The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

  “Roger.”

  But why? The retropack wrapped around the edges of the heat shield and held the retro-rockets. Once the rockets were fired, the retropack was supposed to be jettisoned. They were back to the heat shield again, with no explanation. But he had to concentrate on firing the retro-rockets.

  Next to the launch this was the most dangerous part of the flight. If the capsule’s angle of attack was too shallow, you might skip off the top of the earth’s atmosphere and stay in orbit for days, until long after your oxygen had run out. You wouldn’t have any more rockets to slow you down. If the angle were too steep, the heat from the friction of going through the atmosphere would be so intense you would burn up inside the capsule, and a couple of minutes later the whole thing would disintegrate, heat shield or no heat shield. But the main thing was not to think about it in quite those terms. The field of consciousness is very small, said Saint-Exupéry. What do I do next? It was the moment of the test pilot at last. Oh, yes! I’ve been here before! And I am immune! I don’t get into corners I can’t get out of! One thing at a time! He could be a true flight test hero and try to line the capsule up all by himself by using the manual controls with the horizon as his reference—or he could make one more attempt to use the automatic controls. Please, dear God … don’t let me foul up! What would the Lord answer? (Try the automatic, you ninny.) He released and reset the gyros. He put the controls on automatic. The answer to your prayers, John! Now the dials gibed with what he saw out the window and through the periscope. The automatic controls worked perfectly in pitch and roll. The yaw was still off, so he corrected that with the manual controls. The capsule kept pivoting to the right and he kept nudging it back. The ALFA trainer! One thing at a time! It was just like the ALFA trainer … no sense of forward motion at all … As long as he concentrated on the instrument panel and didn’t look at the earth sliding by beneath him, he had no sense at all of going 17,500 miles an hour … or even five miles an hour … The humming little kitchen … He sat up in his chair squirting his hand thruster, with his eyes pinned on the dials … Real life, a crucial moment—against the eternal good beige setting of the simulation. One thing at a time!

  Schirra began giving him the countdown for firing the rockets. “Five, four—”

  He nudged it back once more with the yaw thruster.

  “—three, two, one, fire.”

  He pushed the retro-rocket switch with his hand.

  The rockets started firing in sequence, the first one, the second one, the third one. The sound seemed terribly muffled—but in that very moment, the jolt! Pure gold! One instant, as Schirra counted down, he felt absolutely motionless. The next … thud thud thud … the jolt in his back. He felt as if the capsule had been knocked backward. He felt as if he were sailing back toward Hawaii. All as it should be! Pure gold! The retrolight was lit up green. It was all going perfectly. He was merely slowing down. In eleven minutes he would be entering the earth’s atmosphere.

  He could hear Schirra saying: “Keep your retropack on until you pass Texas.”

  Still no reason given! He couldn’t see the pattern yet. There was only the dim sense that in some fashion they were jerking him around. But all he said was: “That’s affirmative.”

  “It looked like your attitude held pretty well,” said Schirra. “Did you have to back it up at all?”

  “Oh, yes, quite a bit. Yeah, I had a lot of trouble with it.”

  “Good enough for government work from down here,” said Schirra. That was one of Schirra’s favorite lines.

  “Do you have a time for going to Jettison Retro?” said Glenn. This was an indirect way of asking for some explanation for the mystery of keeping the retropack on.

  “Texas will give you that message,” said Schirra. “Over.”

  They weren’t going to tell him! Not so much the thought … as the feeling … of the insult began to build up.

  Three minutes later the Texas capcom tracking station came in: “This is Texas capcom, Friendship 7. We are recommending that you leave the retropackage on through the entire re-entry. This means that you will have to override the zero-point-oh-five-g switch, which is expected to occur at 04:43:53. This also means that you will have to manually retract the scope. Do you read?”

  That did it.

  “This is Friendship 7,” said Glenn. “What is the reason for this? Do you have any reason? Over.”

  “Not at this time,” said the Texas capcom. “This is the judgment of Cape Flight … Cape Flight will give you the reason for this action when you are in view.”

  “Roger. Roger. Friendship 7.”

