The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

  Compared to the prospect of such a flap, no matter how minor, in the final phase of the countdown, any possible danger of blowing up on the launch pad was far down an astronaut’s list of worries. For a test pilot the right stuff in the prayer department was not “Please, God, don’t let me blow up.” No, the supplication at such a moment was “Please, dear God, don’t let me fuck up.”

  To come this far … and fuck up …

  All along the constant fear of the righteous pilot was not of death but of ending up where John Glenn was this morning: standing by as a mere spear carrier in the drama. You had to hand it to Glenn, however. He had really buckled down and worked like a Trojan as backup pilot during the last month of the training. He had really proved helpful. He had even come up with a little Dawn Patrol camaraderie this morning. Shepard was in a mood for that. Ever since he got up, he had been in his Smilin’ Al of the Cape cycle. On the way out in the van he had gotten Gus Grissom to play straight man for the José Jiménez routine. Shepard liked to do the Mexican accent the way Dana did it. “Eef you osk me what make de good astronaut, I tail you dat you got to have de courage and de good blood pressure and de four legs.” “Four legs?” Gus asked dutifully. “Weh-ayl, eet ees a dog dey want to send, bot dey theenk dot ees too croo-el.” Yes, they would remember him as having been loose as a goose on the way to the top of the rocket. When he came up the gantry elevator and stepped out, to enter the capsule, Glenn was already up there, dressed in white like the technicians. He was smiling. When Shepard finally squeezed himself into the capsule and looked at the instrument panel, there was a little sign on it saying NO HANDBALL PLAYING IN THIS AREA. That was Glenn’s little joke, and he grinned and reached in and took the sign out. Actually, it was funny enough …

  Too late, John! Shepard wasn’t going to get run over or break a leg or be struck down by an angry God. He was in the capsule and they were bolting the hatch, and all the others were … left behind … out there … beyond the portal … There was no way a righteous pilot could have explained to anyone but another pilot what this feeling was, and of course he would not have dared to try to explain it even to a pilot. The holy first flight!—and he would be up there at the apex of the entire pyramid if he survived it.

  And if he didn’t? This would have been even more difficult to explain: the evil odds were essential to the enterprise. That unmentionable stuff, after all, involved a man hanging his hide out over the edge in a hurtling piece of machinery. And such unmentionable payoffs it brought you! One, which he had started receiving even before this morning, was a look. It was a look of fraternal awe, of awe in the presence of manly honor, that came over the faces of other men at a base when a test pilot or combat pilot headed for the aircraft for a mission when the odds were known to be evil. Shepard had rated that look before, particularly when testing overpowered, overweight jet fighters in their first carrier landings. It was the look that came over another man when one’s own righteous stuff triggered his adrenalin. And this morning, every step of the way, from the crew quarters in Hangar S to the gantry deck outside the capsule, where Glenn and the technicians had been waiting to help him inside, men had beamed that look straight at him—and then they had broken into applause. Just as he was getting ready to go onto the gantry and take the elevator up to the capsule, the entire ground crew had started applauding. They had that warm and humid smile on their faces and tears glistened in their eyes and they were banging their hands together and yelling things to him. Shepard had his helmet on, with the visor sealed, and he was carrying his own portable oxygen unit, which was pumping away, and so it was all happening in a muffled pantomime, but there was no mistaking what was going on. They were giving him the applause and homage … up front … come what may! … payable in advance!

