by Tom Wolfe
“Well, Nancy, I’d wish for an Electrolux vacuum cleaner with all the attachments—”
—and they’d all crack up at the thought of what a dim lummox the Genteel Beast really was. Still … that didn’t make it any easier when your time came.
Gordo’s flight was to last thirty-four hours, meaning that Trudy would undergo the longest siege by the Beast and have the most protracted danger wake yet. Two sets of wives came by. Louise Shepard brought most of the other Original Seven wives in her convertible. Later on, some of the Other Nine wives came by—Jim Lovell’s wife Marilyn, Ed White’s wife Pat, Neil Armstrong’s wife Jan, and John Young’s wife Barbara. Everybody tried to listen to Gordo’s transmissions from the capsule over a high-frequency radio receiver Wally Schirra had loaned Trudy. It was the receiver that had been in Wally’s capsule during his flight. But about all you could get out of it was static. So they went out on the patio in the back, out of sight of the Animal, and watched the television coverage of the flight, off and on, and ate devil’s-food cake. In the true spirit of the wake, friends and neighbors had brought over food. During his ninth orbit, which began about 7:30 p.m., Gordo was supposed to try to go to sleep for a few hours, and Trudy decided that she and their two daughters, Jan and Cam, should try to get some rest, too. In the morning Gordo was still up there, twenty-four hours into the flight, and the Beast was still outside the door, and the danger wake was going strong. About noon, as Gordo began his last four orbits, you could tell from the television reports that his capsule was beginning to develop electrical problems. During the next-to-last orbit they became worse. It now appeared as if Gordo would have to line up the capsule for re-entry manually, without any assistance from the automatic control system at all. Trudy received a telephone call from Deke Slayton. He told her that she and the children shouldn’t worry, because Gordo had practiced completely manual re-entries many times on the procedures trainer. “This is what we wanted to do anyway,” he said.
Well, Gordo was going to have his hands full. Nevertheless, Trudy couldn’t help but jump yet one more step forward in the retro sequence. If Gordo was beginning his re-entry, then very soon … she would have to step out the front door and face the Beast and his cameras and microphones and go through the press conference …
Meantime, aloft, Gordo was having a hell of a time for himself. Right after the lift-off he said to Wally Schirra, who was serving as the capcom, “Feels good, buddy … All systems go.” He kept adding things such as “Working just like advertised.” The Life Sciences people, who had finally been allowed a few experiments since the flight was so long, were interested in determining the limits of adaptability to weightlessness. They hoped to see what sleep would be like, although they were not sure they could learn anything about this during a thirty-four-hour flight, given the naturally high adrenal excitement of the astronaut. They needn’t have worried. Ol’ Gordo obliged by falling asleep during his second orbit, even though his suit was overheating and he had to adjust the temperature settings continually. One of his tasks was to provide urine samples at specified intervals. This he dutifully did. Since in a weightless condition it would be impossible to pour the sample from the urine receptacle—it would have floated about the cockpit as globules—Gordo was provided with a syringe to transfer it from the receptacle to a container. But the syringe leaked all over the place, and Gordo had the reeking amber globules floating around, anyway. So he just tried to herd them together into one big blob periodically and went on with his tasks, which included light and photographic experiments, somewhat like Carpenter’s. Gordo was really something. He seemed even cooler about the whole thing than Schirra, and nobody had believed that possible. Every now and then he would look out the window and give the folks on the ground a little travelogue, Gordo-style.
“Down there’s the Himalayas,” he said. He seemed to like the sound of the word. “Ay-yuh … the Himalayas.” In Oklahoma lingo Gordo it came out “Himmuh-lay-yuz.”
On the nineteenth orbit, with three more to go, Gordo started getting readings of g-force buildups, as if the capsule had begun its re-entry. Sure enough, the capsule started rolling, just as it would have during a re-entry in order to increase stability. The automatic control system had begun the re-entry sequence, even though the capsule was still in orbit and hadn’t slowed down in the slightest. The electrical system was shorting out. On the next orbit, the twentieth, the capsule lost all attitude readings. This meant Cooper would have to line it up manually for the re-entry. On the next-to-last orbit, the twenty-first, the automatic control system went out completely. For re-entry Cooper would not only have to establish the capsule’s angle of attack by hand, using the horizon as his point of reference, he would also have to hold the capsule steady on all three axes, pitch, roll, and yaw, with the hand controller and fire the retro-rockets by hand. Meantime, the electrical malfunction had done something to the oxygen balance. Carbon dioxide started building up in the capsule and inside Cooper’s suit and helmet as well.
