The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

  The message had a particular ring to it; but coming, as it did, from a civilian, it took a while for it to register.

  Conrad and the rest of the Pax River contingent were staying at the Marriott motel near the Pentagon, and after dinner they got together in one of the rooms and had a long discussion. Schirra was there, and Lovell, and Alan Shepard, a veteran test pilot who had recently been reassigned from Pax River to a staff position in Norfolk, and a few others. What they talked about was not space travel, the future of the galaxy, or even the problems of riding a rocket into earth orbit. No, they talked about a rather more urgent matter: what this Project Mercury might do to your Navy career.

  Wally Schirra had a lot of reservations about the thing, and Conrad and everybody else listened. Schirra was farther up the pyramid than anybody else in the room. Alan Shepard had more flight test experience, but he had never been in combat. Schirra, at thirty-five, had an outstanding combat record and was the sort of man who was obviously going places in the Navy. He had graduated from the Naval Academy, and his wife, Jo, was the stepdaughter of Admiral James Holloway, former commander of the Pacific Theater in the Second World War. Wally had been on ninety combat missions in Korea and shot down two MiGs. He had been chosen for the initial testing of the Sidewinder air-to-air missile out at China Lake, California, he had tested the F–4H for the Navy at Edwards itself—all this before joining Group 20 to complete his flight test training. Wally was quite popular. He was a stocky fellow with a big wide open face who was given to pranks, cosmic winks, fast cars, and all other ways of “maintaining an even strain,” to use a Schirraism. He was a practical joker of the amiable sort. He would call up and say, “Hey, you gotta come over here! You’ll never guess what I caught in the woods … A mongoose! I’m not kidding—a mongoose! You gotta see this thing!” And it would sound so incredible, you’d go over and take a look. Up on a table Wally would have a box that looked as if it had been converted into a cage, and he’d say: “Here, I’ll open the top a little, so you can see him. But don’t put your hand in, because he’ll take it off for you. This baby is vicious.” You’d lean down to take a look and—bango!—the lid flies open and this huge gray streak springs toward your face—and, well, my God, veteran aviators would recoil in terror, dive for the deck—and only then realize that the gray streak was some sort of foxtail rig and the whole thing was a jack-in-the-box, Schirra-style. It was a broad joke, strictly speaking, but the delight Wally took in such things came in a wave, a wave so big that it swept you along in spite of yourself. A smile about a foot wide would spread over his face and his cheekbones would well up into a pair of cherub bellies, St. Nicholas-style, and an incredible rocking-druid laugh would come shaking and rumbling up from his rib cage, and he’d say: “Gotcha!” Schirra’s “gotchas” were famous. Wally was one of those people who didn’t mind showing their emotions, happiness, rage, frustration, whatever. But in the air he was as cool as they made them. His father had been an ace in the First World War, shooting down five German planes, and both his father and his mother had done barnstorm stunt flying after the war. For all his cutting up, Wally was absolutely serious about his career. And that was his mood now that this “astronaut” business confronted them.

  There were some obvious problems. One, Project Mercury was a civilian program; two, NASA had not yet developed the rockets or the capsule to carry it out; three, it involved no flying, at least not in the sense a pilot used that word. The Mercury capsule was not a ship but a can. Not only did it involve no flying, there wasn’t even a window to look out of. There wasn’t even a hatch you could egress from like a man; it would take a crew of swabbos with lug wrenches to get you out of the thing. It was a can. Suppose you volunteered and got tied up in the project for two or three years, and then the whole thing fizzled? That was entirely possible, because this rocket-and-capsule system was novel and had a lot of Rube Goldberg stuff in it. Any test pilot who had ever been to the Society of Experimental Test Pilots convention, to one of those sessions where they show movies of Great Ideas that never made it out of the test stage, would know what he meant … the Sea Dart, a ten-ton jet fighter that was supposed to take off and land on water skis (up on the screen it keeps hopping up out of the waves, like a rock skipping across a pond, and the audience roars with laughter) … the single-engine plane, with a 25-foot propeller, that was propped up on its tail to take off vertically, like a hummingbird (it hangs in the air, suspended at forty feet, tail down, its engine churning furiously, not realizing that it has turned from an airplane into a cockeyed helicopter, and the audience roars with laughter) … In the history of flight these well-meant farces took place all the time. And where would you be then? You would be three years behind in flight test. You would be three years off the line in the general jockeying for promotion. You would be giving up whatever brownie points you had built up over the past four or five years. For somebody like Wally this was no joke. He was at the point in his career where you really start to climb—or you go off on some ill-advised tangent. He was in line to command his own fighter squadron. That was the route to the top, to admiral rank, for a Navy flier.

  They talked for a long time. Someone Schirra’s age had more to lose than Conrad, who was only twenty-eight. But as every officer knew, it was never too early to screw up your career in the Navy by getting involved in what was known, with some sarcasm, as “innovative duty.”

