On their last day in Albuquerque, Randy brought B and Jerri into his office. He told them they had both performed as well as some men in a number of tests. B was delighted, convinced that their performance would determine when—not if—they went into space and sure that they were on the cusp of something big. She returned home to share the news with her proud and loving husband. Jerri, meanwhile, was met at the airport by an attorney with divorce papers. Deciding between supporting his wife and distancing himself from a woman who left him feeling emasculated, Lou Sloan had chosen the latter.
* * *
Shorty Powers was sleeping fitfully on a small cot in his office. He and a handful of other NASA staffers had been working sixteen-hour days leading up to Al’s flight, making sure every angle was covered, the press informed, and the country was along for the ride. A ringing phone cut through the blissful predawn silence. Barely awake, Shorty answered to find someone on the line asking something about a man in space, but all he registered was the time.
“It’s three a.m. in the morning, you jerk,” he snapped into the phone. “If you’re wanting something from us the answer is we’re all asleep!”
A few hours later, America woke up to newspaper headlines proclaiming that the Soviet Union had put a man in space and recovered him safely. Subheadings on nationally syndicated wire service stories featured some variation of an American spokesman saying that the whole country was sleeping.
Without any of the fanfare afforded the Mercury astronauts, twenty-seven-year-old pilot Yuri Gagarin had been launched into space on April 12, made one full orbit around the planet, then landed safely by parachute near a small village in the Saratov Oblast. Assuming the Soviet flight had knocked John out for contention as history’s first man in space, the press sought him out for a comment. “They just beat the pants off us, that’s all, and there’s no use kidding ourselves about that,” he told reporters. It was his honest reaction, and he couldn’t say anything more since no one knew Al was in line to fly first. “But now that the space age has begun there’s going to be plenty of work for everybody.” John remained the media darling through and through.
Jack Kennedy knew the Soviets had been working on a manned mission but hadn’t seriously thought they would be the first into orbit. A month earlier he’d approved Jim Webb’s proposal of building up America’s space program by authorizing funding for a larger rocket called Saturn, a rocket everyone at NASA believed would be the key to the country’s future in space, but he had denied the space agency money to build a three-man spacecraft. Now he had to reconsider his next move.
That afternoon, Jack held a press conference, and for the first time since taking office, America saw their usually confident leader looking unsure. After his prepared announcements, the press began demanding answers about space.
“Mr. President,” came one question, “a member of Congress said today that he was tired of seeing the United States second to Russia in the space field. What is the prospect that we will catch up with Russia and perhaps surpass Russia in this field?”
“However tired anybody may be,” the president began, “and no one is more tired than I am, it is a fact that it is going to take some time, and I think we have to recognize it. They secured these large boosters which have led to their being first in Sputnik, and led to their first putting their man in space.” He said that NASA was going to be putting more emphasis on its boosters and long-range planning, but had to admit that “the news will be worse before it is better, and it will be some time before we catch up. We are, I hope, going to go in other areas where we can be first, and which will bring perhaps more long-range benefits to mankind. But here we are behind.”
While Jack was busy with the press conference, Speaker Sam Rayburn addressed the House of Representatives Committee on Science and Astronautics. Speaking as the president’s proxy, Sam stated Jack’s belief that the vice president could contribute importantly to the space program while at the same time providing valuable counsel to the office of the president. Jack wanted to leverage Lyndon’s background and experience in the fields of space and defense in guiding the council, giving him the most responsibility in shaping the space program. Sam then presented House Resolution 6169, an amendment to the National Aeronautics and Space Act nominating Lyndon as chairman of the Space Council, which the committee quickly approved. Now it would be up to Lyndon to select committee members, develop space goals and budgets, and facilitate making the space program jump from ideas in meetings to real launches. The president would be the one announcing everything, but the vice president would be making the decisions. That meant Jack could take the credit if things went well and pass the blame onto Lyndon if things went poorly.
Three days later, the Kennedy administration was dealt another blow with the failed Cuban invasion at the Bay of Pigs. The Central Intelligence Agency program, begun during the Eisenhower administration, had trained Cuban exiles to storm the beach at the Bay of Pigs and retake their homeland from Fidel Castro, the communist leader with close ties to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. The plan hinged on the belief that the Cuban people would allow the United States to establish a friendly, non-communist government, but as soon as the attack began on April 15, things went wrong. Bombers missed their targets, photographs of American planes revealed US involvement and forced JFK to cancel the second airstrike, and the 1,200 troops that landed on the beach on April 17 were met with heavy fire from the Cuban army and bad weather. America’s return with air cover two days afterward was late owing to a misunderstanding of time zones.
Almost the whole Cuban exile force was captured, and nearly one hundred were killed.