  From a sheerly analytical standpoint one knew that the odds in this flight, while bad enough, were no worse than the odds he had faced before in testing winged aircraft. Wernher von Braun had said repeatedly that the Redstone rocket’s record of reliability was 98 percent, which was better than that of some of the Century series of supersonic jet fighters during the test stage. But the truth was that by now Shepard would have accepted far worse odds. He had accepted a great many rewards up front. He and his confreres had already been lionized, such as few pilots in history. The very top pilots, with the most righteous stuff, were content to receive that unmentionable glistening look from aviators and support personnel at their own base. Shepard had already had it beamed upon him by every sort of congressman, canned-food distributor, Associated Florists board chairman, and urban-renewal speculator, not to mention the anonymous little cookies with their trembling little custards who simply materialized around you at the Cape. He had already accepted the payment … up front!—and millions of wide-open humid eyes were now upon him. The ancient instinct of a people, their so-called folk wisdom, in the matter of the care, preparation, and recompense of single-combat warriors was indeed sound. Like his predecessors in the ancient past, he had reached the blessed state where one was far more afraid of not delivering on his end of the bargain—having been paid up front—than he was of getting killed. Please, dear Lord, don’t let me fuck up. He was now where he belonged and had striven to be: atop the very thrust point of the danger. He was now precisely at that critical elevation that separated the great pilots, bearing their gigantic albeit invisible pictures of themselves, from the mere mortals on the terrain below. No one would ever know whether or not another type of human being would have handled this day with the same aplomb—this day when one became the first human being ever to sit up on top of an eight-story-high bullet and have a 66,000-pound Redstone rocket lit under his tail. All the racing drivers, mountain climbers, scuba divers, bobsledders, and Seabees they once considered using—what would have been the state of their souls at this moment? Well, by now it was pointless to ask. One could only say this: for the typical competitive military pilot, possessing the regulation-issue heroic self-esteem of the breed, throbbing with rude animal health, convinced of his utterly righteous stuff, and ravenous for glory—which is to say, for a man like Alan Shepard—being where he was right now was his vocation, his calling, his holy Beruf. He was home, upon the right stuffs highest elevations.

  On top of everything else, the organism’s deconditioning was very nearly complete. After all the full-dress rehearsals and simulations of this flight, complete with the sounds, the g-forces, and even the wires protruding from his body, after more than a hundred pre-creations of this moment, after riding up the gantry elevator over and over and fitting himself into the human holster and having them close the hatch and start the countdown, after lying in this very capsule, day after day, with the capsule communicator’s voice coming over his headset and the signals of flight flashing on the instrument panel, until every inch and every second of the experience was familiar and the capsule had become more like an office than a vehicle … it was hard for a man to sense any difference this time in his own nervous system, even though intellectually he knew that this was that day. Now and then he could feel the adrenalin building up and his pulse rate increasing and his breathing speeding up and his heart palpitating slightly, and he would force himself to concentrate on the checklist, the console, the equipment connections, the radio hookup, and the rush would pass, and he would be back once more in his workshop, in his procedures trainer.

  No, the one thing he had experienced all morning that was not second nature was his aching bladder. That had become the first terra incognita. Please, dear Lord, don’t let me fuck up.

  Shepard waited for another stop in the countdown—this time it was to wait for some clouds to pass over the launch area—and he announced his problem over the closed radio circuit. He said he wanted to relieve his bladder. Finally they told him to go ahead and “do it in the suit.” And he did. Because his seat, or couch, was angled back slightly, the flood headed north, toward his head, carrying consternation with it. The flood set off a suit thermometer, and the Freon flow ju
mped from 30 to 45. On swept the flood until it hit his left lower chest sensor, which was being used to record his electrocardiogram, and it knocked that sensor out partially, and the doctors were nonplused. The news of the flood rushed through the worlds of the Life Science specialists and the suit technicians, like the destruction of Krakatoa, west of Java. There was no stopping it now. The wave rolled on, over rubber, wire, rib, flesh, and ten thousand baffled nerve endings, finally pooling in the valley up the middle of Shepard’s back. Gradually it cooled, and he could feel a cool lake of urine in the valley. In any case, the discomfort in his bladder was gone and everything was still. They had not scratched the flight because of the dam break. He had not fucked up.

  The next thing the medical team knew, a voice was coming over the closed loop, their private radio linkup with the Mercury capsule:

  “Weh-ayl … I’m a wetback now.”

  The man was beautiful!

  Imperturbable at every juncture!

  Fifteen minutes, in the countdown, before they fire a seven-story bullet full of liquid oxygen underneath him, and he remains:

  Smilin’ Al!

  The hold had now dragged on for four hours, and each engineer monitoring the panels showing the status of the various flight systems was agonizing over whether to declare, finally, that his system was “go”—after which it would be his responsibility if the system malfunctioned. By now there was agony on all sides. It was transmitted into the capsule in a thousand unspoken ways and sometimes in so many words. It was as if Shepard, lying here on his back, inserted, wired, strapped, and screwed into this tiny holster, were the ganglion, the agony junction, for a thousand tense and tortured souls on the gantry outside and on the ground below. Through it all he had remained Smilin’ Al of the Cape. At T minus 6—six minutes before the completion of the sequence that would lead to the launching—there was yet another hold, and one of the doctors came on the closed telephone circuit and said to Shepard:

  “Are you really ready?”