“Well … things are beginning to stack up a little,” said Gordo. It was the same old sod-hut drawl. He sounded like the airline pilot who, having just slipped two seemingly certain mid-air collisions and finding himself in the midst of a radar fuse-out and control-tower dysarthria, says over the intercom: “Well, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be busy up here in the cockpit making our final approach into Pittsburgh, and so we want to take this opportunity to thank you for flying American and we hope we’ll see you again real soon.” It was second-generation Yeager, now coming from earth orbit. Cooper was having a good time. He knew everybody was in a sweat down below. But this was what he and the boys had wanted all along, wasn’t it? They had wanted to take over the complete re-entry process—become true pilots in this damned thing, bring her in manually—and the engineers had always shuddered at the thought. Well, now they had no other choice, and he had the controls. On top of that, during his final orbit he would have to keep the capsule at the proper angle, by eye, on the night side of the earth and then be ready to fire the retro-rockets soon after he entered daylight over the Pacific. No sweat. Just made it a little more of a sporty course, that was all—and Gordo lined up the capsule, hit the button for the retro-rockets, and splashed down even closer to the carrier Kearsage than Schirra had.
No one could deny it … no brethren, old or new, could fail to see it … when the evil wind was up, Ol’ Gordo had shown the world the pure and righteous stuff.
Over the next week Gordo became the most celebrated of all the astronauts aside from John Glenn himself. Ol’ Gordo!—whose confreres had pictured him as forever bringing up the rear … There he was, sitting on the back of the open limousine, in parade after parade … Honolulu, Cocoa Beach, Washington, New York … And such parades! The ticker-tape parade in New York was one of the biggest ever, Glenn-scale, with signs along the way, saying things such as GORDO COOPER—YOU’RE SUPER-DUPER! in letters three or four feet high. Not only that, he addressed a joint session of Congress, just as Glenn had. A “textbook flight” like Schirra’s was all well and good, but there was nothing like a hair-raiser to capture the imagination and stir the gourds. Gordo was also the first American to spend an entire day in space, of course, and he had put the United States back in the ball game with the Soviets. The role of single-combat warrior seemed more glorious than ever.
XV.
The High Desert
By the time of Gordon Cooper’s flight, Chuck Yeager had returned to Edwards Air Force Base. He was only thirty-nine, the same age, it so happened, as Wally Schirra and Alan Shepard and two years younger than John Glenn. Yeager no longer had quite the head of dark curly hair that everybody at Edwards saw in the framed photographs of him stepping out of the X–I in October 1947. And God knows, his face had more mileage on it. This was typical of military pilots by that age and came not so much from the rigors of the job as from taking the sun rays headon twelve months every year out on the concrete of the flight lines. Yeager had the same tri
m muscular build as always. He had been flying supersonic fighter aircraft as regularly, day in and day out, as any colonel in the Air Force. So in the ten years since he had made his last record-setting flight here at Edwards, that wild ride to Mach 2.4 in the X—IA, he really hadn’t changed too much. You couldn’t say the same about Edwards itself.
When Yeager had departed in 1954, Pancho’s had still been standing. Today the base was loaded with military and civil-service personnel, every GS-type in the manual, working for the Air Force, for NASA, even for the Navy, which had a small piece of the X–15 program. At four o’clock it was worth your life to be heading upstream during the mad rush from the air conditioners in the office buildings to the air conditioners in the tract homes in Lancaster.
This much Yeager already knew about; this was the part that was easy to take. He had been commanding a squadron of F–100s at George Air Force Base, which was only about fifty miles southeast of Edwards in the same stretch of prehistoric dry-lake terrain. Yeager and Glennis and their four children had lived at Victorville in the same sort of housing development you found in Lancaster; just a bit more barren, if anything, a little grid of Contractor Suburbans lined up alongside Interstate Highway 15. The same old arthritic Joshua trees dared you to grow a blade of grass, much less a real tree, and the cars heading from Los Angeles to Las Vegas hurtled by without so much as a flick of the eye. Not that any of this weighed upon Yeager, however. As commander of a squadron of supersonic fighters he had led training operations and readiness maneuvers over half the world and as far away as Japan. Besides, nobody stayed in the Air Force because of the glories of the domestic architecture. Where he was living was standard issue for a colonel such as himself who after twenty years was making just a little over two hundred dollars a week, including extra flight pay and living allowance … and without magazine contracts or any other unorthodox goodies …
The Air Force had brought Yeager back to Edwards two years ago to be director of flight test operations. Last year, 1962, they created the new Aerospace Research Pilot School and made him commandant. ARPS, as the school became known, was part of big plans the Air Force had for a manned space program of its own. As a matter of fact, the Air Force had envisioned a major role in space ever since the first Sputnik went up, only to be thwarted by Eisenhower’s decision to put the space effort in civilian hands. They now wanted to create a military program, quite apart from NASA’s, using fleets of ships such as the X–20 and various “lifting body” craft, wingless ships whose hulls would be shaped to give them aerodynamic control when they re-entered the earth’s atmosphere, and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, which would be a space station. Boeing was building the first X–20 at its plant in Seattle. The Titan 3C rocket booster it would require was almost ready. Six pilots had already been chosen to train to take it into orbit.
