Louise could tell her husband was in a funk, which was rare for him. So when he asked her what she thought of the whole astronaut thing, she tried to be upbeat. “How would you feel if I was one of the hundred and ten?” he asked. “It doesn’t really matter because you’re not,” she said. “But if you were, I’d say, ‘Just go right ahead.’ I think it sounds wonderful.”
Then, first thing Monday morning, a young staffer came up to Shepard and handed him an envelope. Inside was NASA’s invitation. It had arrived the previous week. “Somehow it got misplaced,” the sheepish young officer said, and Shepard didn’t know whether to punch him or promote him.
He rushed home for lunch to tell Louise, who knew before he opened his mouth because Shepard was beaming from ear to ear. That night he and Louise had a long talk about what this meant, for him and for the family. And he asked her what they should do if he actually got selected. “Why are you asking me?” she said. “You know you’ll do it anyway.”
The 110 test pilots were divided into three groups, and the first two groups were told to come to the Pentagon—secretly, and in civilian clothes—for a briefing on their potential role in a top-secret mission; the third group was put on hold. The selection committee was looking for men “who were not only in top physical condition but had demonstrated that they had the capability to stay alive under tough and dangerous assignments.” Skeptics— notably the famed test pilot Chuck Yeager, an early and snide critic of the astronauts and their NASA bosses—would snicker that what NASA really wanted were guinea pigs. But Shepard didn’t see it that way. He saw aviation at “a crossroads, and space was the new turning point . . . something new and important.”
Following the Pentagon briefing, each of the sixty-nine candidates was asked whether or not he wished to volunteer for the astronaut program. A young Navy psychologist, Robert Voas, conducted many of those brief interviews and expected many of the men—especially those who, like Shepard, seemed entrenched in their military careers—to decline. To Voas’ surprise, nine out of ten said yes. One man had even recently been offered a four-year scholarship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and after saying no repeatedly, he returned to Voas’ office to say, “The hell with MIT—yes.”
Shepard also said yes, and was called back a few days later for a more extended interview. At the end of that interview he sat in Voas’ office, growing impatient as the psychologist ruffled through some papers. Finally Voas asked Shepard if he’d like to continue on to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for some physical and psychological tests. Voas thought Shepard was going to jump up and kiss him. He then handed Shepard a phone and told him to call his wife, but Shepard said he already knew she was “all for it.” Secretly Louise hoped that the odds were too great. When a friend asked Louise if she was worried, she said she wasn’t because “he’s only one out of a hundred.”
NASA had expected a quarter of the 110 to volunteer, but when nearly 90 percent of the first two groups said they were interested, the third group that had been on hold was cut loose. Then the initial sixty-nine volunteers were pared to thirty-two, who proceeded to the next level of testing. Each was assigned a number—no names were to be used, everything was hush-hush— and told to wear civilian clothes when he reported to Albuquerque. There the candidates would experience one of the more ridiculous and, for some, degrading weeks of their lives.
The degradation could be blamed on a few of the doctors who had been appointed to President Eisenhower’s scientific advisory committee, men who had started making noisy predictions about the likely effects of space travel and zero gravity on the human body: blindness, brain damage, heart attack, inability to eat or swallow. To shut those critics up, NASA hired Dr. W. Randolph “Randy” Lovelace to conduct some of the most intense medical experiments ever inflicted on a willing human subject. Lovelace’s New Mexico clinic was home to the nation’s best aerospace doctors, experts in an emerging field who sought answers to such questions as: What happens to a man’s body and mind at five thousand miles an hour?
Questions about the medical side effects of flight had been around since 1784, when the first humans left the earth’s surface in a balloon. But in the 1950s the rapid evolution of high-speed flight led to the specialized field of aerospace medicine, which studied the physical effects of rapid acceleration and deceleration and whose doctors contributed such advances as pressurized suits worn in high-altitude flights and restraint systems in jets. Lovelace himself was hard-nosed and well respected in his field, but test pilots harbor a built-in enmity for doctors, who have it in their power to ground a flyer for some previously undetected medical defect. The astronaut candidates would ultimately consider Lovelace and his stoic, lab-coated assistants ghouls.
