Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman

by Neal Thompson

  Forever after, Glenn would refuse to disclose which astronaut was the subject of that killed story or which newspaper had gotten the photos. But Al Blackburn, Shepard’s academy classmate and a test pilot colleague of both Shepard and Glenn’s, says that Glenn once told him the culprit was Shepard.

  Even though he was the one who had gone to Glenn’s cottage asking for help, Shepard became furious at what he later called Glenn’s “moralizing.” He told Glenn that not only were their personal lives not an issue, they were none of Glenn’s business. “Why is this even coming up?” he told Glenn. “Doesn’t everyone have the right to do what they want to do?”

  Four of the astronauts agreed with Shepard. Only Carpenter sided with Glenn. Cooper said it was a turning point in the group’s relationship, and Carpenter felt the same. Until that night, he had thought of them all as “the Seven Musketeers.” “The camaraderie was incredible,” he said years later. But that séance—and what came after it—would cleave the group into factions, and the wounds would take many years to heal.

  Glenn realized immediately that something had changed. “My views were in the minority, but I didn’t care,” he said. “I had made my point.” His one concern, however, was that his firm stance that night would affect his carefully plotted course toward the first space flight.

  Indeed, shortly after the Konakai séance, the astronauts were called to a meeting with Robert Gilruth, head of NASA’s Space Task Group. Gilruth asked them each to write up a memo including the name of the astronaut—besides themselves—they’d like to see get the first ride. Glenn couldn’t believe that nearly two years of training were being reduced to what he later called “a popularity contest.” He wrote Scott Carpenter’s name atop his memo but had a pretty good idea who the others would pick.

  Shepard, on the other hand, was becoming more and more convinced that he was edging ahead, especially after surviving the close call in Tijuana.

  He may have been (in a description once used by one of his peers) an “asshole.” He may have been a cheating husband, a self-centered speed freak, an arrogant elitist. But Shepard never concerned himself with what other people thought about him. For him, it was always what he believed that mattered most, and he believed he was the best man for the job.

  Glenn, however, was not ready to give up the game without a fight.

  13

  “We had ’em by the short hairs, and we gave it away”

  On January 19, 1961—the eve of John F. Kennedy’s inaugu-ration—Bob Gilruth phoned the astronauts’ office at Langley. The seven had been working at Langley in recent weeks, a brief departure from all the travel and training, the long days and nights on the road or at the Cape. Gilruth asked the seven men to stay a little late that afternoon. “I have something important to tell you,” he said.

  At 5:15 P.M. the seven sat quietly in their cramped office, with its seven metal desks and the walls busy with tacked-up flight plans and technical diagrams. All of them knew what was coming, and they were uncharacteristically silent. Wisecracks eluded even Wally this night. Finally Gus Grissom broke the tension.

  “If we wait any longer, I may have to make a speech,” he said.

  Gilruth entered the room and wasted no time. As soon as the door was shut, he dropped the news, calling it “the most difficult decision I’ve ever had to make.”

  “Alan Shepard will make the first suborbital flight,” he said.

  Gilruth then explained that Grissom would make the second flight, and Glenn would serve as backup pilot to both flights.

  Shepard kept his eyes on the ground, fighting back a grin aching to break free. In a competition he had once likened to “seven guys trying to fly the same airplane,” he had won. After all those nasty spins in gut-sloshing NASA contraptions, the goal he had pursued ravenously for two uninterrupted years was his. But he knew it was “not a moment to crow,” so he kept his head down.

  Gilruth asked if there were any questions but was met with silence.

  “Thank you very much, and good luck,” Gilruth said, and left the room.

  Finally, after a few leaden moments, Glenn stepped forward and offered his hand to Shepard, the first of the six to do so. The others came up and congratulated him—some, Shepard noticed, with less enthusiasm than others. And then they left, one by one, as quietly as they had entered. No one offered to buy rounds of drinks to celebrate, and in just a few moments Shepard was left standing in the office, alone.

