“Okay. It is a lot smoother now,” he grunted. “A lot smoother.”
“Roger,” Slayton replied.
The do-or-die moment came seconds later as Shepard prepared for his capsule to separate from the spent booster rocket. Once the liquid oxygen fueling the Redstone rockets had been expended, it would trigger the ignition of small explosives that would sever the connection between the rocket and the capsule. But if the capsule failed to separate from the rocket, Shepard would have to quickly strap on his parachute, pop open the capsule’s hatch, and jump away from the doomed Redstone and capsule—an escape plan with a ludicrously slim chance of success, since Shepard was now traveling at Mach 2. In fact, on future flights, the astronauts wouldn’t even bother with the silly parachute.
Shepard’s heart rate peaked at 132 beats per minute just before the capsule separation, but then immediately ebbed once the three-inch green “cap sep” indicator showed that the capsule was indeed flying free and clear. “Cap sep is green,” Shepard reported.
Shorty Powers, sitting in Mission Control, began describing each moment of the launch to reporters via an audio hookup. He reported that Shepard was acting like “a real test pilot” and that his flight was proceeding “A-okay.” He’d use “A-okay” ten times in the subsequent minutes, and it would appear in countless newspaper headlines the next day on its way to entering the country’s lexicon. The term—used decades earlier by military radio operators—would be attributed to Shepard, who never once uttered “A-okay.”
The closest Shepard came to such a declaration was when speaking to himself. “Okay, buster,” he said when the time came for him to manually control the rotation and angle of the free-flying capsule. This was another crucial moment, psychologically and politically. NASA wanted to highlight the primary difference between his suborbital flight and Gagarin’s longer global loop, which was that Shepard would actually fly his capsule while Gagarin had been a mere passenger. It was a distinction that the astronauts had fought hard for, and one that Shepard was intensely proud of. As he switched his capsule from automatic to manual control, a mere three minutes into his flight, he felt confident about how smoothly things were proceeding.
Then, using a hand controller identical to the one in the MASTIF trainer, Shepard turned his capsule backward, so the blunt end was flying first. Then he tilted the can up and down, left to right, and side to side. While Gagarin had sat monkeylike in a flight entirely controlled and programmed on the ground, Shepard was now actually piloting his capsule, all the while traveling 5,100 miles an hour—roughly a mile for every beat of his heart.
Until that moment, the fastest American had traveled roughly 1,800 miles an hour, just shy of Mach 3. Shepard was now traveling nearly eight times the speed of sound.
Four minutes into the flight, Shepard and his capsule reached weightlessness, and he felt his body float up from the couch and against his shoulder harnesses. Bits of dust began floating past his face, followed by a single steel washer left behind by workers in the bowels of the capsule. He reached for the washer, but it tumbled slowly out of reach.
At the apex of his arc, Shepard tried to look through the periscope at the world below. His heart sank at the gray blob in the screen. During the lengthy delays back on the launch pad, to block out the intense morning sunlight he had flicked a switch that covered the periscope’s lens with a gray filter. He had forgotten to remove the filter before launch. But now, when he tried to reach over and flick off the filter, his wrist banged against the abort handle, and he decided it was best to leave the filter in place.
“What a beautiful view,” he declared, trying to make the best of it.
He described being able to identify Lake Okeechobee and the shoals off Bimini and some cloud cover over the Bahamas. Later, he would tell NASA officials how the view was “remarkable” and “awe-inspiring,” and in an article for Life he’d describe the “brilliantly clear” colors around Bimini. He’d later confess to friends that the filter “obliterated most of the colors.”
