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

by Neal Thompson

  Even so, with so many astronauts—a total of thirty-five by mid-1965—flying and racing across the skies, it was probably inevitable that someone would die. The first was Ted Freeman, who had been selected in 1963 and was training for an early Apollo flight. Freeman’s T-38 plowed into a gaggle of snow geese at five thousand feet, which smashed his windshield; shards of Plexiglas were sucked into the engines, which both flamed out. Freeman tried to wrestle the crippled jet back to Ellington. When he realized it was no good, he ejected, but he was too close to the ground. He died six miles from his home. After that, Shepard imposed the “snow goose rule”—no flying during migration season.

  A few months later the two-man crew assigned to the Gemini 9 flight—Elliot See and Charlie Bassett—attempted to land one stormy night in St. Louis, where they were scheduled for a few weeks of training in a simulator capsule. See, who was flying the T-38, approached the runway too low and too fast. He tried to pull up and away to attempt another approach but clipped the top of the McDonnell Aircraft plant—the same building where their Gemini 9 capsule was being assembled. More funerals would follow.

  On the heels of Grissom’s one-day launch with John Young in March 1965, Gemini flights began soaring every month or two. From the spring of 1965 to the fall of 1966, ten flights lifted off— sixteen more men flew higher, longer, and faster than Shepard. Four of them flew twice, and five walked in space. Each flight was designed as another technical step toward the moon, and each flight put more and more distance—finally—between the United States and the Soviets.

  In December 1965 Gemini 6 and 7, launched eleven days apart, managed to adjust their speed and location and rendezvous with one another. The two capsules flew side by side, a foot apart, traveling at many times the speed of sound. Gemini 7 then shattered all previous endurance records by staying aloft for two weeks. On Gemini 9 Eugene Cernan performed a two-hour space walk. Six months later Buzz Aldrin walked in space for five hours outside his Gemini 12 capsule, the last of the Gemini missions.

  The ten flights of Project Gemini provided valuable lessons for the next phase, Project Apollo. Astronauts learned how to rendezvous two fast-traveling spacecraft, to “walk” in space, and to eat, sleep, and live inside a spacecraft for days at a time. For Shepard, all the success was bittersweet. In addition to seven of the Next Nine making a Gemini flight, three of the Mercury Seven flew, too—Cooper, Grissom, and Schirra. Meanwhile, Shepard and Slayton, still sidelined with their illnesses, were considered halfastros, and Glenn, after a lengthy recovery from his head injury and Ménière’s-like symptoms, had taken a job with Royal Crown Cola and would soon begin working for Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Carpenter, after recovering from his broken arm in 1964, had returned briefly to NASA but quickly realized he’d not get another flight with Chris Kraft (who was still angry about his sloppy Mercury flight) around. So he went the opposite direction, venturing under the ocean with a Navy deep-sea program, a temporary assignment that would be followed in 1967 by his retirement from NASA.

  Shepard, meanwhile, was constantly trying to prove to NASA’s doctors that he was getting better, and his condition did seem to be improving slightly in response to the vitamin-and-drug cocktails the doctors had prescribed. In late summer of 1965 Slayton had even suggested that Shepard begin training to command the first Apollo flight, which was scheduled to lift off in 1967. But when doctors conducted a more thorough examination, they found that while Shepard’s symptoms were under control, the Ménière’s disease itself had not subsided. They decided not to risk putting an imperfect astronaut into space and kept Shepard out of the flight rotation.

  Slayton chose Grissom instead to command the Apollo 1 flight, and Shepard sulked back into his conflicted role as administrator—an astronaut who wasn’t really an astronaut. He was now forty-one and felt as though he had just lost his last chance to fly.

  By late 1966 a massive new NASA conglomerate was churning in place of the boutiquelike operation that had helped launch Freedom7. Project Gemini had been a raging success, and NASA was confident that it was on a solid path to Kennedy’s moon-by-1970 goal. Congressional funding continued to flow. NASA’s payroll now supported an astounding four hundred thousand people, and many more private contractors and subcontractors.