  He sped home to tell Louise, who came bounding down the stairs when she heard him burst through the front door. As soon as she saw his grin-creased face, she knew. “You got it!” She threw her arms around him. “You got the first ride!”

  “Lady, you can’t tell anyone, but you have your arms around the man who’ll be first in space,” he told her. Louise pulled back from him and looked around the room. “Who let a Russian in here?” she joked, somewhat presciently.

  Shepard wasn’t allowed to tell anyone else. Officially, NASA planned to announce in another month that Shepard, Glenn, and Grissom were still vying for the first flight. That meant Glenn and Grissom would have to pretend in public that they still had a chance—a ruse that all the astronauts thought was ridiculous and annoying.

  While a couple of the other six were hurt and angered by Gilruth’s choice—Wally, for one, felt “really deflated . . . a very traumatic feeling,” like he’d been demoted to “the second team”— the decision didn’t surprise Scott Carpenter.

  “For Al, it was the competition,” he said. “He felt for his comrades, but he also had a need to be better than anyone else. . . . Everything he did was evidence of that. He was single-minded in his pursuit of the first flight.” Glenn, on the other hand, seemed during the previous two years to be working equally hard on the public relations side of the pursuit. “John figured he had made all the right moves,” Slayton said. “He just figured wrong.”

  Deke Slayton was “shocked, hurt, and downright humiliated” that he hadn’t even been selected among the top three. But, back in December, it had been Shepard’s name that he had scribbled on the “peer vote” memo Gilruth had requested. Slayton felt that Shepard not only had the piloting skills but was the smartest and most articulate of them all. And so when Gilruth picked Shepard, Slayton said, “it was all right with me.”

  Still, something about the decision nagged at him. It wasn’t until the next day, Kennedy’s inauguration, that “reality walloped me right between the eyes.” “Of course! Politics!” Slayton thought. “No way was it an accident that both Shepard and John Kennedy were Navy.”

  Snow began falling after midnight on Friday, January 20, and the next morning was bitterly cold. Kennedy, his breath emerging in puffs of steam, called his inauguration “a celebration of freedom.” Alan, Louise, and some of the other astronauts drove up from Langley to join the crowds. Kennedy said a torch had been passed to a new generation—“born of this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage.” He famously asked his people to ask themselves how they could help carry their country toward the freedom of man. And in an auspicious declaration for the space program, he also said, “Together, let us explore the stars.”

  Later that night Bill Dana performed at Kennedy’s inaugural ball, a fête sponsored by Frank Sinatra at the National Guard Armory. With the electricity downed by the continuing snow-storm, generators powered the auditorium’s lights. José entered, helmeted and clad in his silvery space suit, escorted by Marine officers. With Milton Berle as his straight man, José complained about his uncomfortable $18,000 space suit, but at least, he conceded, “it has two pairs of pants.” Then he told a chuckling Kennedy that the best part about space travel is the blastoff.

  “I always take a blast before I take off. . . . Otherwise I wouldn’t get in that thing.”

  Earlier that afternoon, far from the inaugural celebrations, John Glenn sat down and wrote an urgent letter to his superiors, a letter designed to snatch the f
irst space flight from Alan Shepard’s grasp.

  Despite their similar goals, Shepard and Glenn had very different methods.

  Glenn loved the spotlight, and it loved him. With his crinkly smile, light blue eyes, and freckled face, he was truly the all-American lad. Despite his aw-shucks demeanor, he worked hard to perfect his boy-next-door image. “Glenn loved an audience on whom he could turn his charm,” one top NASA official said. Another NASA official said that Glenn seemed less interested in becoming technically proficient and more interested in “cozying up to top management and thus improving his chances.”

  It was exactly that image consciousness that led some NASA officials to consider Shepard the better choice for the first flight, not Glenn. “We wanted to put our best foot forward,” Walt Williams, director of operations for Project Mercury, said in an unpublished memoir. Williams considered Shepard “the most capable” and said so during discussions about who should fly first.

