The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

  That was the spirit of the hour—ride! más allâ! over the next hill! don’t look back!—when Bob Gilruth called in Glenn and the other six for a meeting at the office at Langley just before Christmas. Gilruth had always been a sympathetic soul around the seven of them; and now that the cowboy rush was on, his concern for them was written all over his face. The message seemed to be: “It’s terrible, but I may have to send one of you boys up without all the precautions that I would like to take.” When they assembled in his office, he told them he wanted them to take a little “peer vote,” along the following lines: “If you can’t make the first flight yourself, which man do you think should make it?” Peer votes were not unknown in the military. They had been used among seniors at West Point and Annapolis for some time. For that matter, during the selection process for astronaut, the groups of finalists at Lovelace and Wright-Patterson took peer votes. But peer votes had never amounted to anything more than what they were prima facie: an indication of how men at the same level regarded one another, whether for reasons of professionalism or friendship or jealousy or whatever. Pilots regarded peer votes as a waste of time, because a man either had the right stuff in the air or he didn’t, and a military career, particularly among those with “the uncritical willingness to face danger,” was not a personality contest. But there was something about Bob Gilruth’s deep concern … They were to think the whole thing over and put their choices down on paper and drop them off at Gilruth’s office. The look on Bob Gilruth’s face set off a neural alarm.

  Even so, the esprit throughout NASA was tremendous over that Christmas holiday. Everyone was working like a zealot. Christmas itself was a mere syncopation in the mad cowboy rush. Bureaucratic lines no longer meant anything. Anyone in Project Mercury could immediately get in to see anybody else about any problem that came up. At Langley, if some GS—14 wanted to get hold of Gilruth face to face, all he had to do was wait around in the cafeteria at lunchtime and walk up to him while he waited in line, edging his tray along the stainless-steel tubing. There weren’t enough hours in the day to do all the things that had to be done.

  On January 19, the day before Kennedy’s inauguration, Gilruth again convened the seven of them in the astronaut office. He said that what he was about to tell them must be kept in strictest confidence. As they all knew, he said, the original plan had been to select the pilot for the first flight on the very eve of the flight itself. But he had thought better of that, because it now seemed clear that the prime pilot should have maximum access to the procedures trainer and other training facilities during the final weeks before the flight. So a decision had been made as to who was to be the prime pilot and as to which two men would be the backup pilots for the first flight. In due course, the press would be given the names of all three men, but the fact that the prime pilot had already been chosen would not be revealed. The press and the public would be told only that it would be one of these three men. All three men would go through the same training, and it would seem that the original plan was being adhered to, and the prime pilot would be spared the public pressure that would otherwise bear down on him.

  This had been a very difficult decision, he said, because all seven of them had worked with such dedication, and he knew that any of them would make a capable pilot for the first flight. But it had been necessary to come to a decision. And the decision was that the prime pilot would be … Alan Shepard. The backup pilots would be John Glenn and Gus Grissom.

  The words hit Glenn like a ray. The cause, effect, and outrageous results thereof came to him in a flash, and he was stunned. Al was staring at the floor. Then Al looked up at him and the rest of them with his eyes gleaming, resisting the temptation to break into a grin of triumph. Yet Al had triumphed! It was unbelievable, and yet it was really happening. Glenn knew what he had to do and he made himself do it. He made himself smile the earnest-looking smile of the runner-up and congratulate Al and shake his hand. Now the other five were doing the same thing, coming up to Al and smiling earnest smiles and shaking his hand. It was a shocking thing, and yet it had happened—Glenn was absolutely sure of it. To get around the agony of having to designate someone to sit up on top of the first rocket—a peer vote! After he, Glenn, had spent twenty-one months doing everything humanly possible to impress Gilruth and the rest of the brass, it had been turned into a popularity contest among the boys.

  A peer vote!—it was unbelievable! Every move Glenn had made undoubtedly worked against him like a captured weapon in the peer vote. In the peer vote he was the prig who had risen at the seance like John Calvin himself and told them all to keep their pants zipped and their wicks dry. He was the Eddie Attaboy who had gotten up every morning at dawn and done all that ostentatious running and tried to make the rest of them look bad. He was the Harry Hairshirt who lived like an Early Christian martyr in the BOQ. He was the Willie Workadaddy who drove around in a broken-down Prinz, like a lonely beacon of restraint and self-sacrifice in a squall of car crazies.

  But Smilin’ Al Shepard—Smilin’ Al was the fighter jock’s fighter jock, if all you were doing was taking a peer vote. He was His Lordship of Langley and the King of the Cape. He gave off the aura of the hot pilot. Since they had done practically no flying for twenty-one months, there had been no way for Glenn or anyone else to impress the others in the air—and so it came down to a question of which one other than he, Glenn, the Offending Saint, looked the most like a hot pilot. It was not only a popularity contest, it was a cosmetic popularity contest. How else was he to regard it? It was as if the past twenty-one months of training had never happened.