  From the beginning George Low and others in the NASA hierarchy had been afraid that the pilots would react in precisely this way. As a result, they were amazed. They had briefed thirty-five test pilots on Monday, February 2, Conrad, Schirra, Lovell, and Alan Shepard among them, and another thirty-four the following Monday; and of the total of sixty-nine, fifty-six volunteered to become astronauts. They now had so many volunteers they didn’t even call in the remaining forty-one men who fit the profile. Why bother? They already had fifty-six grossly overqualified volunteers. Not only that, the men seemed so gung-ho about the project, they figured they could get by with seven astronauts instead of twelve.

  Pete Conrad had ended up volunteering, and so had Jim Lovell. In fact, every man who had been in that room at the motel had volunteered, including Wally Schirra, who had been the most dubious of all. And why? That was a good question. Despite all the pondering, all the discussions, all the career-wrestling, all the toting up of pros and cons, none of them could give you a very clear-cut answer. The matter had not been decided by sheer logic. Somehow, in that briefing in the inner room at the Pentagon, Silverstein and Low had hit every button just right. It was as if they possessed a blueprint of the way the fighter jock was wired.

  “The highest national priority” … “hazardous undertaking” … “strictly volunteer” … so hazardous that “if you don’t volunteer, it won’t be held against you” … And they had all gotten the signal, subliminally, in the solar plexus. They were being presented with the Cold War version of the dangerous mission. One of the maxims that was drilled into all career officers went: Never refuse a combat assignment. Moreover, there was the business of “the first men to go into space.” The first men to go into space. Well … suppose it happened just that way? The rocket aces at Edwards, from their eminence, might be able to look down upon the whole scheme. But within the souls of the rest of the fighter jocks who came to the Pentagon was triggered a motivation that overrode all strictly logical career considerations: I must not get … left behind.

  That feeling was magnified by the public reaction. No sooner had the first group of men been briefed than the news that NASA was looking for Mercury astronauts made its way into the press. From the beginning the reporters and broadcasters dealt with the subject in tones of awe. It was the awe that one has of an impending death-defying stunt. The question of whether an astronaut was a pilot or a mere guinea pig never entered into it for a moment, so far as the press was concerned. “Are they really looking for somebody to go into space on top of a rocket?” That was the question and the only one that
seemed to matter. To almost anyone who had followed NASA’s efforts on television, the odds against the successful launch of an American into space seemed absolutely dreadful. For fourteen months now the Eisenhower Administration had adopted the strategy of openly publicizing its attempts to catch up with the Russians—and so people were being treated to the sight of the rockets at Cape Canaveral and Wallops Island, Virginia, either blowing up on the launch pad in the most ignominious, if briefly hilarious, fashion or else heading off on crazy trajectories, toward downtown Orlando instead of outer space, in which case they had to be blown up by remote control. Well, not all of them, of course, for the United States had succeeded in putting up some small satellites, mere “oranges,” as Nikita Khrushchev liked to put it, in his cruel colorful farmboy way, as compared to the 1,000-pound Sputniks the mighty Integral was sending around the earth loaded with dogs and other experimental animals. But the only obvious American talent was for blowing up. They had many names, these rockets, Atlas, Navaho, Little Joe, Jupiter, but they all blew up.

  Conrad, like Schirra or any other test pilot, did not look at the TV footage in the same light, however. What people were seeing on television were, in fact, ordinary test events. Blown engines were par for the course in testing aircraft prototypes and were inevitable in testing an entirely new propulsion system such as jet or rocket engines. It had happened at Muroc in testing the engine of the second American jet fighter, the XP–80. Obviously you didn’t send a man up with an engine until it had attained a certain level of reliability. The only thing unusual about the testing of big rocket engines like the Navaho and the Atlas was that so much of it was televised and that these normal test events came across as colossal “failures.” They were not even radical engines. The rocket engines that had been used in the X–1 project and all of the X projects that followed employed the same basic power plants as the Atlas, the Jupiter, and the other rockets NASA was working with. They used the same fuel, liquid oxygen. The X-project rockets, inevitably, had blown in the testing stage, but had been made reliable in the end. No rocket pilot had ever had an engine blow up under him in flight, although one, Skip Ziegler, had died when an X–2 had exploded while it was still attached to the B–50 that was supposed to launch it. To pilots who had been through bad strings at Pax River or Edwards, it was hard to see how the risk would be any greater than in testing the Century series of jet fighters. Just think of a beast like the F–102 … or the F–104 … or the F–105 …

  When Pete talked to Jane about Project Mercury, she was all for it! If he wanted to volunteer, then he should by all means do so. The thought of Pete riding a NASA rocket did not fill her with horror. On the contrary. Although she never quite put it this way to Pete, she felt that anything would be better, safer, saner than for him to continue flying high-performance jet fighters for the Navy. At the very least, astronaut training would take him away from that. As for rocket flights themselves, how could they possibly be any more dangerous than flying every day at Pax River? What rocket pilot’s wife had ever been to more funerals than the wives of Group 20?