  But in choosing Shepard, NASA knew it was taking a chance on a mercurial personality. One of the seven anonymously told Life magazine, in an article published soon after Shepard’s selection: “You might think you’d get to know someone well after working so closely with him for two years. Well, it’s not that way with Shepard. He’s always holding something back.” Shepard admitted it in an interview with the same Life reporter: “I have never been my own favorite subject, and I don’t think I’ve found anything new about myself since I’ve been in this program.”

  Still, Shepard had shown with his intense focus during sessions in the MASTIF and the centrifuge, with his attention to detail and his curiosity about capsule designs and flight plans, that—despite a sometimes testy personality and a few self-admitted skeletons in his closet and “secrets”—he was the best man to become the first American in space. Shepard wanted to know about all the egghead stuff that some of the other astronauts left in the engineers’ hands. He befriended the engineers and learned to speak their language. He was wary but respectful with his superiors, and if he ever disagreed with their decisions on the progress and purpose of the training schematic, he never pouted or whined. Instead he spoke bluntly and openly with his superiors and, in turn, impressed them not with pandering but with a genuine curiosity about space flight and a hunger for information about every detail of the mission he had signed up for.

  Shepard was chosen not because he was the most popular, the most likable, or the best person among the seven. He was, in short, the best flyer.

  “He was an egotist,” said Chris Kraft, who would be the flight director for Shepard’s launch, and considered Shepard “a typical New Englander . . . hard, cold.” “But he was all business when it came to flying.”

  Shepard and Kraft began working closely together a few weeks later, in mid-February, beginning with a series of simulated launch exercises at the Cape. The plan for Shepard’s upcoming flight was to launch his capsule atop one of von Braun’s Redstone rockets. The Redstone lacked sufficient power to boost the capsule into orbit; an orbital flight would have to travel three times as fast. Still, Shepard’s Redstone carried enough thrust to blast him up and through the far side of the earth’s atmosphere. Without the necessary speed to reach orbit, though, Shepard’s capsule, after reaching speeds of five thousand miles an hour and an altitude of a hundred miles, would arc back down to earth and through the atmosphere for a landing at sea, three hundred miles east of the Florida coast.

  That parabolic flight was expected to last just fifteen minutes, and NASA engineers had crammed each of those minutes with many tests and tasks for Shepard to perform. He’d be required to look through his periscope at the coastline below, search for stars above, constantly check the capsule’s systems to ensure they were working properly, then briefly take control of the capsule by grabbing the hand control stick and testing the ability of an astronaut to actually fly a spacecraft. To prepare for the densely packed mission, Shepard began to rehearse each second of the flight inside a NASA simulator.

  As in a sophisticated arcade game, Shepard would sit in a mockup of a capsule cockpit, facing the same dashboard of buttons, switches, and levers that would be in his own capsule, while he and the NASA engineers practiced launch and landing procedures over and over. Each man rehearsed his role, with Kraft presiding like the choreographer. Shepard would spend so much time in that simulator he’d learn to find and flip switches with his eyes closed.

  But during his first simulator session Shepard goofed, and he and Chris Kraft had a showdown. During the computerized launch simulation, the computer program surprised Shepard, as well as the engineers in Mission Control, with a simulated system failure, and Shepard failed to take the obvious and proper action (which was to abort). Afterward, Kraft and his Mission Control team invited Shepard to sit in on their postexercise critique session, which they called their “dog-eat-dog sessions.” Kraft was insulted when Shepard shrugged off his mistake, made a joke about it, and then asked for another simulator session.

  “Let’s go again,” Shepard said.

  “No,” Kraft replied. “It’s coffee time.”

  Kraft took Shepard aside and explained that he and his team took their critique sessions seriously, and suggested that Shepard do the same. He knew Shepard had “quick reflexes and a quicker brain,” but he wanted him to admit to his mistake.

