The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

  It served many purposes at once. It made the rest of them seem like real pilots after all and not mere riders in a pod. A man either had it or he didn’t … in space as in the air. As every pilot knew in his secret heart—deny it, if you wish!—it required washouts to make your own righteous stuff stand out. So was Carpenter, by implication, to be designated the washout? Logic no longer mattered—especially since none of this could be talked of openly in any case: publicly there were to be no flaws in the manned space program whatsoever. Sheer logic would have raised the question: why pick Carpenter and not Grissom? Grissom had lost the capsule and had then come back with the classic pilot’s response to gross error: “I don’t know what happened—the machine malfunctioned.” The telemetry showed that Grissom’s heart was on the edge of tachycardia at times. Just before re-entry his heart rate had reached 171 beats per minute. Even after Grissom was safe and sound on the carrier Lake Champlain, his heart rate was 160 beats a minute, his breathing was rapid, his skin was warm and moist; he didn’t want to talk about it, he wanted to go to sleep. Here was the clinical picture of a man who had abandoned himself to panic. Then why was not Grissom designated the washout—if anybody cared to find one? But logic had nothing to do with it. One was in the area of magical beliefs now. In his everyday life doughty little Gus lived the life of the right stuff. He was a staunch bearer of the Operational banner. Here Gus’s fate and Deke’s fate came together. Deke had said all along: You need a proven operational test pilot up there. Gus and Deke were great pals. For three years they had flown together, hunted together, drunk together; their children had played together. They were both committed to the holy word: operational . Schirra was with them on this particular commitment, and Shepard threw his weight toward them, too, as did Cooper.

  Deke had plenty to be thankful to Shepard for. One day Al had gotten the other boys together and said, “Listen, we’ve got to do something for Deke. We’ve got to do something to give him back his pride.” Shepard’s suggestion was that Deke be made a sort of chief of the astronauts, with an office and a title and official duties. They all went for the idea and took it to Gilruth, and in no time Deke had the title “Coordinator of Astronaut Activities.” There may have been people at NASA who figured this would be a supernumerary make-work job for the fallen astronaut; if so, they underestimated Deke. He was a far shrewder and more determined individual than his Wisconsin tundra manner let on. The job gave him something to channel his tremendous thwarted energy into. The NASA hierarchy was still a political vacuum, and Deke set about filling it … with a vengeance, as it were. Soon Deke was a power within NASA, a man to be reckoned with, and his motivation never varied: the more powerful he became, the better his chances of reversing the decision that prevented him from flying. Justice, simple operational justice … in the name of the right stuff.

  Operational; the word had new clout now, and a corollary to the theory of the Carpenter flight began to develop. Carpenter’s flight agenda had been loaded with Larry Lightbulb experiments. The scientists, lowest men in the NASA pecking order up to now, had been given their heads on this flight … and the results were there for your inspection. Carpenter had taken all this Mad Professor stuff seriously, and that was what led to his problems. He became so wrapped up in his various “observations” that he fell behind in the checklist and became rattled and then blew it. All this science nonsense could wait. Just now, in the critical operational phase of the program, the crucial period of real flight test, it wasn’t just ding-a-ling stuff, it was dangerous. There were too many goddamned doctors involved in this thing, too. (Look what they did to Deke!) On top of that, they had the two psychiatrists to contend with. They were nice enough men personally, Ruff and Korchin were, but they were … in the way! What the hell was all this pissing into bags and hitting little circles with a pencil … after you’ve just hung your hide out over the edge in a space flight? They hadn’t even picked up the fact that Carpenter had panicked. They found him exhilarated, alert, full of energy, ready to take off and do it all over again … The two men were not invited to continue with the program after the move from Langley to Houston. Thanks a lot, gentlemen, and don’t let the doorknob hit you in the butt.

  Here the outlook of Grissom, Slayton, and Schirra coincided with that of Kraft and Walt Williams. Kraft and Williams also felt that non-operational experiments should be kept to a minimum at this stage of the space program. From now on, whenever anyone said otherwise, one had only to roll his eyeballs and turn his palms up and say: You want another Carpenter flight?

