The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

  It wasn’t likely to make him any happier, either, to know that Scott Carpenter had taken his place. Carpenter had the least flight test experience of any of them, and yet he was replacing Deke Slayton—Deke Slayton, who had stood up before the Society of Experimental Test Pilots and insisted that only an experienced test pilot could do this job correctly. Wally Schirra, a man with real flight test credentials, had been training as Deke’s backup. Why had he been passed over in favor of Carpenter? The two buddies, Glenn and Carpenter, were getting the first two orbital flights … and Deke Slayton was being left behind … to hitch airplane rides with other pilots.

  Gilruth’s opinion, backed up by Walt Williams, was that Carpenter had logged far more flight training, as Glenn’s backup, than Schirra could possibly hope to cram in during the ten weeks remaining before the flight. Scott was not exactly ecstatic over having been handed Deke’s flight on such short notice. He had trained for six months with John, but the second orbital flight was to be quite a different proposition. NASA’s experimental scientists would finally have an inning. The astronaut was supposed to deploy a multicolored balloon outside the capsule in order to study the perception of light in space and the amount of drag, if any, in the presumed vacuum of space. He was supposed to observe how water in a glass bottle behaved in a weightless state and whether or not capillary action was altered. There would be a small glass sphere for that experiment. He would have a densitometer, as it was known, to measure the visibility of a ground flare. He would be trained in the use of a hand-held camera to take weather photographs and pictures of the daylight horizon and the atmospheric band above the horizon and of various land masses, particularly North America and Africa. They had the right man. Scott was intrigued by the experiments. But the addition of all these things to the checklist, which was already undergoing last-minute changes of the operational sort, put him under increasing pressure. In making all of these sightings, for the use of the camera, the densitometer, or whatever, he would be using an entirely new manual control apparatus. It was a system in which you created one pound of thrust if you pushed the hand controller slightly and twenty-five more if you pushed it beyond a small angle. It would be either/or; there would be no turning the capsule gradually like an airplane or an automobile.

  The flight went off on schedule on May 24. For the first two orbits Scott had a picnic. He was more relaxed and in higher spirits than any of the three men who had preceded him. He was enjoying himself. His pulse rate, before lift-off, during the launch, and in orbit, was even lower than Glenn’s. He talked more, ate more, drank more water, and did more with the capsule than any of them ever had. He obviously loved all the experiments. He was swinging the capsule this way and that way, taking photographs a mile a minute, making detailed observations of the sunrises and horizon, releasing balloons, tending his bottles, taking readings with the densitometer, having a grand time. The only problem was that the new control system used up fuel at a terrific rate. You wanted to pitch or yaw the capsule just ever so slightly, and—bango!— you were over the invisible line and another outsized geyser of hydrogen peroxide squirted out of the tanks.

  During the second orbit he was warned by several capcoms to start conserving fuel, so that he would have enough for re-entry, but it was not until the third and last orbit that he himself seemed to realize just how low the fuel was. For most of the final orbit he just let the capsule drift and turn in any attitude it wanted to, so as not to have to use any of the thrusters, high or low, automatic or manual. It presented no problems at all. Even when you were upside down in relation to the earth, with your head pointed straight down, there was no feeling of disorientation, no feeling of up or down. Floating in a weightless state was even more enjoyable than swimming underwater, which Scott loved.

  The diminished fuel supply was very much on his mind. Still, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to experiment. He reached for the densitometer, and his hand hit the hatch of the capsule, and a cloud of John Glenn’s “fireflies” appeared outside the window. So he swung the capsule over in a yaw to have a look at the fireflies. To him they looked more like frost or snowflakes, so he banged on the hatch and another cloud flew up and he swung around some more to take a look and used up some more fuel. Whatever they were, they were attached to the hull of the capsule and no doubt emanated from or were created by the capsule and were not some sort of micro-galaxy, all of which aroused his curiosity, and so he banged away and pitched and yawed and tooled around some more, the better to unravel the mystery. All of a sudden it was time to prepare for re-entry, and Scott was already behind in the retro-sequence, as that part of the checklist was known. Also, the fuel situation was beginning to get a little dicey. On top of that, the automatic control system would no longer hold the capsule at the proper angle for re-entry. So he switched to fly-by-wire … but at the same time forgot to throw the switch that cut off the manual system. For ten minutes he was eating up fuel out of both systems. He would have to fire the retro-rockets manually, as Alan Shepard, the capcom in Arguello, California, sounded off the countdown. When Shepard called “Fire one!” the capsule’s angle was off about nine degrees and Scott was late in hitting the switch. He had practically no fuel left for controlling the capsule’s oscillations during re-entry. By the time he hit the denser atmosphere and the radio blackout began, Chris Kraft and the other flight control engineers feared the worst. Long after radio communication should have resumed—nothing. It looked as if Carpenter had consumed all his fuel up there playing around—and had burned up. They all looked at each other and were already thinking one step ahead: “This disaster is going to set the program back a year—or do worse than that.”

