Mercury Seven, as well as his NASA bosses, knew it wasn’t his fault, and an in-house investigation had concluded that he hadn’t initiated the firing of the hatch. But he knew there were people out there who thought he’d panicked and popped it on purpose. More than anything, Grissom wanted—needed—another flight so he could redeem himself.

  But his chances weren’t looking good. It appeared that the Mercury program would be over before Grissom would make it into space again. With five others who had yet to fly, he was at the back of the line; not only that, but Al Shepard was already angling for another mission, and Gus wasn’t going to beat him out. After Grissom’s nominal flight—except for that last development—and the confirmation that a human could indeed survive weightlessness in space, NASA had canceled the two other suborbital flights originally planned. What would be the point? John Glenn, up next, would fly the first orbital flight. There would be more of those, but not six more.