The X–20 and the MOL were not yet operational, of course. In the meantime, it seemed to be highly important that Air Force pilots be chosen as NASA astronauts. The prestige of the astronaut absolutely dominated flying, and the Air Force was determined to be the prime supplier of the breed. Four of the nine new astronauts selected in 1962, before ARPS was instituted, had been from the Air Force; that was not considered good enough.
To tell the truth, the brass had gone slightly bananas over this business of producing astronauts. They had even set up a “charm school” in Washington for the leading candidates. The best of the young test pilots from Edwards and Wright-Patterson flew to Washington and were given a course in how to impress the NASA selection panels in Houston. And it was dead serious! They listened to pep talks by Air Force generals, including General Curtis LeMay himself. They went through drills on how to talk on their feet—and that was the more sensible, credible part of the course. From there it got right down to the level of cotillion etiquette. They were told what to wear to the interviews with the engineers and the astronauts. They were to wear knee-length socks, so that when they sat down and crossed their legs no bare flesh would show between the top of the socks and bottom of the pant cuffs. They were told what to drink at the social get-togethers in Houston: they should drink alcohol, in keeping with the pilot code of Flying & Drinking, but in the form of a tall highball, either bourbon or Scotch, and only one. They were told how to put their hands on their hips (if they must). The thumbs should be to the rear and the fingers forward. Only women and interior decorators put the thumbs forward and the fingers back.
And the men went through it all willingly! Without a snigger! The brass’s passion for the astronaut business was nothing compared to that of the young pilots themselves. Edwards had always been the precise location on the map of the apex of the pyramid of the right stuff itself. And now it was just another step on the way up. These boys were coming through Chuck Yeager’s prep school so they could get a ticket to Houston.
The glamour of the space program was such that there was no longer any arguing against it. In addition to the chances for honor, glory, fame, and the celebrity treatment, all the new hot dogs could see something else. It practically glowed in the sky. They talked about it at beer call at every Officers Club at every air base in the land. Namely, the Astronaut Life. The youngsters knew about that, all right. It existed just over the rainbow, in Houston, Texas … the Life contract … $25,000 per year over and above your salary … veritable mansions in the suburbs, custom-designed … No more poor sad dried-up asbestos-shingle-roof clapboard shacks rattling in the sandstorms … free Corvettes … an enormous free lunch from one side of America to the other, for that matter … and the tastiest young cookies imaginable! One had only to reach for them! … The vision of all the little sugarplums danced above the mighty ziggurat … You bet! A veritable Fighter Jock’s Forbidden Dream of the goodies had been brought to life, and all these young hot dogs looked upon it like people who believed in miracles …
It really made some of the older pilots shake their heads. If a man got a piece of tail every now and then, the world wasn’t going to come to an end. But to dream of a goddamned aerial nookie circus … What was worse, however, was the Life contract. The way any true Blue-Suiter saw it, to let an experimental test pilot exploit his job commercially was only asking for trouble. If a man had the opportunity to fly machines with incalculable millions of dollars’ worth of resources and facilities and man hours built into them, if they put him in a position to make history—that was more than enough compensation.
Yeager had flown the X–I at straight pay, $283 a month. The Blue Suit!—that was enough for him. The Blue Suit had brought him everything he had in this world, and he asked for nothing else.