  It was really unbelievable. It was beginning to fit—

  Twenty-seven seconds later he was over the Cape itself and the Cape capcom, with the voice of Alan Shepard on the radio, was telling him to retract his periscope manually and to get ready for re-entry into the atmosphere.

  It was beginning to fit together, he could see the pattern, the whole business of the landing bag and the retropack. This had been going on for a couple of hours now—and they were telling him nothing! Merely giving him the bits and pieces! But if he was going to re-enter with the retropack on, then they wanted the straps in place for some reason. And there was only one possible reason—something was wrong with the heat shield. And this they would not tell him! Him!—the pilot! It was quite unbelievable! it was—

  He could hear Shepard’s voice.

  He was winding in the periscope, and he could hear Shepard’s voice: “While you’re doing that … we are not sure whether or not your landing bag has deployed. We feel it is possible to re-enter with the retropackage on. We see no difficulty at this time in that type of re-entry.”

  Glenn said, “Roger, understand.”

  Oh, yes, he understood now! If the landing bag was deployed, that meant the heat shield was loose. If the heat shield was loose, then it might come off during the re-entry, unless the retropack straps held it in place long enough for the capsule to establish its angle of re-entry. And the straps would soon burn off. If the heat shield came off, then he would fry. If they didn’t want him—the pilot!—to know all this, then it meant they were afraid he might panic. And if he didn’t even need to know the whole pattern—just the pieces, so he could follow orders—then he wasn’t really a pilot! The whole sequence of logic clicked through Glenn’s mind faster than he could have put it into words, even if he had dared utter it all at that moment. He was being treated like a passenger—a redundant component, a backup engineer, a boiler-room attendant—in an automatic system!—like someone who did not have that rare and unutterably righteous stuff!—as if the right stuff itself did not even matter! It was a transgression against all that was holy—all this in a single limbic flash of righteous indignation as John Glenn re-entered the earth’s atmosphere.

  “Seven, this is Cape,” said Al Shepard. “Over.”

  “Go ahead, Cape,” said Glenn. “You’re ground … you are going out.”

  “We recommend that you …”

  That was the last he could hear from the ground. He had entered the atmosphere. He couldn’t feel the g-forces yet, but the friction and the ionization had built up, and the radios were now useless. The capsule was beginning to buffet and he was fighting it with the controls. The fuel for the automatic system, the hydrogen peroxide, was so low he could no longer be sure which system worked. He was descending backward. The heat shield was on the outside of the capsule, directly behind his back. If he glanced out the window he could see only the blackness of the sky. The periscope was retracted, so he saw nothing on the scope screen. He heard a thump above him, on the outside of the capsule. He looked up. Through the window he could see a strap. From the retropack. The straps broke! And now what! Next the heat shield! The black sky out the window began to turn a pale orange. The strap flat against the window started burning—and then it was gone. The universe turned a flaming orange. That was the heat shield beginning to burn up from the tremendous speed of the re-entry. This was
something Shepard and Grissom had not seen. They had not re-entered the atmosphere at such speed. Nevertheless, Glenn knew it was coming. Five hundred, a thousand times he had been told how the heat shield would ablate, burn off layer by layer, vaporize, dissipate the heat into the atmosphere, send off a corona of flames. All he could see now through the window were the flames. He was inside a ball of fire. But!—a huge flaming chunk went by the window, a great chunk of something burning. Then another … another … The capsule started buffeting … The heat shield was breaking up! It was crumbling—flying away in huge flaming chunks … He fought to steady the capsule with the hand controller. Fly-by-wire! But the rolls and yaws were too fast for him … The ALFA trainer gone amok, inside a fireball … The heat! … It was as if his entire central nervous system were now centered in his back. If the capsule was disintegrating and he was about to burn up, the heat pulse would reach his back first. His backbone would become like a length of red-hot metal. He already knew what the feeling would be like … and when … Now! … But it didn’t come. There was no tremendous heat and no more flaming debris … Not the heat shield, after all. The burning chunks had come from what remained of the retropack. First the straps had gone and then the rest of it. The capsule kept rocking, and the g-forces built up. He knew the g-forces by heart. A thousand times he had felt them on the centrifuge. They drove him back into the seat. It was harder and harder to move the hand controller. He kept trying to damp out the rocking motion by firing the yaw thrusters and the roll thrusters, but it was all too fast for him. They didn’t seem to do much good, at any rate.