  On August 11 and 12 the mighty Integral struck again, and now there was absolutely no stopping the operational theory. On August 11 the Soviets launched Vostok 3 on what at first looked as if it would be a repetition of Titov’s day-long flight. But no! Exactly twenty-four hours later the Chief Designer sent up Vostok 4, and the two craft flew together, in tandem, within three miles of each other. Within three miles of one another in the infinity of space! The Soviets spoke of a “group flight,” as if the two cosmonauts, Nikolayev and Popovich, were flying in formation. In fact, neither could change his flight path in the slightest, and their proximity was due solely to the precision with which the second Vostok was launched as the first came orbiting overhead—but even this seemed to be a feat of incalculable sophistication. The Genteel Beast and many congressmen seemed to be on the edge of hysteria. Entire formations of Soviet space warriors, hurling thunderbolts at Schenectady … Grand Forks … Oklahoma City … Once again the Chief Designer was toying with them! God knew what his next surprise would be … (It would be a big one.) Well, that settled it. No more densitometers and varicolored balloons and other White Smock accessories. (No more pilots with non-operational stuff!) Which explained the singular nature of Wally Schirra’s flight on October 3.

  Schirra named his capsule Sigma 7, and there you had it. Scott Carpenter had named his Aurora 7 … Aurora … the rosy dawn … the dawn of the intergalactic age … the unknowns, the mystery of the universe … the music of the spheres … Petrarch on the mountaintop … and all that. Whereas Sigma … Sigma was a purely engineering symbol. It stood for the summation, the solution of the problem. Unless he had come right out and named the capsule Operational, he couldn’t have chosen a better name. For the purpose of Schirra’s flight was to prove that Carpenter’s need not have happened. Schirra would make six orbits—twice as many as Carpenter—and yet use half as much fuel and land right on target. Whatever did not have to do with that goal tended to be eliminated from the flight. The flight of Sigma 7 was designed to be Armageddon … the final and decisive rout of the forces of experimental science in the manned space program. And that it was.

  Schirra cut the jolly fun-loving figure so well that people sometimes failed to notice how formidable he could be. But his emphasis, after all, was on maintaining an even strain. His pranksterish, rib-shaking, wilddriving gotcha intervals gave him plenty of slack when the time came to wind things up tight and get tough. Every bit as much as Shepard, Wally had the instincts of an Academy man, a leader of men, the commander, the captain of the ship. He merely operated in a different fashion. He was cool; he had “the uncritical willingness to face danger,” but he wasn’t afraid to show his feelings when strategy seemed to dictate it. If it was going to be his show, he insisted on running it; and he was shrewd enough to recognize the political outlines of a situation. Having seen four flights from up close, Wally couldn’t help but have noticed that the secret of a successful mission lay in a simplified checklist with white space between tasks. The fewer tasks you had, the better chance you had for a 100 percent performance. Not only that, if you could control the checklist, then you could give your flight a theme, a clear-cut goal that everyone could immediately appreciate and respond to. Wally’s theme for this flight was Operational Precision, which, being translated, meant conserving fuel and landing on target. Now that the operational forces were lined up shoulder to shoulder, it was possible to keep offboard most novel items that
engineers or scientists had dreamed up for the flight.

  It was decided that one of Wally’s major operational tests would consist of powering down all of the attitude-control systems, automatic as well as manual, and just drifting in any attitude the capsule’s inertia took it, upside down (in relation to the earth), head over heels, canted this way and that, whatever. Scott heard about it and told Wally that he didn’t really think it was necessary. He had drifted for most of his last orbit, in an attempt to conserve fuel for the re-entry, and had proved to his own satisfaction that you could stand the capsule right up on its aerial or let it revolve or put yourself in any other attitude and it was not the least bit disorienting or uncomfortable. Why didn’t Wally put the proposed drifting time to other uses? Wally said no, he was going to devote his flight to experimenting with drifting flight and to conserving fuel, in order to prepare the way for missions of long duration.