And what would all of that mean to these boys, even if someone said it? Not a hell of a lot, probably. Not even the fact that the X–15 project was in its finest hour, right here, for all to see, affected the new order of things. In June the X–15, with Joe Walker at the controls, had achieved Mach 5.92, or 4,104 miles per hour, which brought the project close to the optimum speed—“in excess of Mach 6”—it had been aiming for. In July Bob White had flown to 314,750 feet, or 59.6 miles, 9.6 miles into space (50 miles was now officially regarded as the boundary line) and well above the project’s goal of 280,000 feet. These and many less spectacular flights of the X–15 were bringing back data concerning heat buildup (from air friction) and stability upon which the design of all the supersonic and hypersonic aircraft of the future, commercial and military, would be based. The X–15’s XLR–99 rocket had 57,000 pounds of thrust. The Mercury-Redstone had 78,000; the Mercury-Atlas had 367,000 pounds; but soon there would be the X–20, and the X–20 would have a Titan 3 rocket’s 2.5 million pounds of thrust, and it would be the first ship to go into orbit with a pilot at the controls from beginning to end, a pilot who could land it anywhere he wanted, eliminating the tremendous expense and risk of the Mercury ocean-rescue operations, which involved carriers, spotter planes, helicopters, frogmen, and backup vessels strung halfway around the world.
Yeager’s students had a chance t
o experience something close to what such space piloting would be like. They went “booming and zooming” in the F–104. The F–104 was a fighter-interceptor that had been built to counter the MiG–21, which the Russians were known to be developing. The F–104 was fifty feet long and had two razor-thin wings, each only seven feet long, set far back on the fuselage, close to the tail assembly. The pilot and his guy-in-back were in two seats way up in the nose. The F–104 was built for speed in combat, period. It could climb at speeds in excess of Mach 1 and it could achieve Mach 2.2 in level flight. The faster it went, the steadier it was; it was unstable at low speeds, however, and oversensitive to the controls, with an evil tendency to pitch up and then snap into rolls and spins. At glide speed it seemed to want to fall like a length of pipe. After practicing on an F–104 simulator, Yeager’s students would take the ship up to 35,000 feet and open her up to Mach 2 (the boom), then aim her up at about forty-five degrees and try to poke a hole in the sky (the zoom). The g-forces slammed them back in their seats and they shot up like shells, and the pale-blue desert sky turned blue-black and the g-forces slid off and they came sailing over the top of the arc, about 75,000 feet up, silent and weightless—an experience like unto what the brethren themselves had known!—
—and these boys thought that was neat. Maybe it would be nice to fly the X–15 or the X–20, if you didn’t make astronaut …
Yeager liked to take the ARPS students up for mock dogfights, hassling, just to … keep the proficiency up … Few of the lads had ever been in combat and they knew little about the critical tolerances of fighter aircraft during violent maneuvers. They knew where the outside of the envelope was, but they didn’t know about the part where you reached the outside and then stretched her a little … without breaking through … Yeager waxed their tails with regularity, but they took that in stride. These days the way to the top—meaning the road to test-pilot astronaut—involved being very good at a lot of things without necessarily being “shit-hot,” to use the beer-call expression, at anything. A balance of pilot skills and engineering; that was the ticket. Joe Walker’s backup pilot in the X–15 project, Neil Armstrong, was typical of the new breed. A lot of people couldn’t figure out Armstrong. He had a close blond crew cut and small pale blue eyes and scarcely a line or a feature in his face that you could remember. His expression hardly ever changed. You’d ask him a question, and he would just stare at you with those pale-blue eyes of his, and you’d start to ask the question again, figuring he hadn’t understood, and—click—out of his mouth would come forth a sequence of long, quiet, perfectly formed, precisely thought-out sentences, full of anisotropic functions and multiple-encounter trajectories, or whatever else was called for. It was as if his hesitations were just data punch-in intervals for his computer. Armstrong had been preparing for an X–15 launch from the Smith’s Ranch dry-lake bed last year when Yeager, who was director of flight test operations, told him the lake bed was still too muddy from the rains. Armstrong said the meteorological data, considering the wind and temperature factors, indicated the surface would be satisfactory. Yeager received a call from NASA asking him if he would take a small plane over to the lake bed and make a ground inspection. “Hell, no,” said Yeager. “I’ve been flying over these lakes for fifteen years, and I know it’s muddy. I’m not going to be responsible for disabling an Air Force plane.” Well, would he fly a NASA plane up there? Hell, no, said Yeager; he didn’t want that on his record, either. It was finally arranged that he would fly up there backseat, with Armstrong at the controls and therefore responsible for the mission. As soon as they touched down, Yeager could tell that the mud was going to suck up the landing gears like a couple of fence posts, which it did. Now they were hopelessly mired in the muck, and a range of hills blocked radio contact with the base. “Well, Neil,” said Yeager, “in a few hours it’ll be dark, and the temperature’s going down to zero, and we’re two guys standing out here in the mud wearing windbreakers. Got any good ideas?” Armstrong stared at him, and the computer interval began, and it ended, and nothing came out. A rescue team from the base, alerted by the loss of radio contact, retrieved them before nightfall—and brought back the story, which entertained the old-timers for a few days.