On April 18, Irene Leverton arrived alone at the Lovelace Clinic for her medical testing. Irene had learned to fly through the Civil Air Patrol as a teenager, and almost from the moment she was airborne knew she’d found her calling. Finding an outlet for that calling had been another matter altogether. Just seventeen years old with nine hours in her logbook when the WASPs started recruiting during the Second World War, she’d borrowed an older friend’s birth certificate and forged her logbook in an attempt to fly for her country, but the ruse hadn’t fooled anyone. Denied entry to the WASPs, she’d taken on a host of part-time flying jobs. In her brief time as a crop duster, she’d flown one infamous prank flight: she’d sprayed attendees at the dedication of the new Chicago lakefront airport, Meigs Field, with Jacqueline Cochran Cosmetics Tailspin perfume. She quickly gained a reputation as a serious pilot and clever prankster.
Her series of odd jobs had eventually landed Irene a position making charter flights and instructing pilots out of an airport in Santa Monica. But when she told her boss that she’d been invited to participate in a research program at the Lovelace Clinic, she was denied the time off for her week in Albuquerque. Unsure what might come from taking the medical tests but sure they were worth doing, Irene circumvented the issue. She told her boss’s wife that she would be gone for a week, and without any further explanation left for Albuquerque.
A week later, Irene returned to Santa Monica as the eighth woman to pass the Lovelace medical tests to find she had been demoted to instructing primary students. Her boss wasn’t willing to fire her over her transgression but found a way to punish her all the same.
* * *
On April 20, JFK sent a memo to LBJ in his capacity as chairman of the Space Council. “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip to the Moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man? Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win? How much additional money would it cost? Are we making maximum efforts? Are we achieving necessary results?” Between Gagarin’s flight and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the president needed a win against the Soviet Union, and just as Lyndon had done in the wake of Sputnik, he thought space might be his way forward.
Lyndon moved quickly. He huddled with congressmen, talked to Jim W
ebb, consulted with presidential science advisor Jerome Wiesner, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and NASA’s Wernher von Braun. Every conversation confirmed what Lyndon already knew: the Soviets’ early emphasis on big rockets had put them ahead of America when it came to launch power. But what the US had that the Soviets didn’t, he learned, were resources and better leadership potential. So, rather than try to catch up with Russia, it made sense for America to embark on its own path and take on a long-range goal that would depend more on management and problem-solving than might. Of all the potential long-range goals, NASA had done the most research into a Moon landing mission, a program internally called Apollo. The caveat from Jim was that a mission this big would take ongoing support over a period of at least a decade with a price tag on the order of thirty or forty billion dollars,19 meaning Jack would have to be ready to start something he might not be in office to see finished. Originally a distant goal, the Moon was suddenly something to fast-track, a so-called “crash program” that would take the easier path to this goal for the sake of beating the Soviets. Gradually, Lyndon came to see that there wasn’t any other option: America’s best bet was to focus on a manned lunar landing. The political and propaganda implications were as important, if not more important, as the technological coup. Control of space was the modern-day equivalent of controlling the oceans, and first in space would mean first in the world.
After just eight days, Lyndon passed his formal recommendation to Jack Kennedy. “As for a manned trip around the moon or a safe landing and return by a man on the moon, neither the US nor the USSR has such capability at this time, so far as we know,” his memo read. “The Russians have had more experience with large boosters and with flights of dogs and men. Hence they might be conceded a time advantage in circumnavigating of the Moon and also a manned trip to the Moon. However, with a strong effort, the United States could conceivably be first in those two accomplishments by 1966 or 1967.”
He had just recommended America put a man on the Moon.
* * *
The April 30, 1961, edition of Parade magazine introduced America to a pair of smiling brunettes dressed in matching red flight suits and holding matching helmets. The caption identified them as “Jan and Marion Dietrich: the First Astronaut Twins.” Under this baiting heading was Jackie’s attempt to bring truth to the story. She’d run her manuscript by Randy, so the article that ran under her byline served as his first approved publicity around the women’s testing, too. “Women will fly in space just as certainly as men will—only not so soon,” the piece began, accompanied by the picture of Jackie overseeing Jan walking on a treadmill. Jackie made it clear that the women’s testing, enabled through private donations she didn’t say were her own, was unofficial and the idea of a female astronaut program was little more than a gleam in the eyes of the doctors interested in aerospace medicine. “I myself,” she wrote, “expect to fly into space before I hang up my flying gear.” The short article ended with a call for other women to send a letter expressing their interest in the program and credentials to Jackie at the Ranch. If the right woman was out there and wrote to her, Jackie teased, she might become the first woman astronaut to really earn that designation.
By her own admission Myrtle “K” Thompson Cagle, who felt her given name sounded too much like “turtle” and so went by the initial K, was Jackie’s most ardent fan. She’d made a trip to a Robinson’s department store to have her copy of The Stars at Noon autographed. She’d been thrilled but too shy to say hello when she’d seen Jackie out one night in Palm Springs. She even had a Jackie doll that she’d dressed in flight clothes. K was also a pilot with multiple licenses and qualifications currently teaching at the Air Force Aero Club in Georgia. Having been too young and too short to fly with the WASPs during the Second World War, K read the Parade article and saw it as her way to make up for the lost experience of flying with her hero. She immediately answered Jackie’s call with a letter. “I want to participate in your space program to make up for having missed the WASPs. Then, I can name drop…Jacqueline this, and Jacqueline that.” K felt certain that if anyone could make a female astronaut program go from talk to reality, it was the woman who made the WASPs the envy of every female pilot during the war.