The ghouls didn’t deny it: “We were trying to drive them crazy,” one doctor said.
For twelve or more hours a day, at all hours of day and night, over the course of one week, Lovelace’s team measured and sampled every spot on the thirty-two astronaut candidates’ bodies. No muscle, bone, or gland went untouched. Shepard had his throat scraped, gave stool and semen samples, had jolts of electricity zapped into his hand, and had a probe nicknamed the “steel eel” shoved into his rectum. He wasn’t alone in feeling like a lab rat beneath the microscope of these all-too-serious doctors with their air of superiority. One frustrated astronaut candidate, who had a difficult time producing big enough stool samples, left an enema bag on a general’s desk in protest. Another candidate called the tests “an embarrassment, a degrading experience . . . sick doctors working on well patients.” Yet another called the doctors “sadists.”
One day Shepard the prankster decided to mess with them. As a bespectacled young doctor slowly inserted the “steel eel” into Shepard’s rectum, Shepard began moaning and slowly rocking his hips back and forth. “Oh, yeah,” he said in a low whisper. “Mmmm, that’s good. More . . . give me more.” Another astronaut candidate who was in the room—John “Mitch” Mitchell, Shepard’s former flying partner from the USS Oriskany—shook with laughter as the stone-faced young doctor turned cherry red.
At the end of that week, the candidates were sent to another Frankensteinian medical facility, the Wright Aeromedical Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio (named for the Wright brothers), for equally bizarre psychological, psychiatric, and physical tests. There Shepard withstood cold water pumped into his ears, stuck his feet in a bucket of ice water for an hour, and sat for two hours in a 135-degree sauna. He was strapped into the seat of a maniacal machine that jackhammered his body, and then sat for many hours in a darkened, soundproof isolation chamber. He had more probes stuck inside him. They took pictures of his naked body from every conceivable angle; he even had to squat over the camera for what was surely the most humiliating photograph of his career. “Nothing is sacred anymore,” one astronaut candidate said. Indeed, the scientists went so far as to wonder if the candidates’ interest in flying jets might be related to feelings of sexual inadequacy, and therefore spent a considerable amount of time reviewing what they could of each candidate’s adolescence.
Shepard at least understood the point of the physical tests: The doctors wanted to make sure they picked the unbreakable ones. “We looked for real men,” a NASA official said at the time. Onto their clipboards, the doctors scribbled notes not only on the results of the specific tests but also about the candidates’ reactions to the test. How did they respond when told to stick their feet in ice water? How did they interact with the testers—angrily or with self-control? Those who seemed to exhibit “emotional stability,” said psychologist Voas, “came out with a few extra points.” In this pursuit of flawless all-around males, candidates lost points for the most minor imperfection; a Navy pilot named Wally Schirra was told to have a lump surgically removed from his throat before he could proceed through the tests. “We wanted perfect physical and emotional and aesthetic specimens,” Voas said.
Still, what really perplexed Shepard were the personality questions, such as the analogy tests
(“light is to dark as pleasure is to . . . ?”) and the annoying true-or-false quizzes. “I often worry about my health—true or false?” or “Sometimes I feel like cursing—true or false?” That day the answer to the latter was clearly true. The psychological tests were excruciating and maddening for him.
Among the 566 personal questions asked of each man were: “What was your true motivation for joining the program? Are you too egocentric to work with a team?” One exercise required him to express his “real feelings” by completing sentences such as “I am sorry that . . .” and “I can never . . .” Finally Shepard was told to submit twenty different answers to the question “Who am I?” Guys like John Glenn—an amateur poet who wrote poems while locked in the isolation chamber—had no trouble. Glenn started scribbling, “I am a man, I am a Marine, I am a flyer, I am a husband, I am an officer, I am a father . . .”