As he reached the zenith of his trajectory, 116 miles above the earth, the periscope retracted and Shepard strained to look for stars and planets through two small, awkwardly placed portholes, one to the upper left and one to the lower right. It always bothered him that there was no “forward-looking window.” He often complained to the engineers who’d built the capsule that even Lindbergh had the benefit of seeing where he was flying. He wanted desperately to match Gagarin’s claim to have witnessed the stars, but he could find none, no matter which way he twisted and turned the capsule. Suddenly, he realized that his search for the stars had put him a few seconds behind in his tight schedule, in which every second was meticulously assigned a task. With only a few minutes of the flight to actually be spent in outer space, NASA had overloaded Shepard with dozens of small tasks. Falling slightly behind in that schedule was the only time he didn’t feel “on top of things.”
Still, all the training in simulators had prepared Shepard to play the 127 buttons and switches of the control panel as if he were a “sightless organist.” And so, to catch up on the lost seconds, he began “running around the cockpit with my hands”— turning the capsule around, firing the retro-rockets that would slow down the capsule, retracting the periscope. All this was preparation for reentering the atmosphere, the dangerous and physically demanding portion of the ride that he knew was “not one most people would want to try in an amusement park.” During this catch-up period, Shepard reported steadily back to Slayton, “Three retros fired . . . periscope is retracting . . . going into reentry attitude.”
Shepard then had to align the capsule at the precise angle so that the ablative material on the bottom of the capsule could absorb the intense heat to come. If he was off by just a degree or two, the capsule could be thrown dangerously far off course. As he plunged back into the thicker air close to earth, he was shoved into his couch with a force of 11 Gs—the equivalent of eighteen hundred pounds. Though he tried to keep up a steady stream of talk, Shepard could only grunt as the Gs stomped on his chest.
“Okay . . . okay . . . okay . . . okay,” he reported in clenched-mouth growls.
As he rapidly descended from eighty thousand feet to forty thousand, the friction of the capsule’s blunt end rubbing against the atmosphere caused the temperature just a foot behind Shepard’s back to soar above 1,200 degrees. But inside the can, the temperature peaked at just 102, and inside Shepard’s pressurized suit, the temperature hovered at about 82. “At worst it was like being in a closed car on a warm summer day,” he said later.
Shepard fretted a few moments waiting for the parachutes to release, and was relieved to see the preliminary drogue chute pop out at twenty-one thousand feet, followed seconds later by the sixty-three-foot orange and white main chute, which caught air and blossomed, snapping his capsule with a sharp but “reassuring kick in the butt.” Shepard thought the billowing parachute was “the most beautiful sight of the mission.”
“Main chute is coming unreefed and it looks good,” Shepard practically yelled.
The parachute slowed the capsule to a descent speed of about thirty feet per second, or twenty miles an hour. Shepard watched his altimeter and prepared for the abrupt slam into the Atlantic, which he would later describe as feeling no worse than the shove in the back he used to get from a catapult launch off an aircraft carrier.
Within seconds of splashing down into the water—302 miles east of the Cape, and about 100 miles north of the Bahamas—Wayne Koons, pilot of the rescue helicopter, was hovering overhead and asking Shepard by radio if he was ready to come out. Shepard was just removing his helmet and the many straps and harnesses, and thought Koons “seemed in a hurry to get me out.” He told Koons he wasn’t ready. Water lapped against the portholes, and Shepard asked Koons—who’d already snagged the top of the capsule with a hook and cable—to lift the capsule above the waterline. “Okay, you’ve got two minutes to come out,” Koons radioed, apparently eager to get Shepard
out of the water and safely into his helicopter.
Finally Shepard popped open the hatch and leaned out to grab the horse’s collar, a padded harness that Koons had lowered by cable. NASA officials were nervous about this small piece of the mission. The previous day a Navy balloonist had set a new altitude record by flying 113,000 feet above the Gulf of Mexico in a balloon. When he and his crew landed their balloon in the Gulf, a Navy helicopter lowered a horse collar to pull the crew from the balloon’s gondola. One of the balloonists, who was wearing a pressure suit similar to Shepard’s, slipped out of the horse collar, fell into the water, and drowned.