  It was hard to figure out whether the question was addressed to the body or the soul. It wandered into the unmentionable terrain of the most righteous stuff itself, and it was Smilin’ Al who handled it.

  He laughed and said: “Go!”

  “Good luck, old friend,” said the doctor.

  Farewell … from the valley of the woeful abyss …

  At T minus 2 minutes and 40 seconds there was another hold. Now Shepard could hear engineers in the blockhouse agonizing over the fuel pressure in the Redstone, which was running high. He could sense what would be coming next. They were going to talk themselves into resetting the pressure valve inside the booster engine manually. That would mean postponing the launch for another two days at least. He could see it coming! They were going to scrub the whole thing, lest they hold themselves accountable for his hide if something went wrong! This was not a job for Smilin’ Al. It was time for the Icy Commander to arrive and take charge. So he got on the circuit and put the glacial edge on his voice, as only he could do it, and he said:

  “All right, I’m cooler than you are. Why don’t you fix your little problem … and light this candle.”

  Light the candle! he says. The words of Chuck Yeager himself! The voice of the rocket ace! Oddly enough, it seemed to do the trick. Realizing the astronaut’s irritation, they began wrapping up the process and declaring their systems “go.” It was nearly 9:30 a.m. by the time the countdown entered its last minute. Shepard’s periscope began automatically retracting inside the capsule, and he remembered that he had put in the gray filter to cut out the sunlight. If he didn’t remove it, he wouldn’t be able to see any colors in flight. So he started moving his left hand toward the periscope, but his left forearm hit the abort handle. Shit! That was all he needed now! Fortunately, he had barely brushed it. The abort handle was the equivalent of the ejection seat cinch ring in an airplane. If the astronaut sensed some catastrophe that the automatic system had not picked up, he could turn the handle and the escape tower rocket would fire and pull the capsule free of the Redstone rocket and bring it down by parachute. That was all he needed—the world waits for the first American spaceman, and Shepard gives them an exhibition of a little man popping up a few thousand feet in a thimble and floating down by parachute … He could see it all in a flash … Another Popped Cork fiasco … The hell with changing the filter. He would look at the world in black and white. Who cared? Don’t fuck up. That was the main thing.

  Time seemed to speed up tremendously in the final thirty seconds of the countdown. In thirty seconds the rocket would ignite right underneath his back. In those last moments his entire life did not pass before his eyes. He did not have a poignant vision of his mother or his wife or his children. No, he thought about abort procedures and the checklist and about not fucking up. He only half paid attention to Deke Slayton’s voice over his headset as he read out the final “ten … nine … eight … seven … six …” and the rest of it. The only word that counted, here in this little blind stuffed pod, was the last word. Then he heard Deke Slayton say it: “Fire! … You’re on your way, José!”

  Louise Shepard was not in the valley of the woeful abyss. She was here in her house in Virginia Beach—but beyond that it was hard to chart the locus of her soul at that moment. Never in the history of flight test had the wife of a pilot been put in any such bizarre position as this. Naturally all the wives had been aware that there might be some “press interest” in the reactions of the wife and family of the first astronaut—but Louise hadn’t bargained for anything like what was now going on in her front yard. Every now and then Louise’s daughters would peek out the window, and the yard looked like the clay flats three hours after the Marx Midway Carnival pulls in. Mobs of reporters and cameramen and other Big Timers were out there wearing bush jackets with leather straps running this way and that and knocking back their Pepsi-Colas and Nehis and yelling to each other and mainly just milling about, crazy with the excitement of being on the scene, bawling for news of the anguished soul of Louise Shepard. They wanted a moan, a tear, some twisted features, a few inside words from friends, any goddamned thing. They were getting desperate. Give us a sign! Give us anything! Give us the diaper-service man! The diaper-service man comes down the street with his big plastic bags, smoking a cigar to provide an aromatic screen for his daily task—and they’re all over him and his steamy bag. Maybe he knows the Shepards! Maybe he knows Louise! Maybe he’s been in there! Maybe he knows the layout of chez Shepard! He locks himself in the front seat, choking on cigar smoke, and they’re banging on his panel truck. “Let us in! We want to see!” They’re on their knees. They’re slithering in the ooze. They’re interviewing the dog, the cat, the rhododendrons …