  Albuquerque, home of the Lovelace Clinic, was a dirty red sod-hut tortilla highway desert city that was remarkably short on charm, despite the Mexican touch here and there. But career officers were used to dreary real estate. That was what they inhabited in America, especially if they were fliers. No, it was Lovelace itself that began to get everybody’s back up. Lovelace was a fairly new private diagnostic clinic, somewhat like the Mayo Clinic, doing “aerospace-medical” work for the government, among other things. Lovelace had been founded by Randy Lovelace—W. Randolph Lovelace II—who had served along with Crossfield and Flickinger on the committee on “human factors” in space flight. The chief of the medical staff at Lovelace was a recently retired general of the Air Force medical corps, Dr. A. H. Schwichtenberg. He was General Schwichtenberg to everybody at Lovelace. The operation took itself very seriously. The candidates for astronaut would be given their physical testing here. Then they would go to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton for psychological and stress testing. It was all very hush-hush. Conrad went to Lovelace in a group of only six men, once more in their ill-fitting mufti and terrific watches, apparently so that they would blend in with the clinic’s civilian patients. They had been warned that the tests at Lovelace and Wright-Patterson would be more exacting and strenuous than any they had ever taken. It was not the tests per se, however, that made every self-respecting fighter jock, early in the game, begin to hate Lovelace.

  Military pilots were veterans of physical examinations, but in addition to all the usual components of “the complete physical,” the Lovelace doctors had devised a series of novel tests involving straps, tubes, hoses, and needles. They would put a strap around your head, clamp some sort of instrument over your eyes—and then stick a hose in your ear and pump cold water into your ear canal. It would make your eyeballs flutter. It was an unpleasant, disorienting sensation, although not painful. If you wanted to know what it was all about, the Lovelace doctors and technicians, in their uncompromising white smocks, indicated that you really didn’t need to know, and that was that.

  What really made Conrad feel that something eccentric was going on here, however, was the business of the electrode in the thumb muscle. They brought him into a room and strapped his hand down to a table, palm up. Then they brought out an ugly-looking needle attached to an electrical wire. Conrad didn’t like needles in the first place, and this one looked like a monster. Hannh?—they drove the needle into the big muscle at the base of his thumb. It hurt like a bastard. Conrad looked up as if to say, “What the hell’s going on?” But they weren’t even looking at him. They were looking—at the meter. The wire from the needle led to what looked like a doorbell. They pushed the buzzer. Conrad looked down, and his hand—his own goddamned hand!—was balling up into a fist and springing open and balling up into a fist and springing open and balling up into a fist and springing open and balling up into a fist and springing open at an absolutely furious rate, faster than he could have ever made it do so on its own, and there seemed to be nothing that he, with his own mind and his own central nervous system, could do to stop his own hand or even slow it down. The Lovelace doctors in their white smocks, with their reflectors on their heads, were having a hell of a time for themselves … with his hand … They were reading the meter and scribbling away on their clipboards at a jolly rate.

  Afterward Conrad said, “What was that for?”

  A doctor looked up, distractedly, as if Conrad were interrupting an important train of thought.

  “I’m afraid there’s no simple way to explain it to you,” he said. “There’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  It was then that it began to dawn on Conrad, first as a feeling rather than as a fully formed thought: “Lab rats.”

  It went on like that. The White Smocks gave each of them a test tube and said they wanted a sperm count. What do you mean? Place your sperm in the tube. How? Through ejaculation. Just like that? Masturbation is the customary procedure. What! The best results seem to be obtained through fantasization, accompanied by masturbation, followed by ejaculation. Where, f’r chrissake? Use the bathroom. A couple of the boys said things such as, “Well, okay, I’ll do it if you’ll send a nurse in with me—to help me along if I get stuck.” The White Smocks looked at them as if they were schoolboys making obscene noises. This got the pilots’ back up, and a couple of them refused, flat out. But by and by they gave in, and so now you had the ennobling prospect of half a dozen test pilots padding off one by one to the head in their skivvies to jack off for the Lovelace Clinic, Project Mercury, and America’s battle for the heavens. Sperm counts were supposed to determine the density and motility of the sperm. What this had to do with a man’s fitness to fly on top of a rocket or anywhere else was incomprehensible. Conrad began to get the feeling that it wasn’t just him and his brother lab rats who didn’t know what was going on. He now had the suspicion that the Reflector Heads did
n’t know, either. They had somehow gotten carte blanche to try out any goddamned thing they could think up—and that was what they were doing, whether there was any logic to it or not.

  Each candidate was to deliver two stool specimens to the Lovelace laboratory in Dixie cups, and days were going by and Conrad had been unable to egest even one, and the staff kept getting after him about it. Finally he managed to produce a single bolus, a mean hard little ball no more than an inch in diameter and shot through with some kind of seeds, whole seeds, undigested. Then he remembered. The first night in Albuquerque he had gone to a Mexican restaurant and eaten a lot of jalapeño peppers. They were jalapeño seeds. Even in the turd world this was a pretty miserable-looking objet. So Conrad tied a red ribbon around the goddamned thing, with a bow and all, and put it in the Dixie cup and delivered it to the lab. Curious about the ribbons that flopped out over the lip of the cup, the technicians all peered in. Conrad broke into his full cackle of mirth, much the way Wally might have. No one was swept up in the joke, however. The Lovelace staffers looked at the beribboned bolus, and then they looked at Conrad … as if he were a bug on the windshield of the pace car of medical progress.