  Gone were the quaint early days of Shorty Powers and his deep voice, that made him sound as if he were nine feet tall. Shorty was among many casualties of NASA’s mid-’60s explosion. The cocky, skinny, five-foot-six colonel, legendary for his bourbon-drinking abilities, reached for the bottle more and more often.

  Shorty had been leaking internal Gemini flight plans to Jay Barbree, a reporter with NBC, who’d stop by Shorty’s office and put a fifth of Jim Beam on the table as “payment.” When the higher-ups found out, they insisted Shorty release the information to all reporters. When Shorty refused, they asked him to resign. And when he refused to quit, they reassigned him to a small Washington office that ran school fairs.

  “In an organization as big as this one, there are people who feel perhaps they’ve been slighted,” Shorty said later. He’d felt trapped in a “three-cornered box” trying to serve the disparate interests of the NASA brass, the astronauts, and the press. After three divorces and many bottles of bourbon, Shorty would one day be found dead in an Arizona cabin. Cause of death: internal bleeding due to chronic alcoholism.

  Shorty wasn’t the only one burned by the intensity of the new NASA. Schirra, who was mulling his retirement, was no longer the happy prankster he’d been with his Mercury Seven colleagues. He had become a bitchy prima donna. “I have been completely devoured by this business,” Schirra confessed at the time. The reason: NASA had become, as he later put it, “a monster.” And the turbulent mid-’60s had become a surreal time to be an astronaut.

  The world outside—the real world that existed beyond NASA’s insular, well-funded, chummy fraternity—seemed to be tearing away at itself, each bit of good news followed by bad. Lyndon Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act, but then Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, allowing Johnson to send more soldiers to Vietnam, which incited violent antiwar protests on college campuses. Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel peace prize, but then his followers were attacked by state troopers during a “walk of freedom” into Selma, which inflamed racial tensions that would soon lead to terrible race riots in Los Angeles, Detroit, and Newark. The voices of some detractors grew louder, questioning the nation’s priorities and the billions being spent on space: What’s more important, peace or science fiction?

  A Gallup poll at the time found that two-thirds of Americans felt that funding for space exploration should be decreased; when asked who was ahead in the space race, the United States or the Soviet Union, 29 percent had no opinion on the matter. Pablo Picasso summed up the mood among space critics at the time: “It means nothing to me.” But pursuing the moon still meant a lot to Johnson, who continued to promote and protect NASA’s mission.

  Among the astronauts, meanwhile, broad public support was hardly necessary. Inside the bubble of the astronaut world, contractors continued to throw wild parties and to offer prostitutes. At the opening of Houston’s new indoor stadium, the Astrodome, the astronauts were given ten-gallon hats at the giddy opening-night celebration. Airline executives continued to donate penthouse suites and stewardesses, while CEOs offered Acapulco haciendas for astronauts and their girlfriends. But the astronauts would soon learn that everything had grown too big too fast and that workmanship had suffered.

  The astro-party was about to crash.

  A strange theme of Shepard’s career was about to be confirmed: Flights he sought ended up being flights that he was lucky to have missed. It had happened with Cooper’s jinxed Mercury flight, which Shepard had fought so hard to make his own, and it was about to happen with the Apollo 1 flight that Slayton had briefly assigned to Shepard.

  When Shepard’s unrelenting medical condition sidelined him—apparently once and for all—Slayton had
given Grissom command of the first Apollo flight, the first big leap toward the moon. As commander of the first Gemini flight and now the first Apollo flight, Grissom seemed now to be the front-runner to be the first man on the moon. But as Grissom and his two partners— Ed White, who performed the first American space walk on Gemini 4, and Roger Chaffee—approached their early 1967 launch, numerous glitches afflicted their complicated Apollo 1 rocket and capsule, requiring costly modifications and delays. Grissom began complaining to NASA and the press about what he considered shoddy workmanship and a sloppy rush not only to meet Kennedy’s deadline but also to satisfy President Johnson’s desire for a successful space launch to deflect America’s attention from the growing war in Vietnam and the internal unrest at home. “This is the worst spacecraft I’ve ever seen,” Grissom once told Shepard. And in a rare display of outspokenness with the press, Grissom said there had been “bushelfuls” of problems and admitted that he had “misgivings” about the flight.