  And so now Glenn was driving back home, through the stunted Virginia countryside and the raggedy snowflakes, to tell Annie the secret bad news. And the new President was screaming over the car radio: “Together let us explore the stars …” Shepard would be first! It was incredible. Shepard would be … the first man to go into space! He would be famous throughout eternity! And here was something even more unbelievable: he, John Glenn, for the first time in his career, would be one of those who were left behind.

  The astronaut headquarters on the base at the Cape were in the building known as Hangar S. The hangar had been rebuilt inside to house the procedures trainer, a pressure chamber, and most of the other facilities an astronaut would need in the final preparations for a flight. There was a suite of rooms for living quarters, a dining room, a medical examination room, a ready room in which the astronaut would put on his pressure suit, a special doorway where the astronaut would get into a van to be driven out to the launch pad, and so forth. The boys seldom stayed there overnight, however, much preferring the motels in Cocoa Beach— and of course they had yet to use Hangar S for an actual flight. In fact, the first creatures to use Hangar S fully, from procedures trainer to rocket launch, were the chimpanzees. The chimpanzees were already at Hangar S on the morning before the inauguration, when Gilruth told the seven men that Alan Shepard had won the competition for the first flight. The chimpanzees had been there, ready for the first flight for almost three weeks. The veterinarians at Holloman Air Force Base had cut the original field of forty chimpanzees down to eighteen and, finally, to six, two males and four females, and had flown them to the Cape and installed them out back of Hangar S in a fenced-in compound. In the middle were two long, narrow trailer units, each made up of two eight-foot-wide trailers hooked up end to end. Around them was an assortment of other trailers and vans, including a special transfer van for carrying a chimpanzee from Hangar S to the rocket launch pad. The press was not invited into the little trailer park, nor would the good Gent have been interested. The chimpanzee test seemed to be merely one more tedious preliminary to the main event. Not even people at the base had much of an idea what was going on out back of Hangar S. The apes spent most of the day inside the two double-trailer units. The trailers were home and office, cage and operant conditioning cubicle, for the beasts. Inside each unit were three cages, two procedures trainers, and a mockup of the Mercury capsule. Th
e veterinarians in their white smocks and the attendants in their white T-shirts and white ducks had a trailer unit of their own; they were on hand, in shifts, twenty-four hours a day. Within those long skinny trailers the biggest countdown in the brief history of Project Mercury was underway. Every day for twenty-nine days, at the heart of the American space facility, out back of a great moldering hangar, on a stone boondock scrub-pine spit on the point of Cape Canaveral, a tribe of six scrawny apes and twenty humans in white were up in the early morning, on the move, restless, earnest, driven, scratching, flapping, ricocheting through the trailers’ innards, yammering at fate and each other. The humans were giving the apes physical examinations and wiring them from top to bottom, sticking eight-inch thermometers up their rectums, imbedding sensors in the thoracic cages, clamping the psychomotor stimulus plates on the soles of their feet, threading them into their restraint harnesses, strapping them into their procedures-trainer cubicles, closing the hatches, pressurizing. the cubicles with pure oxygen, inserting the cubicles in the mock Mercury capsules, and then flashing the lights. The apes had to throw their switches on cue or get the dread dose of volts in the soles of the feet. How their scrawny fingers did fly! All six apes were stringy-looking, like those overtrained fleaweight college wrestlers who have run so many laps and taken so many B—12s and diuretics at the training table that they appear to be little dried-up lengths of gristle, nodes, and nerve ganglia. But out back of Hangar S the little bastards could play their Mercury consoles like a dream.

  The white-smock humans zapped the apes through their workouts right up to the last. On January 30, on the eve of the flight, they made the final selection. Originally the first astronaut was to have been chosen at this same stage. They chose a male chimpanzee as the prime flier and a female as the backup. The Air Force had bought the male from a supplier in the Cameroons, West Africa, eighteen months ago, when he was about two years old. All this time the animals had been known by numbers. He was test subject Number 61. On the day of the flight, however, his name was announced to the press as Ham. Ham was an acronym for Holloman Aerospace Medical Center.

  Before dawn on January 31 they woke Number 61 up and led him out of his cage and fed him and gave him a medical examination and attached his biosensors—and put the zap plates on his feet—and put him in his cubicle and closed the hatch and depressurized it. Another goddamned day with these earnest hard-zapping ballbreaking white-smock humans. The vets put the cubicle in the transfer van, and the chimpanzee was taken to the launch pad, out by the sea. The sun was up now, and a white rocket with a Mercury capsule and an escape tower on top of it stood gleaming, and they took Number 61 in his cubicle up an elevator on a gantry beside the rocket and then put the cubicle in the capsule. There were more than a hundred NASA engineers and technicians nearby, working on the flight, monitoring consoles, and an entire team of veterinarians was monitoring the dials that read the ape’s heartbeat, respiration, and temperature. Hundreds more NASA and Navy personnel were strung out across the Atlantic, toward Bermuda, in a communications and recovery network. This was the most crucial test in the entire history of the space program and they were giving it everything they had.