For Shepard, being asked about himself, his emotions, was painful and awkward. “It is always difficult for me to analyze my own feelings or to figure out exactly what is going on in my brain and why,” he said at the time. Had he been forced to answer the “Who am I?” question with brutal frankness, he might have included such responses as “I am an egotist, I am a hard-drinking liberty hound, I am an insubordinate flat-hatter, I am a philanderer . . .”
Shepard believed a man’s actions, his military record, and his reputation should speak for themselves. He didn’t see the relevance of the doctors’ questions about who he was and what he wanted. “Al thought it was a bunch of nonsense,” John Glenn recalled. Fortunately for Shepard, he kept his complaints to himself and showed only good-natured compliance. The doctors, in turn, came to think of Shepard as “motivated.”
In addition to the medical responsibility the doctors felt in administering their tests was a broader sense of the historical responsibility involved—these tests, they reasoned, could ultimately decide who becomes the first man in space. The sense among the doctors was that they were, in effect, choosing the next Lindbergh—or Columbus. “Everyone had in mind that these would probably be famous people,” said Voas. “And we wanted those who’d be good representatives.”
Of thirty-two candidates sent through the strange battery of tests, thirty-one passed. Of those, the names of eighteen finalists were forwarded to a selection committee, which would choose a final six. Four NASA officials and doctors sifted through their files and selected five they considered to be the best of the bunch, but couldn’t decide which of two competing candidates should be the sixth. So they agreed to take them both, for a total of seven.
During the rigorous discussions that led to the selection of those seven, the goal was to choose those with superior flying abilities, but also those with harder-to-measure qualities, strengths of character that could sustain them through the expected media frenzy to come. As the selectors sifted through Shepard’s military dossier, they surely came across a few of his less-than-perfect displays—his near arrest after flat-hatting a Maryland beach and his near court-martial after flat-hatting three hundred sailors. But, in the end, his notoriety as an occasional rule-breaking exhibitionist was judged to be a sign of Shepard’s boldness and independence, a virtue stitched into the complexity of his overall character.
Shepard had to wait six painfully long weeks to learn whether or not he had been chosen. When he finally heard back from NASA on April 1, the caller simply said: “We’d like you to join us. Are you still willing to volunteer?” Alone in his office, Shepard let out a whoop and then called Louise. When he couldn’t reach her, he quit for the day and raced home, amazed that he arrived without mowing down any pedestrians.
That night, he recalled years later, “Louise and I just held each other after I told her—I could see that she was as happy as I was.”
Two nights later Alan and Louise flew to Boston to attend the wedding of his cousin Anne. Alan’s parents and sister met him and Louise at Boston’s Logan Airport. During the hour-long drive north to East Derry, Alan broke the news that he’d been keeping bottled up for days.
He told Bart and Renza that NASA had chosen him to be one of its astronauts. He’d been ordered not to discuss the highly classified selection process, but his name was going to be announced at a press conference the following week, so NASA officials told him to quietly prepare family members for the expected onslaught of media attention.
Renza said she was “delighted,” but Bart looked as though he’d been rapped in the head with a hammer. The colonel quietly scowled and stewed as Alan explained the events of recent weeks. Finally Bart cleared his throat and spoke up. “I’m not sure you’re doing the right thing,” he said. “Are you sure you really want to do this?”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Alan said. “What’s the matter?”
Bart explained that Alan’s “career pattern is developing very, very nicely,” and that after serving another few months of administrative duty in Norfolk, Alan could expect another hefty promotion. After that, the Navy would likely give him command of his own fighter squadron, and at that rate he might someday be given command of his own aircraft carrier. “Someday,” Bart concluded, “you may be an admiral.” More to the point, Bart wanted his son to follow the safe route, the stable, sensible, and predictable course of action.