  These incredible maniacs were all out there tearing up the lawn and yearning for their pieces of Louise’s emotional wreckage. The truth was, however, that Louise Shepard could hardly be said to be experiencing the feelings that all these people were so eager to wolf down. Louise had had her chances to become a nervous wreck over Al’s flying many times, most recently at Pax River. In 1955 and 1956 Al had tested one hot new fighter plane after another. Their names were a delirium of sharp teeth, cold steel, cosmic warlords, and evil spirits: the Banshee, the Demon, the Tigercat, the Skylancer, and so on, and Al took them through not only maximum performance runs but also high-altitude tests, in-flight refueling tests, and “carrier suitability tests”—a stolid phrase that covered a multitude of ways for a test pilot to expire. Louise knew the entire world of the test pilot’s wife … the calls from other wives saying that “something” has happened out there … the wait, in a little house with small children, to see if the Friend of Widows and Orphans is coming to make his duty call … Day after day she tries to be stoic, she tries not to think about the subject, not to pay attention to the clock when he doesn’t return from the flight line on time—

  Well, my God—what an improvement Project Mercury was over the daily lot of the test pilot’s wife! No question ab
out it! The worst part of the Pax River days had been the constant wondering and worrying, alone or with uncomprehending little faces around you. This morning Louise knew exactly where Al was every minute. He was hard to miss. He was on nationwide television. There he was. She had merely to look at the screen. On nationwide television they were talking about no one else. You could hear the laconic baritone voice of Shorty Powers, the NASA public affairs officer, in the Mercury Control room at the Cape periodically reporting the astronaut’s status as the countdown proceeded. Then the telephone rings—and she hears that same voice, calling to speak to her, Louise. Al had spoken to Deke, and Deke had spoken to Shorty, and now Shorty—possessor of the voice that the entire nation was listening to—was talking to her personally, explaining the reasons for the delays, as Al had requested. Nor was she alone in this house. Hardly! It was getting crowded in here. In addition to the children, there were her parents, who had come from Ohio and had been here for days. A few of the other wives had arrived. Al had been stationed nearby in Norfolk when the program began, and so they had many Navy friends and neighbors whom they knew well, and quite a few of them had come by. There was quite a burble of voices building up in the living room. It didn’t sound very tense in there. And of course she had merely half the newspapers in America in the front yard, plus the usual rabble of gawkers who materialize for car wrecks or roof jumps or traffic arguments, and the whole lot would have liked nothing better than to charge in and gather round if she had opened the front door to them so much as a crack. Life had wanted to have two writers and a photographer on the premises to record her reactions from start to finish, but she had held out against that. So they were waiting in a hotel on the beach, and it was agreed they could come inside as soon as the flight was completed. Louise hadn’t even had all that much opportunity to sit in front of the television set and let the tension build. She had gotten up before dawn, in the dark, to fix breakfast for everybody who was staying in the house, and then there was the whole business of fixing coffee and whatnot for the other good folks as they arrived … until before she knew it she was caught up in the same psychology that works at a wake. She was suddenly the central figure in a Wake for My Husband— in his hour of danger, however, rather than his hour of death. The secret of the wake for the dead was that it put the widow on stage, whether she liked it or not. In the very moment in which, if left alone, she might be crushed by grief, she was suddenly thrust into the role of hostess and star of the show. It’s free! It’s open house! Anybody can come on in and gawk! Of course, the widow can still turn on the waterworks—but it takes more nerve to do that in front of a great gawking mob than it does to be the brave little lady, serving the coffee and the cakes. For someone as dignified and strong as Louise Shepard, there was no question as to how it was going to come out. As hostess and main character in this scene, what else was there for the pilot’s wife to do but set about pulling everybody together? The press, the ravenous but genteel Beast out there upon the lawn, did not know it but he was covering not the Anguished Wife at Lift-off … but the Honorable Mrs. Commander Astronaut at Home … in the first wake, not for the dead, but for the Gravely Endangered … Louise didn’t even have time to collapse in neurasthenic paralysis over the possible fate of her husband. It was all that the star and hostess could do to get back to the TV room in time for the final minutes of the countdown, to watch the flames roaring out of the Redstone’s nozzles.