  Rene was following Scott’s re-entry over television inside a rented house in Cocoa Beach. For two days she had been involved in a hide-and-seek operation that had finally become absolutely loony. Bridge dragnets … amok helicopters … Rene had decided that since Life’s accounts of the brave wives bravely enduring the ordeal of their husbands’ flights were written in the first person, she was actually going to write hers. Loudon Wainwright could edit what she wrote and rewrite the rough spots, but she was going to write the whole thing herself. That being the case, she wasn’t going to let herself be imprisoned inside her house at Langley by the television crews and all the rest of that madness. She had seen Annie being driven far crazier from having to play quavering pigeon for the press—and the likes of Lyndon Johnson—than by any fears she had for John. It was an undignified position to be in. Despite the attention lavished on you, you were not treated as an individual but as the anxious loyal mate of the male up on top of the rocket. After a while Rene didn’t know whether it was her modest literary ambitions or her resentment of the pat role of Astronaut Wife that made her do it. Life rented a “safe house” for her in Cocoa Beach. Life did things right. They rented a backup safe house as well, in case Rene’s presence in the first one was discovered. Rene called up Shorty Powers, who was NASA’s official press officer in matters concerning the astronauts, and told him that she was going to the Cape for the launch but wanted privacy and was telling no one where she would be, including him. Powers was not happy. The astronauts’ Life contract had already made his job difficult enough. He was cut off from all “personal” material about the men and their families, since that was supposed to go to Life exclusively. And yet when a flight was on, 90 percent of the reporters Powers had to deal with were really interested in only two questions: (1) What is the astronaut doing now and how does he feel? (Is he afraid?); and (2) What is his wife doing now and how does she feel? (Is she dying from anxiety?) One of Powers’s main roles was serving the television networks—and telling them where the wife would be during the flight, so that they could congregate for the death-watch campout. And this time all he could tell them was that the wife would be at the Cape … somewhere … That did it. The networks took the situation as an insult and a challenge. Before Rene left for the Cape, a correspondent for one of the networks call
ed her and told her they were going to find out where she was staying … They could do it the hard way, if they had to, but they’d rather do it the easy way. So she’d better just tell them. It was like something out of a gangster movie. But sure enough, when she reached the Cape, the networks had people watching every bridge and causeway into Cocoa Beach. Rene knew they would be looking for a car with a woman with four children. So she had the children lie on the floor, and they slipped through. The networks were not going to be foiled that easily. After all, how could they camp on her front lawn and film her drawn shades if they didn’t even know where she was? So they hired helicopters and began scouring Cocoa Beach. They went up and down the hardtack beach, looking for congregations of four small children. They would swoop right down on children on the beach until they could read the terror in their eyes. People were running for cover, abandoning their Scotch coolers and telescopes and cameras and tripods, trying to save their children from the amok helicopters. It was crazy, utterly bananas, but by now not knowing where the wife was—it was like not knowing where the rocket was. Finally, Rene was sending her children over to the beach two by two, in order to foil the insane people in the network helicopters.

  Came time for the launch, and now Rene and the children watched the countdown on the TV in the safe house, with Wainwright and a Life photographer in attendance. Then the children rushed out and watched part of the rocket’s slow ascent through a telescope mounted on a garage roof. The children didn’t seem at all apprehensive. Flying was what their father did. They were in high spirits … . And now they were following the re-entry, as best they could, on television. They had CBS turned on. There was Walter Cronkite. Rene knew him. Cronkite had become an astrobuff. He had more than the usual reasons to like the astronauts. It was his coverage of John Glenn’s flight that, in the strange workings of the television news business, had led to his current eminence among the network anchormen. Cronkite had been explaining Scott’s fuel problem as he entered the atmosphere. Then Cronkite’s voice began to take on more and more concern. They didn’t know where Scott was. They weren’t sure he had begun his re-entry at the proper angle. All at once Cronkite’s voice broke. Tears came into his eyes. “I’m afraid that …” There was a catch in his voice. His eyes glistened. He had the waterworks turned on. “I’m afraid … we may have … lost an astronaut …” What instincts the man had! There was the Press, the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion … live … with no prompting whatsoever! Rene’s children were very quiet, staring at the screen. Yet Rene herself did not believe for a moment that Scott had perished. She was like every military pilot’s wife in that respect. If he were merely missing—if no dead body had been found—then he was alive and would come through it all right. There were no two ways about it. Rene had known of a case in which a cargo plane had crash-landed in the Pacific and broken in two on impact, the rear half sinking like a brick. Some men were rescued from the front half, which stayed afloat a few minutes. And yet the wives of the men who had been in the rear of the craft refused to believe that they were lost. They were out there somewhere; it was only a matter of time. Rene had marveled at how long it had taken them to accept the obvious. But her reaction was precisely the same. Scott was all right, because there was no real proof that he wasn’t. Cronkite gulped on the television screen. No tears came to her eyes at all. Scott was all right. He would turn up … No two ways about it.