Alan tried to convince his father that he’d already considered all those things. He knew he’d be derailed from his military career path. Still, this was a chance to fly faster and go farther, to look down on the earth from a satellite’s view, to become a human Sputnik. And that, to him, was far more interesting than wearing an admiral’s stars.
It was late when they got home. The conversation ended and they all went straight to bed. Shepard went to sleep that night feeling as if he was “splitting up the family.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please,” the head of NASA said. “In about sixty seconds we will give you the announcement you have all been waiting for: the names of the seven volunteers who will become the Mercury astronaut team.”
Shepard and the six others stood backstage in a conference room of the Dolley Madison House in Washington, D.C. Hands dug into the pockets of the civilian suits they had been told to wear, they could hear the crowd murmuring and rustling on the other side of the curtains. It was clear they were unaccustomed to “civvies”: two of them wore bow ties, two wore plaid jackets. Just before they were introduced, Shepard told one of his new colleagues, Deke Slayton, he had a splotch of “guck” on his bow tie that looked like “smeared egg.” Slayton would recall thinking Shepard “seemed kind of cold and standoffish,” while another of the bow-tied men, John Glenn, “was trying to be nice to everyone.”
Discreetly the seven men checked each other out, trying not to appear too curious but instantly aware that the man by his side was both a colleague and, in the race that had already begun—the race to be first into space—a competitor.
Each of their names was announced, in alphabetical order:
Malcolm S. Carpenter, a Navy lieutenant who went by his middle name, Scott. Carpenter, a Colorado native, was the handsome one, blond and athletic. His wife, Rene, also blond, was funny and enthusiastic. He sang songs to her while playing guitar. They had four kids, but the relationship would not survive. Of the seven, he had the least amount of experience as a test pilot—and one day that would show.
Leroy G. Cooper Jr., an Air Force captain known as Gordo. Cooper’s slow Oklahoma twang sometimes betrayed him; people assumed the rail-thin pilot was less sharp than he really was. In fact, he was a decorated combat pilot with a degree in aeronautical engineering. He had a subtle wit and hoped to have some “real good fun” as an astronaut. He and his wife, Trudy, had two daughters—and a deeply troubled marriage.
John H. Glenn Jr., a colonel and the lone Marine of the group. Glenn, a freckled plumber’s son from Ohio, was at thirty-seven the oldest and probably the most accomplished overall. He had flown fifty-nine combat missions in World War II and over a hundred in Korea. He and his wife,
Annie, had a son and a daughter. He liked to sing at parties and played the trumpet for his wife. He believed deeply in God—and in himself.
Virgil I. Grissom, an Air Force captain known as Gus. Grissom, at thirty-two, was the youngest; at five foot seven, he was also the shortest. A reporter once called him “a little bear of a man.” He loved to hunt and fish—and fly. He had flown more than a hundred combat missions over Korea, more total combat missions than any of the other seven except Glenn, and was a test pilot instructor at Edwards. He and his wife, Betty, had two sons.
Walter M. Schirra Jr., a Navy lieutenant commander they called Wally. Schirra was the smart-ass of the group. The New Jersey native’s father had been a stunt pilot and his mother sometimes performed as a wing walker, walking out on the biplane’s lower wing above air shows. Like Shepard, he had attended the Naval Academy. Unlike Shepard, he had flown ninety combat missions over Korea. With his wife, Josephine—the daughter of a top Navy admiral—he had a son and daughter.
Alan B. Shepard Jr., who had more experience as a test pilot than the others but was alone in having zero combat experience. Although NASA gave extra consideration to candidates with combat duty, Shepard’s test piloting more than made up for his lack of war making. Still, that glaring gap in his resume would nag at him. He wore a dark suit, white shirt, and narrow tie, slightly loosened. He, along with Slayton and Schirra, fired up a cigarette as soon as the seven were allowed to cross the creaky wood floor and sit at two long tables to await questions.
Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman Page 21