  One day in late 1966 Grissom pulled a grapefruit-sized lemon off a tree in his backyard south of Houston, said goodbye to his wife, Betty, and took the lemon nine hundred miles east to the Cape, where he was to begin the final weeks of preflight training. There he hung the lemon from a problematic capsule simulator, built by North American Aviation, which he considered “a piece of crap.”

  Grissom’s concerns aside, the buildup to his launch was a heady time to be part of the NASA family. The stepping-stones of Mercury and Gemini had finally led to the big time, Project Apollo, with its enormous rockets, its three-man capsules, and its powerful “fly me to the moon” ambitions, which had inspired so many songs, poems, and dreams.

  Apollo’s capsule was easily the most complex piece of machinery the United States had ever constructed. It consisted of two main sections, a bell-shaped “command module” where the astronauts would lie three abreast and, beneath that, a cylindrical “service module.” The contractor, North American, despite the $2 billion it was getting from NASA, wrestled with hundreds of problems, large and small, with the command and service modules—welding problems, insulation problems, excessive weight, electrical short circuits, structural imperfections, design modifications, and leaks.

  Some NASA engineers called the spacecraft “sloppy and unsafe”—“a bucket of bolts.” Nonetheless, NASA’s top officials defended their contractor and stuck to their tight schedule. Following Apollo 1, a fast-paced series of subsequent Apollo flights was scheduled to take longer and longer strides toward the moon, and some NASA officials were already predicting that a man would walk on the moon as early as 1968. But then the construction woes, the frantic schedule, and Grissom’s nagging fears all converged on January 27, 1967, at the end of a long, frustrating Friday of training.

  North American had corrected many of Apollo 1’s problems—at least to NASA’s satisfaction—and the capsule was bolted atop a massive new Saturn IB booster rocket. For the purposes of the test, the rocket wasn’t filled with fuel, but the capsule was fully powered and the astronauts sat inside, fully suited, as the hatch was shut tight and pure oxygen filled the cramped space, where Grissom, White, and Chaffee lay on their backs for a daylong dress rehearsal called a “plugs out” test. NASA had decided against a system that would fill the cockpit with a mix of oxygen and nitrogen (which makes up the air on earth); to cut the extra space and weight, NASA chose a simpler system that supplied 100 percent oxygen.

  Throughout that Friday afternoon, it became clear that North American had not fixed all of its glitches. One of the first things Grissom noticed was a foul smell in the oxygen supply. That was followed by malfunctions in the communications system, which caused radio transmissions between the astronauts and Mission Control to fill with crackling static. At one point Grissom barked, “Christ, how are we going to get to the moon if we can’t even talk between two or three buildings?” Later he found he couldn’t shut off his microphone—“Damn it!” he yelled. As tempers flared, an engineer suggested calling it quits for the night, fixing the problems, and resuming the test the next day—it was already past 6 P.M., and the astronauts had been in the capsule for five hours. The engineer was overruled, and NASA’s bosses decided to keep working for another hour.

  Thirty miles of wiring snaked beneath, over, and around Grissom and his two colleagues. One of those wires, overlooked by North American’s engineers, was frayed and exposed—a bad thing in a capsule full of pure, flammable oxygen—and at 6:31 P.M. a spark or two leaped off that frayed wire and ignited Apollo 1. Grissom yelled, “Hey!”

  Engineers at the Cape and at Mission Control in Houston then listened in horrified, helpless silence as three astronauts screamed their final words.

  “We’ve got a fire . . . fire in the cockpit.”

  “Get us out of here!”

  “We’re burning up!”

  Finally there was a scream . . . and then silence.

  The hatch on the spacecraft had been designed to be opened manually by an astronaut from the inside. Unlike the Mercury hatches, whose explosive mechanism allowed them to be popped off in an emergency, the Apollo hatch was a complicated, double-hulled door that took at least ninety seconds to open. Everyone knew that if there was a fire inside the cockpit, it would be impossible for the astronauts to get out in time.