  As a matter of fact, she was correct. Scott had come through the atmosphere in good shape. The capsule began rocking violently in the dense atmosphere below 50,000 feet, and he had to release his parachute early and by hand, the automatic system being out of fuel. The capsule had overshot the target area by some 250 miles. A reconnaissance plane found him in about forty minutes, but throughout that period the impression created on television was that he might be dead. When a rescue aircraft reached Scott, they found him bobbing contentedly on a life raft beside the capsule. He was very pleased with the whole adventure. When he reached the aircraft carrier Intrepid, he was in terrific spirits. He talked and talked into the night. He wanted to stay up and keep talking about the grand adventure he had been through. He was really pleased about all the experiments he had been able to do, despite the overcrowded checklist he had, and about solving or at least greatly narrowing down the mystery of the “fireflies.” He hadn’t determined precisely what they were, but he had proved that they were produced by the spacecraft itself; they were not some extraterrestrial material, and so on … He could have gone on all night … He was content … a job well done … He felt that he had helped create one of the most important roles in astronautics: man as scientist in space …

  Over the next two weeks Scott received a hero’s homage. It was not on the scale of John’s, which was understandable, but it was sweet enough. There were parades in the East and parades in the West. He rode in a motorcade through Boulder, his old hometown, and through Denver, which was just down the highway. It was a great day. The sun was out and it was a light fluffy Rocky Mountain day in May, and Rene was beside him, sitting up on the ridge of the seat back in the convertible, wearing white gloves, like a proper Navy wife, and smiling and looking absolutely beautiful and radiant. Well, Scott thought he had just shot the moon.

  Back at the Cape, Chris Kraft was telling his colleagues: “That sonofabitch will never fly for me again.”

  Kraft was furious. The truth was, he had been quietly put out before … about the seven brave lads. As he saw it, Carpenter had ignored repeated warnings from capcoms all around the world about wasting fuel, and this had almost resulted in a disaster, one that might have done irreparable damage to the program. As it was, Carpenter’s performance had cast doubt on the capability of the Mercury system to carry out a long flight such as Titov’s seventeen orbits. And why had this catastrophe nearly occurred? Because Carpenter had insisted on comporting himself like an Omnipotent and Omniscient Mercury Astronaut. He didn’t have to pay attention to suggestions and warnings from mere groundlings. He apparently believed that the astronaut, the passenger in the capsule, was the heart and soul of the space program. All of the resentment that the engineers had about the top-lofty status of the astronauts now crept out of its cage … at least within NASA. Outside of NASA, publicly, nothing was to change. Carpenter, like Grissom before him, was an exemplary brave lad; just a little dicey scrape at the end of the flight, that was all. Very successful flight; go ahead, let him have his medals and his receiving lines.

  And now that the wound had been opened, there were those who were only too pleased to see the following line develop concerning the Carpenter flight: Carpenter had not merely wasted fuel while up there playing with the capsule’s attitude controls, doing his beloved “experiments.” No, he had also become … rattled … when he finally realized he was getting low on fuel. The evidence for this was that he forgot to turn off the manual system when he switched to fly-by-wire and thereby really blew his fuel supply. And then he … panicked! … That was why he couldn’t line the capsule up at the right angle and that was why he couldn’t fire the retro-rockets right on the button … and that was why he hit the atmosphere at such a shallow angle. He nearly skipped off it instead of going through it … he nearly skipped off into eternity … because … he panicked! There! We’ve said it! That was the worst charge that could be brought against a pilot on the great ziggurat of flying. It said that a man had lost whatever stuff he had in the most awful manner. He had funked it. It was a sin for which there was no redemption. Damned eternally! Once such a verdict had been pronounced, no judgment was too vile. Did you hear his voice on the tape just before the blackout? You could hear the panic! In fact, they could hear no such thing. Carpenter sounded very much the way Glenn had sounded and a good deal less excited than Grissom. But if one wanted to hear panic, especially in the words that a man had to force out after the g-forces built up, if that was what one was after … then you could hear panic. But, then, Carpenter never had the right stuff to be
gin with! That much was obvious. He had given up long ago. He had opted for multi-engine planes! (Now we know why!) He had only two hundred hours in jets. He was here only through a fluke of the selection process. And so forth and so on. Certain objective data had to be ignored, of course. Carpenter’s pulse rate remained lower, during the re-entry as well as during the launch and orbital flight, than any other astronaut’s, including Glenn’s. It never rose above 105, even during the most critical point of the re-entry. One could argue that pulse rate was not a dependable indication of a pilot’s coolness. Scott Crossfield had a chronically rapid pulse rate, and he was in the league with Yeager. Nevertheless, it was inconceivable that a man in a state of panic—in a life-or-death emergency—in a crisis that did not last for a matter of seconds but for twenty minutes— it was inconceivable that such a man would maintain a heart rate of less than 105 throughout. Even a pilot’s heart rate could jump to more than 105 for nothing more than the fact that some cocky bastard had cut into line ahead of him at the PX. One might argue that Carpenter had mishandled the re-entry, but to accuse him of panic made no sense in light of the telemetered data concerning his heart rate and his respiratory rate. Therefore, the objective data would be ignored. Once it had begun, the denigration of Carpenter had to proceed at any cost.