  No more red glow … he must be out of the fireball … seven g’s were driving him back into the seat … He could hear the Cape capcom:

  “ … How do you read? Over.”

  That meant he had passed through the ionosphere and was entering the lower atmosphere.

  “Loud and clear; how me?”

  “Roger, reading you loud and clear. How are you doing?”

  “Oh, pretty good.”

  “Roger. Your impact point is within one mile of the up-range destroyer.”

  Oh, pretty good. It wasn’t Yeager, but it wasn’t bad. He was inside of one and a half tons of non-aerodynamic metal. He was a hundred thousand feet up, dropping toward the ocean like an enormous cannonball. The capsule had no aerodynamic qualities whatsoever at this altitude. It was rocking terribly. Out the window he could see a wild white contrail snaked out against the blackness of the sky. He was dropping at a thousand feet per second. The last critical moment of the flight was coming up. Either the parachute deployed and took hold or it didn’t. The rocking had intensified. The retropack! Part of the retropack must still be attached and the drag of it is trying to flip the capsule … He couldn’t wait any longer. The parachute was supposed to deploy automatically, but he couldn’t wait any longer. Rocking … He reached up to fire the parachute manually—but it fired on its own, automatically, first the drogue and then the main parachute. He swung under it in a huge arc. The heat was ferocious, but the chute held. It snapped him back into the seat. Through the window the sky was blue. It was the same day all over again. It was early in the afternoon on a sunny day out in the Atlantic near Bermuda. Even the landing-bag light was green. There was nothing even wrong with the landing bag. There had been nothing wrong with the heat shield. There was nothing wrong with his rate of descent, forty feet per second. He could hear the rescue ship chattering away over the radio. They were only twenty minutes away from where he would hit, only six miles. He was once again lying on his back in the human holster. Out the window the sky was no longer black. The capsule swayed under the parachute, and over this way he looked up and saw clouds and over that way blue sky. He was very, very hot. But he knew the feeling. All those endless hours in the heat chambers—it wouldn’t kill you. He was coming down into the water only 300 miles from where he started. It was the same day, merely five hours later. A balmy day out in the Atlantic near Bermuda. The sun had moved just seventy-five degrees in the sky. It was 2:45 in the afternoon. Nothing to do but get all these wires and hoses disconnected. He had done it. He began to let the thought loose in his mind. He must be very close to the water. The capsule hit the water. It drove him down into his seat again, on his back. It was quite a jolt. It was hot in here. Even with the suit fans still running, the heat was terrific. Over the radio they kept telling him not to try to leave the capsule. The rescue ship was almost there. They weren’t going to try the helicopter deal again, except in an emergency. He wasn’t about to attempt a water egress. He wasn’t about to hit the hatch detonator. The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to the dear Lord could not be clearer. He had done it.

  Annie Glenn had already had a taste of what it was going to be like. But the other six and their wives were not ready for it. It was as if some enormous tidal wave were heading for the Cape and the entire U.S.A. from out in the Atlantic, from the vicinity of Grand Bahama Island, where John was being debriefed. Riding the crest, like Triton, was the Freckled Face God, John himself. Word got back that the sailors on the Noa, the ship that hauled the capsule, with John in it, out of the water, had painted white lines around his footprints on the deck after he walked from the capsule to a hatchway. They didn’t want his footprints on their deck to ever disappear! Well, it just seemed like some sort of goony swabbo sentimentality. But that was only the beginning.

  Al Shepard and Gus Grissom didn’t know what the hell was happening. Poor Gus—all he had gotten after his flight was a medal, a handshake, a gust of rhetoric from James Webb, out on a brain-frying strip of asphalt at Patrick Air Force Base, plus a few attaboys from a crowd of about thirty. For John—well, the mobs that had showed up for the launch, for the fireworks, barely seemed to have thinned out at all. Cocoa Beach was still full of the crazy adrenalin of the event. Out-of-towners were still tooling around all over the place in their automobiles and asking where the astronauts hung out. They didn’t want to miss a thing. They knew that John would be flying back to the Cape after the debriefing. The next thing they knew, Lyndon Johnson was in town. He was going to meet John at the landing strip at Patrick. Underlings like Webb would just be part of the scenery. Then they learned that the President was coming, John F. Kennedy himself. Glenn wasn’t going to him, in Washington—he was coming to Glenn.