Shepard had been given a report on the tragedy earlier that morning. He knew he had to be careful. He pulled the horse collar into the open hatch of his capsule, looped it over his head and under his arm, then gave a thumbs-up. As the winch pulled the cable taut, he was lifted up and away. But Shepard’s weight caused the helicopter to drop slightly, and his splayed legs splashed into the water. Finally he was pulled clear. He reached the helicopter’s open door, climbed inside, and declared it “a beautiful day.”
As they flew toward the aircraft carrier USS Lake Champlain, the deck looked like a blanket of white and appeared to be moving. As they neared the ship Shepard realized the deck was covered with sailors, all cheering for him. Until that moment, he’d been focused totally on the specifics of the job, the technical tasks at hand. The crowd of ecstatic sailors below showed him, for the first time, how people perceived his mission. That moment, full circle from his early Navy days, felt “like coming home.” He swallowed hard and blinked away the moisture in his eyes. Later, he called it “the most emotional carrier landing I ever made.”
The helicopter copilot, George Cox, lowered the capsule onto a stack of mattresses, disconnected it, then landed on deck. Shepard debarked from the helicopter, waved at the cheering sailors, and yelled, “Boy, what a ride!” Captain Ralph Weymouth, the ship’s skipper—whose fears the previous night had been that they’d have to “dish him out of the capsule with a spoon”— greeted Shepard aboard. Shepard shook Weymouth’s hand and introduced himself.
“Hi, I’m Al Shepard.”
Back at Mission Control, months of tensions erupted into cheers—and a few tears. Men hugged and slapped each other on the back, then fired up celebratory cigars. “Myself, I damn near cried,” said Walt Williams, the operations director.
Guenter Wendt, who oversaw launch pad operations, recalled that he and his crew erupted in jubilation once they received word of Shepard’s safe landing: “I simply cannot put into words the excitement and euphoria that I felt.”
On Florida’s coastal beaches, the crowds cheered and prayed and drank. John Glenn conducted a brief press conference and told reporters that they should just leave the aircraft carriers out there and set up another rocket for him.
New Hampshire’s governor, Wesley Powell, visited East Derry to head up a spontaneous parade through Shepard’s hometown, declaring it “the greatest day in the history of the state.” Schools closed as children and their families poured into the streets. Army and Air Force planes flew low overhead, dropping pounds of confetti as Bart, Renza, and Polly rode in the rear of a convertible, waving at the crowds. Ever optimistic, Renza told reporters, “I believe the flight will bring all the world closer together.”
And at the Shepard house in Virginia Beach, Louise had hung on each word of the TV and radio reports, feeling confident as they “never varied in their rightness.” As her husband reached his apex, the point of weightlessness, she felt “suddenly staggered to think where I was and where he was.” Only when she got a call from NASA, however, telling her that he was safely aboard the aircraft carrier did she relax. And she realized: “I went with him all the way.” Then she opened the front door and, looking beautiful and poised in a chocolate brown linen dress and pink cardigan, faced the reporters and their questions. In the sky overhead, a Navy jet spelled S in smoke.
NASA doctors had wanted to monitor and record every second of the flight’s aftermath—the way Shepard looked, smelled, walked, and talked. But Shepard immediately warned them, “I don’t think you’re going to have to do too much.”
The sailors and crew had been told not to talk to Shepard, let alone cheer. NASA had wanted Shepard to initiate any conversations. The only people who could address him were the doctors, who hovered around him, asking again and again how he felt. They were afraid of some strange delayed reaction, as if he might turn green, float, or explode.
When Shepard reached Captain Weymouth’s quarters, after guzzling a glass of orange juice, he was handed a tape recorder and told to record his thoughts. He clicked record and then introduced himself. “My name is José Jiménez. . . .”
For the next half hour Shepard rambled breathlessly about each detail of the flight, at one point praising his overall performance: “I quite frankly did a whole lot better than I thought I was going to be able to do. . . . I felt no apprehension at any time.” Psychiatrists later reported that Shepard was “calm and self-possessed,” but they also officiously noted the obvious: that Shepard appeared to be exhibiting signs of “excitement and exhilaration.” He was absolutely drunk with self-satisfaction.