  Shepard, at that very moment, was in Dallas about to make a speech at a dinner event. Someone rushed to his side and whispered in his ear. He walked slowly to the podium and in a quiet, choked voice said, “I have just been informed of the loss . . . the loss of my comrades.” He stood there for a long, silent moment, then walked away.

  Shepard went home and told Louise, who left immediately to visit Grissom’s wife, Betty. Shepard then phoned his assistant, Chuck Friedlander, who was stationed at the Cape. “Chuck, did we have an accident?” he asked, already aware of the answer but needing to hear it directly and from someone he trusted. “Did we lose anybody?”

  “All three.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Shepard said quietly.

  Shepard’s secretary, Lola Morrow, made arrangements for Shepard to travel to the Cape. “I’ll never forget the pain in Al Shepard’s eyes, in his face,” she said.

  Betty Grissom was at home with her two children when Wally Schirra’s wife, Jo, her next-door neighbor, knocked on the door. A black NASA car pulled up a few minutes later, and she knew she had been widowed. Louise came by that night to offer comfort.

  Grissom was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, with Shepard and the other surviving Mercury Seven carrying his dark-wood, flag-draped casket. Lyndon Johnson sat in the front row, trying to catch Betty Grissom’s eye, but she stared straight ahead.

  Suddenly four jets roared into view, flying low and fast, wingtip to wingtip. As the foursome approached the cemetery one of the planes pulled up and away from the others—the traditional missing-man formation, which left an empty slot where the fourth plane should be. As the jets disappeared, a volley of rifle shots cracked, followed by the painful notes of taps played by a lone bugler.

  Shepard, Slayton, Schirra, and public information director Paul Haney drove into Georgetown and sipped scotch and water at the Georgetown Inn. They stood near the windows, staring out at the chilly day, its sunny skies. Haney looked over and was amazed, flat-out floored, to see tears streaming down Shepard’s cheeks.

  “I hate those empty-slot flyovers,” Shepard said, and swallowed another scotch.

  Just weeks before his death Grissom had told an interviewer that “the conquest of space is worth the risk of life.” Still, many of the astronauts felt that a fire in the cockpit—the result of sloppy construction, no less—was no way for a test pilot to die. Better to have perished in a midair explosion than on the launch pad during a test.

  A lengthy follow-up report determined that the fire had started beneath Grissom’s couch, spread quickly along nylon webbing beneath the seats, and then crawled up the walls, igniting everything in its path—especially the many straps made of a new inv
ention called Velcro, which had been installed to hold tools and equipment in the zero gravity of space but, in an atmosphere of pure oxygen, had burned like gasoline.

  Investigators said that the three astronauts died of asphyxiation in less than a minute. It was clear from the position of the bodies that Grissom and Ed White had been frantically trying to open the hatch when they died.

  Once the public sorrow had abated, Congress and the media began painfully and publicly exploring all the possible reasons for the first casualties of the space program. Some newspapers blamed NASA for trying to accomplish too much too fast, and one went so far as to call it “downright criminal.” Ironically, when a Soviet cosmonaut on the first Russian mission in two years died during a fiery reentry just three months later, many in the United States were reminded that the space race was indeed a complicated, imperfect, and dangerous venture.

  The U.S. space program would be grounded for more than a year, during which time all the people involved in the race for the moon reassessed their life, their goals. “I was miserable,” Slayton said of that period. “But Al was worse. And he took it out on everybody.”

  In the weeks after the fire, Shepard became insufferable. He felt in some small way responsible for what had happened to Grissom and his crew, for not doing more to prevent it. He knew of Grissom’s complaints about the equipment; he’d heard them daily. But everyone wallowed delusionally in a “sense of false security . . . a sense of complacency—including myself,” Shepard said. A congressional report would later use almost exactly the same words in blaming NASA’s “overconfidence” and “complacency.” Everyone in Houston had thought, after the huge success of Gemini and the absence of any Soviet flights between 1965 and mid-1967, We’re winning. We’re beating the Russians. But by not taking Grissom’s complaints seriously enough, Shepard felt, “Deke and I insidiously became part of the problem.” Shepard got even tougher on the other astronauts after Apollo 1, determined not to “let those guys get away with anything.”