  Something quite extraordinary was building up. It was a wave and a half, and the other six and their wives were more surprised than anybody else. It was ironic. They had all assumed that Al Shepard was the big winner. Al had won out in the competition for the first flight. Al had been invited to the White House to receive a medal, whereas Gus had gotten his about eight steps from the palmetto grass, because Al was the certified number-one man in this thing and had taken the first flight. But even before John got back to the Cape from Grand Bahama Island, there was a note of worshipful swooning in the air that indicated that Al had not made the first flight, after all. He had merely made the first suborbital flight, which now looked like nothing at all. He was now more like Slick Goodlin to John’s Chuck Yeager. Slick Goodlin had, technically, made the first flight of the X–1. But it was Yeager who made the flight that counted, the flight in which they first tried to push the bird supersonic. As Slick Goodlin to John’s Chuck Yeager—what was Al supposed to do, cheer about it? And Betty Grissom—who never even got a parade down the poor dim dowdy main street of Mitchell, Indiana—was she supposed to be tickled pink about the Glenns, who were going to be paraded up and down every high road in the United States? But there was precious little time to brood. Once John’s plane touched down at Patrick on February 23, the wave became so big it simply carried everyone along with it. The fellows and the wives and the children were all out at Patrick, waiting for John’s plane, and the Vice-President was on hand, along with about two hundred reporters. Johnson was right up there at the head of the mob with Annie and the two children. He had gotten next to her at last. Johnson was right beside her now, out at Patrick, oozing prot
ocol all over her and craning and straining his huge swollen head around, straining to get at John and pour Texas all over him. The plane arrives and John disembarks, a tremendous cheer goes up, a cry from the throat, from the diaphragm, from the solar plexus, and they bring Annie and the two children forward … the holy icons … the Wife and the Children … the Solid Backing on the Home Front … and John is too much! He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handkerchief and dabs his eye, wipes away a tear! And some little guy from NASA stretched out his hand and took the used handkerchief … so that it could be preserved in the Smithsonian! (With this handkerchief Astronaut John H. Glenn, Jr., wiped away a tear upon being reunited with his wife after his historic earth-orbital flight.) From that moment on, Al and Gus were also-rans, minor leaguers. And they didn’t even have time to fume! The events, day by day, were becoming like something elemental, like a huge change in the weather, a shift in the templates, the Flood, the Last Day, the True Brother Entering Heaven …

  John did not merely get a parade through Washington and a trip to the White House and the medal from the President. Oh, he got those things, all right. But he also addressed a special joint session of Congress—the Senate and the House met together to hear John, the way they had for presidents, prime ministers, kings. There was John standing up there at the podium, with Lyndon Johnson and John McCormack seated behind him, and the rest of them looking up at him from their seats. In absolute adoration, too! That was where the tears started! The tears—they couldn’t hold them back. John’s great round freckled face was shining with glory. He knew just what he was doing. He was the Presbyterian Pilot addressing the world. He said some things that nobody else in the world could have gotten away with, even in 1962. He said, “I still get a lump in my throat when I see the American flag passing by.” But he pulled it off! And then he lifted his hand up toward the gallery—this was in the House side of the Capitol—and five hundred pairs of congressional eyes swung up with his hand toward the gallery, and he introduced his mom and dad from New Concord, Ohio, and a few aunts and uncles for good measure, and then his children and, finally, “ … above all, I want you to meet my wife, Annie … Annie … the Rock!” Well, that did it. That turned on the waterworks. Senators and representatives were trying to clap and reach for their handkerchiefs at the same time. They were dabbing their eyes and cheering through the fluttering ends of their handkerchiefs. Their faces glistened. Some fought back the tears and a couple let go. They applauded, cheered, snuffled, wheezed … A couple of them said, “Amen!” They said it out loud; it just came popping out of their good hardtack cracker evangelical dissenting Protestant hearts as the Presbyterian Pilot lifted up his eyes and his hand to the Rock and the eternal Mother of us all …