  “It’s how we learn,” Kraft said. “I don’t want it to happen when you’re up there.”

  Shepard stared at Kraft, and for a few long, silent moments the two men barely moved. Kraft said it seemed as if Shepard was making up his mind about what to do next. And then, slowly, the look on Shepard’s face changed, “from one of defensiveness to understanding.” He admitted that they used to conduct similar postflight critiques in the ready room of his aircraft carriers, and he also admitted—reluctantly, Kraft felt—that it was probably a good idea.

  Kraft would learn that Shepard did not often admit to his faults. But after their face-off, the two men went right back to work and in time became close friends. Kraft felt that he had passed some type of test, had proven himself to Shepard and earned his respect.

  On February 21, 1961, a month after Shepard had been selected, NASA finally issued a press release announcing that the seven had been narrowed to three. It announced that Shepard, Glenn, and Grissom would begin training for the first manned flight, but that the actual pilot of the first flight “will be named just before the flight.” The intent of such obfuscation was to take the pressure off Shepard so that he wouldn’t be hounded by the press during his final months of training. But for Glenn, the tactic presented an opening.

  Because Shepard’s selection wasn’t yet public, Glenn figured there was still time to change things. The afternoon of Kennedy’s inauguration a month earlier, Glenn had written a letter to Gilruth, criticizing his use of a “peer vote” in deciding who should become the first astronaut, and explaining why he might have lost that vote. In Glenn’s mind, he had been punished by his peers for his speech in San Diego back in December about keeping their pants zipped. “I might have been penalized for what I thought was the good of the program,” Glenn said in his strongly worded letter. “I didn’t think being an astronaut was a popularity contest,” he said decades later in his memoir. “I would turn out to be wrong about that.”

  Glenn wasn’t alone in trying to change Gilruth’s mind. One or two of the others warned Gilruth of Shepard’s “wild antics” and complained that Shepard was “too lighthearted for the job” and didn’t have the “perfect image.” On the other hand, maybe NASA knew exactly what it was doing. Maybe Shepard was a better fit for NASA’s sought-after image. Maybe NASA intentionally overlooked the Boy Scout in favor of the liberty hound.

  A few weeks later Gilruth finally intervened. “I want this backbiting stopped right now. Alan Shepard is my choice. That’s it.”

  Glenn grudgingly abandoned his campaign and began training alongside Shepard. But there were days he was withdrawn, even morose. Although he once repr
imanded the press for overemphasizing who would be the first American in space— “as though we are out trying to knife each other every night to see who was going to be first”—Glenn had harbored an intense desire for the slot. And now he wouldn’t even be second; Grissom had been chosen to fly after Shepard.

  “Those were rough days for me,” Glenn said a year later. A lingering remorse would addle Glenn for another year, until he got a flight of his own—one that would end up being well worth the wait.

  Until that day came, Glenn had to serve as Shepard’s backup. The two men began spending long days together, training in the simulators, going over flight plans, and continuing to pretend that they were still competing for the first ride. At a press conference following NASA’s announcement that Glenn, Shepard, and Grissom were in the running for the first flight, the normally personable and chatty Glenn was a bit chilly when asked to re-create his wife’s reaction when he told her that he had made the cut to the final three. “I would rather not get into places and times, and such things as that,” he said.

  Shepard, meanwhile, seemed to be having fun with the situation. “If I may be hypothetical: assume that I had the opportunity of going first . . . ,” he began, in response to one reporter’s question. And when asked how far in advance he’d like to be notified that he had been chosen to fly first, Shepard said, “At least before sunrise on launch day.”

  At the time he had reason to feel relaxed and confident. NASA was making tentative plans to put Shepard into space the following month, sometime in March. With Glenn’s challenge behind, and with all glitches apparently fixed on the rocket, it seemed Shepard was destined to become the first human to leave the earth’s atmosphere—the Lindbergh of space.

  But then a chimp, a German, and a Russian got in the way.