  Scott would learn that planning sessions had been held—and he had not been informed of them. It was not that Scott was supposed to take any official part in the planning for Wally’s flight, and it was not unusual in flight test for a pilot to have his own particular circle of colleagues and ground crew he preferred to consult with. But be that as it may, anyone could recall how much Scott had valued John Glenn’s counsel before his flight. In fact, one of Scott’s concerns had been that John wasn’t available more. The demands on John’s time in his role as NASA’s number-one hero had become enormous. But anytime John was around, Scott—and the engineers, too—wanted John at the meetings. Wally also complained that John wasn’t around. He caused quite a flap when he told Walter Cronkite, in a taped interview, that John was off on the banquet circuit so much, he was lost to the program. He didn’t complain about the absence of Scott, however. Scott began to conclude that Kraft and Williams were overreacting to the fact that he had overshot the target by 250 miles. The possibility that there were people—pilots—going around saying that he had panicked never even crossed his mind.

  Given the goal of the flight—which was to prove that a cool pilot could travel twice as far as Carpenter with half as much fuel consumption and ten times the accuracy—Schirra was terrific. From the moment he got up that morning, he was about as cool and relaxed a human being who ever went out to sit on top of a rocket shaft. A few days ago Wally had played one of his patented gotchas on Dee O’Hara, the nurse. One of her tasks was to collect urine samples. She gives him the usual little bottle and asks him to bring in a sample and leave it on her desk. She comes into her office, and on top of her desk is not a little bottle but a huge beaker holding about five gallons of an amber liquid with a head of foam on top. It couldn’t possibly be—but could it possibly be?—and so she puts her hands on the sides of the beaker to see if it’s warm, and—

  “Gotcha!”

  —she wheels about, and there’s Wally peeking in the doorway, him and his beaming face and a couple of the boys. He had concocted it of water, tincture of iodine, and detergent. The next day Dee O’Hara presents Wally with a clear plastic bag, a big thing, about four feet long, telling him that it’s the urine receptacle for his flight, replacing the little condom device that Grissom, Glenn, and Carpenter had worn. Gotcha! So today, the morning of his flight, here comes Wally down the hallway in Hangar S in his bathrobe, heading for the medical room. Flopping out below the robe and dragging along the floor between his legs is the huge plastic bag. He parades right past Dee O’Hara, as if he were going to suit up that way. Gotcha! And he kept it up. That whole day he was the jolly Wally from beginning to end. He was amazing. He never sounded for a moment like someone under the stress of a novel form of flight test. It was like listening to a good buddy at beer call, recollecting in tranquillity. He practically out-yeagered Yeager. As soon as the escape tower blew off, marking the successful completion of the fully powered part of his ascent, Schirra saw it streaking through the sky and said: “This tower is a real sayonara.”

  Chris Kraft, the flight director, gave his approval for the first orbit, and Deke Slayton, the capcom at the Cape, told Schirra: “You have a go from Control Center.”

  Schirra said: “You have a go from me. It’s real fat.”

  Then Slayton said: “Are you a turtle today?”

  “Going to VOX recorder only,” said Wally. Then he spoke into the tape recorder, whose microphone was not hooked into the open radio circuit.

  “You bet your sweet ass I am,” he said.

  The Turtle Club was one of Wally’s gotcha games. If one good buddy who played the turtle game met another good buddy in public—preferably in the company of very proper folk—and challenged him with the question “Are you a turtle?” that good buddy had to answer, “You bet your sweet ass I am,” in a loud voice or else treat everybody else to a round of drinks. This was three minutes and forty-one seconds into the flight. Wally was already maintaining an even strain.