Then Shepard’s whirling monologue was interrupted by a phone call. A sailor handed him a big black phone, and Shepard heard the voice of his old flying buddy Taz Shepard, the drawling Alabaman with whom he’d trained back at Corpus Christi. Taz had been selected by President Kennedy to serve as his naval aide.
“Alan, the president wants to speak to you,” Taz said.
“By golly, old boy, you’ve picked up a New England accent,” Alan said.
Taz laughed and told Alan to hold for the president of the United States.
“Hello, Commander,” Kennedy said.
“Yes, sir.”
“I want to congratulate you very much.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. President.”
“We watched you on TV, of course,” said Kennedy. “And we are awfully pleased and proud of what you did.”
“Well, thank you, sir. And as you know by now, everything worked out just perfectly.”
Kennedy then said he was looking forward to meeting Alan in three days.
Years later Taz would describe how Kennedy had been “walking on thin ice” in the space between Gagarin’s flight and Alan’s. During those twenty-three tense days, he would fill his black alligator bag with news clippings and NASA reports to read at night. Kennedy was desperate for success and had been relying heavily on Alan’s flight. When an aide had given Kennedy the news that Alan was safely aboard the helicopter, the president broke into a grin and said softly, “It’s a success.”
“If it had been a failure, no telling what would have happened,” Taz recalled.
One of Kennedy’s favorite sayings was “Happiness is full use of your powers in pursuit of excellence.” In Alan and the other astronauts Kennedy had found exactly the type of men he needed as allies in his pursuit of new frontiers. “President Kennedy had a great admiration for heroes,” recalled Taz Shepard, himself a winner of the Navy Cross (for taking command of his ship’s guns after the ship’s captain and two hundred others were killed at Guadalcanal). “Anybody who excelled at what they did.”
That afternoon, an enthusiastic Kennedy told the press that Shepard’s day was one for the history books: “All America rejoices in this successful flight of astronaut Shepard. This is an historic milestone in our own exploration into space.”
Kennedy might have been the most grateful beneficiary of Shepard’s success, but he was hardly alone in believing that Shepard had instantly earned a place beside Wilbur Wright and Charles Lindbergh in the history books. In fact, not since Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight thirty-four years earlier would the American public react so ecstatically to a feat of aviation. Spontaneous parades, parties, and celebrations erupted across the land.
Walter Cronkite, who would cover many subsequent launches, recalled decades later th
at none of the launches he witnessed would compare to that first space flight. He recalled that some of his crew members—who’d set up their equipment in the rear of a station wagon parked in mosquito- and snake-filled palmetto scrub a mile from the launch pad—broke down into tears. “There wasn’t a cynical enough press man in the gallery to not have a sense of great relief and a certain thrill that we were in space,” he said.
For the next few weeks the newspapers and magazines would be stuffed with stories and photographs and commentaries, boasting how “Shep did it!” Headlines in Henry Luce’s Life magazine trumpeted Shepard’s “Thrust into Space” and “Flawless Flight.” National Geographic would dedicate practically an entire issue to the flight.
And in subsequent years Shepard’s flight would continue to resonate as an event that legitimized NASA and propelled the agency throughout the 1960s. “Some countries build cathedrals,” said John Pike, director of the space policy project at the Federation of American Scientists. “We have a space program.”
With Shepard’s help, NASA was now set to grow into the dual-role behemoth it would soon become—a cold war propaganda machine and an agency of brilliant scientists and fearless explorers. NASA would reflect to the world an image of America as a nation of technologically advanced pioneers and risk takers.
“The presumption of the American republic is that we’re pioneers, that we explore frontiers, that we use technology in that pursuit, that we are a country with a special sense of our place in history. And, in various guises, I think that’s mainly what NASA’s been about. It’s mainly about making us feel good about being Americans,” Pike said.
Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman Page 32