K’s was among a barrage of letters that reached Jackie’s desk in the wake of the Parade article, but hers stood out. As a pilot who had founded her own aviation school, K’s was among the few names Jackie passed on to Randy at the end of the month.
Eisenhower Presidential Library
* * *
A week after the Dietrichs’ issue of Parade came out, Jerrie spoke as part of the missile and space panel at the twenty-third annual meeting of the Aviation/Space Writers’ Association.
“There are at this time sixteen highly qualified and experienced women pilots undergoing the astronaut examinations at the Lovelace Foundation in Albuquerque,” she began, emphasizing that they were the exact same initial medical tests the male candidates had taken in 1959. She spoke to the scientific benefits of launching smaller and lighter women who consume fewer resources, women whom science has proved are less susceptible to boredom than their male peers. This wasn’t to say she thought women were better than men, she said, just that women should be considered alongside men. What she didn’t mention was that the women were testing alone or in pairs, not as a group. She also didn’t discuss the non-medical qualifications that went into NASA’s astronaut selection. Instead, she determinedly used the phrase “astronaut testing,” letting the image of an organized program sit in the minds of her audience.
She closed saying the Lovelace tests would ultimately produce a group of seven to nine women who would form a core group for further testing. “This program has no official government sponsorship and the NASA does not include women astronauts in their program at this time,” she said, then made her case for why she thought America ought to launch a woman sooner rather than later. “Russia may have put the first man in orbit but the United States can now put the first woman in space—and here’s one who’d like to be riding that Redstone tomorrow.”
Four days later, on May 5, after two cancellations due to bad weather, it was Al Shepard sealed into his Freedom 7 Mercury spacecraft ready to ride a Redstone. The world watched as the Redstone’s engine fired at 9:34 in the morning local time. Jackie, serving as a timer on the mission, watched from the control room as the rocket lifted off the ground. Eight hundred miles away in Washington, Jack, Lyndon, and a handful of others stood huddled around a television, their focus unwavering. If the flight failed, the country would blame LBJ as head of the Space Council for leading NASA to the death of an astronaut.
In just fifteen minutes and twenty-eight seconds, Al reached his peak altitude of 116.5 miles on a parabolic flight that afforded him just five minutes of weightlessness before he landed gently in the Atlantic Ocean. When it was all said and done, he’d traveled 303 miles, a far cry from Yuri Gagarin’s full orbit around the globe, but it was a start.
Al’s flight was the tonic the country needed: evidence of the competence and the courage America needed to secure a position of international leadership in space. Though he hadn’t gone into orbit—and analysts were quick to point out that his flight paled in comparison to Gagarin’s—Americans everywhere were thrilled that the first manned spaceflight had been a success. Ticker-tape parades in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles saw thousands upon thousands of people lining the streets for a glimpse of the first astronaut.
* * *
On a muggy day two weeks later, Jerrie awoke from a night of poor sleep in a noisy military barracks. But excitement took over as she reported to the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. She was there for advanced astronaut simulation tests, the third phase of her testing, which she was convinced would determine whether she could handle the predicted physical demands of spaceflight.
The schedule was daunting. She began with a two-day investigation into her physical condition, which included chin-ups,
endurance runs, and sit-ups. Then it was on to a full pressure-suit run. After a full hour and a half to get laced and strapped into the smallest suit on hand, she climbed into an altitude chamber that took her to the equivalent of 60,000 feet without leaving the ground. In the simulated low atmospheric pressure, the suit expanded, engulfing her like a cocoon. Technicians asked her to move her arms and legs as though she were flying a plane and report whether she felt hampered in her movements; she didn’t. Then they “dropped” her to 10,000 feet, then 5,000 feet, then sea level, stopping each time to see if she had any problem clearing her ears or if her head felt stopped up. Again, she reported feeling completely fine.
Then came the Dilbert Dunker, a wholly different simulated environment. Fully dressed with a lifejacket and a parachute pack strapped on, she settled into the cockpit of a round capsule sitting on skids and tightened her harness. She took a deep breath as the capsule was plunged into a pool at a forty-five-degree angle, then tried to stay oriented as the capsule flipped upside-down underwater. Confident in the rescue divers on hand, Jerrie watched the water gurgle up all around her and tried to keep a clear head as she undid the harness and got herself safely above water.
Another test had Jerrie alone in a windowless room furnished like an apartment sitting on a forty-two-ton steel gyroscope. Spinning ten times a minute, it was fast enough for her to notice the movement, but without windows, she didn’t have the visual cues to make the motion disorienting. It did, however, make simple movements difficult. Walking to the chair, she stumbled as though she were drunk. When she was asked to flip switches, she had to focus hard on the dials to stave off motion sickness. Still another test had her riding in a jet, wires measuring her brain activity while the pilot flew a series of acrobatic maneuvers.
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