  It was four hours before they were able to fire the rocket. The biggest problem was an inverter, a device that was supposed to prevent rogue surges of power in the Mercury capsule’s control system. The inverter kept overheating. All the while during the “hold,” as they called the delay, Chris Kraft, director for the first ape flight, just as he would be for the first human flight, kept asking how the ape was doing, apparently on the presumption that the long confinement would make the beast anxious. The doctors checked their dials. The ape didn’t seem to have a nerve in his body. He was lying up there in his cubicle as if he lived there. And why not? For the ape every hour of the delay was like a holiday. No lights! No zaps! Peace … bliss! They gave him two fifteen-minute workouts with the lights, just to keep him alert. Otherwise it was terrific. “Hold” for an eternity! Don’t let anything stop you!

  When they fired the rocket, shortly before noon, it climbed at a slightly higher angle than it was supposed to, driving Number 61 back into his couch with a force of seventeen g’s, i.e., seventeen times his own weight, five g’s more than anticipated. His heart rate shot up as he strained against the force, but he didn’t panic for a moment. He had been through this same sensation many times on the centrifuge. As long as he just took it and didn’t struggle, they wouldn’t zap all those goddamned blue bolts into the soles of his feet. There were a lot worse things in this world than g-forces … He was weightless now, hurtling toward Bermuda, and they flashed the lights in his cubicle, and the ape’s pulse returned to normal, to no more than what it was on the ground. The usual shit was flowing. The main thing was to keep ahead of those blue bolts in the feet! … He started pushing the buttons and throwing the switches like the greatest electric Wurlitzer organist who ever lived, never missed a signal … Then the Mercury retro-rockets were fired, automatically, and the capsule came down through the atmosphere at the same angle at which it had gone up. Another 14.6 g’s hit Number 61 on the way down, making him feel as if his eyeballs were coming out of his head. He had been through so-called eyeballs-out g’s, too, many times, on the centrifuge. It could get a lot worse. There were worse things than feeling as if his eyeballs were coming out … The goddamned zap plates on his feet, for a start … So far as mere space flight was concerned, Number 61 was fearless. The beast had been operantly conditioned, aerospatially desensitized.

  The high angle of the launch also caused the capsule to overshoot the planned splashdown area by 132 miles. So it took two hours for a Navy helicopter crew to find the capsule out in the Atlantic and bring it aboard a recovery ship. The capsule and the ape were riding up and down in seven-foot swells. Water had begun to seep in where the landing bag had torn loose in the heavy seas. The capsule was wheezing and gurgling with water and pitching up and down like a ball in the waves. It wouldn’t have stayed afloat too much longer. Eight hundred pounds of water had seeped in. For the ordinary prudent human being it would have been two hours of freaking terror. They brought the capsule to a recovery ship, the Donner, and opened it and brought out the ape’s cubicle and opened the hatch. The ape was lying there with his arms crossed. They offered him an apple and he took it and ate it with considerable deliberation, as if gloriously bored. Those two hours of being slung up and down in the open sea in seven-foot gulps inside a closed coffin-like cubicle had been … perhaps the best time ever in this miserable land of the white smocks! No voices! No zaps! No bolts, no lengths of hose, no more breaking of his bloody balls …

  There was great elation among the astronauts and almost everyone involved in Project Mercury. There seemed to be no way that Kennedy and Wiesner could intervene and keep them from trying at least one manned flight. The pall of the Day the Cork Popped had been removed.

  Late the next day they flew Number 61 back to the Cape and Hangar S, where a great mob of reporters and photographers were now waiting out in the compound by the Mercury capsule that had been used for the training. The vets led the ape out of a van. As the mob closed in and the flashbulbs began exploding, the animal—brave little Ham, as he was now known—became furious. He bared his teeth. He began snapping at the bastards. It was all the vets could do to restrain him. This was immediately—on the spot!—interpreted by the press, the seemly Gent, as an understandable response to the grueling experience he had just been through. The vets took the ape back inside the van until he calmed down. Then they led him out again, trying to get him near a mockup of a Mercury capsule, where the television networks had set up cameras and tremendous lights. The reporters and photographers surged forward again, yammering, yelling, exploding more camera lights, shoving, groaning, cursing—the usual yahoo sprawl, in short—and the animal came unglued again, ready to twist the noodle off anybody he could get his hands on. This was interpreted by the Gent as a manifestation of Ham’s natural fear upon layin
g eyes once again on the capsule, which looked precisely like the one that had propelled him into space and subjected him to such severe physical stresses.

  The stresses the ape was reacting to were probably of quite another sort. Here he was, back in the compound where they had zapped him through his drills for a solid month. Just two years ago he had been captured in the jungles of Africa, separated from his mother, shipped in a cage to a goddamned desert in New Mexico, kept prisoner, prodded and shocked by a bunch of humans in white smocks, and here he was, back in a compound where they had been zapping him through their fucking drills for a solid month, and suddenly there was a whole new mob of humans on hand! Even worse than the white smocks! Louder! Crazier! Totally out of their gourds! Yammering, roaring, brawling, exploding lights beside their bug-eyed skulls! Suppose they threw him to these assholes! Fuck this—