  He buckled down to the task of conserving hydrogen peroxide. Ordinarily, when the booster rocket separated from the capsule, the capsule was then turned around by the automatic control system, but this consumed considerable fuel. This time Schirra nudged it around manually, using only the low thrusters, the five-pound thrusters, of the fly-by-wire system. Soon he was telling Deke at the Cape: “I’m in chimp mode right now and she’s flying beautifully.” He started using this phrase chimp mode. On the chimpanzee flights the attitude of the capsule had been controlled automatically throughout. The chimp mode was a little zinger for the benefit of all those on the mighty ziggurat, whether astronauts or X–15 “dream pilots,” who were aware of the taunt: “A monkey’s gonna make the first flight.” Schirra’s continual reference to the chimp mode as much as said: “Who cares! Here—I’ll wave the bloody monkey in your face.” As soon as he could, however, he went into what he called the drifting mode. He just let the capsule twist into any attitude it wanted, as Scott had on his final orbit.

  “I’m having a ball up here drifting,” said Wally. “Enjoying it so much I haven’t eaten yet.”

  When he came over California during the fourth orbit, John Glenn, acting as capcom at Point Arguello, was instructed to have Wally say something for live broadcast over television and radio.

  “Ha, ha,” said Wally. “I suppose an old song, ‘Drifting and Dreaming,’ would be apropos at this point, but at this point I don’t have a chance to dream. I’m enjoying it too much.” When he was over South America, he was asked to say something in Spanish for live broadcast.

  “Buenos días, you all,” said Wally. (And the Latins loved it.)

  After nearly four orbits, drifting and yakking and yukking it up, cool, relaxed, a turtle to the last, Wally had used up barely 10 percent of his hydrogen peroxide. He had already traveled one orbit farther than Carpenter or Glenn. He had floated every which way, and (as Scott had told him) there was nothing to it. There was no sensation of up or down in weightless flight. It was obvious that you could send a Mercury capsule on a seventeen-orbit flight, like Titov’s, if you wanted. As Schirra came over the Cape, Deke Slayton said, “Flight would like to talk to you now.”

  “Flight” meant the flight director, Kraft himself, was coming onto the circuit.

  “Been a real good show up there,” said Kraft. “I think we are proving our point, old buddy!”

  Glenn was sitting in front of a microphone in the tracking station at Point Arguello. Scott was sitting in front of a microphone in the tracking station at Guaymas. Kraft had never come on the circuit to say any such thing to either of them. Scott was beginning to see what the point, our point, was.

  As he neared the completion of his sixth and last orbit, Wally announced that he had 78 percent of the fuel left in both the automatic and manual systems. He had flown twice as far as Glenn or Carpenter, and he could have gotten through another fifteen orbits or so if he had to. One of Kraft’s lieutenants, an engineer named Gene Kranz, came on the circuit and said to Wally: “Now that’s what I call a real engineering test flight!”

  Sco
tt picked up the message in his central nervous system even before his mind analyzed it. Unlike the last one, the man was saying. There was even a hint of … unlike the last two.

  To complete an operational triumph Schirra now had only to land on target. Carpenter had landed 250 miles off the mark. As he began his descent toward the atmosphere, Wally told Al Shepard, the capcom on Bermuda, near the target area, “I think they’re gonna put me on the number-three elevator.” He was talking about the number-three elevator used for moving aircraft up to the flight deck on the carrier Kearsage. This was a bit of the Schirra metonymy for “squarely on target.” Oh, yes! And in fact he landed just 4.5 miles from the carrier. The swabbos crowding the flight deck could see him coming down under his big parachute. Carpenter had found the capsule uncomfortably hot once he splashed down and had crawled out through the neck of the capsule and waited on his life raft for the rescue planes. Glenn had also complained of the heat. Schirra’s suit had an improved cooling system, and he was willing to stay in the capsule indefinitely. He refused a helicopter’s offer of a lift to the carrier. What was the rush? He stayed in the capsule while a crew of swabbos in a motor-driven whaling boat towed him back to the carrier. Once he was on the Kearsage he told the doctors: “I feel fine. It was a textbook flight. The flight went just the way I wanted it to.”