by Jay Barbree
If the program worked as planned, it would be another president in Washington who would talk to the first Americans on the moon.
In the astronaut office complex at Langley Air Force Base, Alan Shepard listened to Kennedy’s words on a radio by his desk. His face reflected changing emotions: disbelief, hope, wonder. Finally he could no longer contain himself.
He turned to the others. “Did I hear what I think I heard?”
Deke Slayton nodded. “You heard right,” he confirmed. “The man wants to send us to land on the moon. Land, not just fly around the moon.”
“Sure, but don’t you remember what he said in Washington?” Alan retorted. “He was going for a flight that would loop around the moon. Take the safest shot.”
Gordo Cooper looked up, infinitely patient. “Ain’t no way,” he joined in. “First, we don’t have the rockets. Second, we don’t have the spacecraft, and third, we don’t know how to get there and back.”
Deke looked at Gordo and laughed at his fellow Air Force pilot. “Hey, Gordo, don’t forget Kennedy’s a Navy man like Shepard. We’ve got only fifteen minutes of flight time in space, and now he figures we’ll just follow the railroad tracks all the way to the moon.”
Alan Shepard showed them a mouthful of teeth and shot the middle finger of his right hand straight into the air.
“Kennedy is nuts,” came a comment from the back of the room.
“Nuts?” Deke laughed. “Could the eminent Captain Gus Grissom be calling our president nuts?”
Gus grinned and John Glenn gestured for attention. His face was serious as he spoke.
“This thing may not be so crazy after all, guys,” he said slowly. “I know we’ve got boosters that like to blow up.”
“Yeah,” came an acid comment. “Like that overblown balloon they call the Atlas. Can’t get out of its own way.”
“They’ll get it right,” Glenn said with confidence. “But that’s just a whistle stop for us. Titan’s coming on line, we all know that. You guys seen the advanced Army projects Wernher’s working on?”
Heads turned. “And?”
“DARPA,” he said. They knew what he meant. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “The Army wants to put up a really humongous communications satellite system. It wants instant worldwide communications. So it’s turned Wernher loose on some monster rocket they call Saturn. Eight engines. Something over a million pounds of thrust for liftoff. We could put up a Mack truck with that thing.”
Astronauts were coming to their seats. “They’re working on that now?” came the question.
Glenn nodded. “The engineers say it’s a winner. It’s not the thin edge, either. Its whole key is power and reliability. I admit bringing everything on line in eight years is a hell of a job, but—” He grinned. “Any of you guys old enough to remember how down in the dumps we were the day after the Japanese tore us up at Pearl Harbor? Less than four years later Japan was an ash heap.”
“Eight years, huh?” Deke chimed in. He winked at his fellow astronauts. “Kennedy never would have said what he did if he didn’t believe we could do it. Besides, think of what it means to us. Eight years from now we’ll all still be young.”
He slapped his knee and laughed. “In eight years we could all go to the moon. Think about that.”
Deke stood up. “There’s just one thing I think we ought to remember.”
“What’s that?”
“If it wasn’t for the Russians, we wouldn’t be going anywhere.”
No one argued the point.
Congress acted as if it had been given a shot of super-vitamins. On the first fiscal go-around it gave NASA a check for $1.7 billion to kick the new program into action. NASA administrator Jim Webb confirmed Kennedy’s confidence in him when he spread a great net across the U.S. and began to haul in top talent from leading industrial and science centers from every state in the union. Then he began assigning contracts as much on the scattering of congressional districts as any other factor, assuring that he wouldn’t let the complaints of governors and congressmen whose states had been left out burden the technological effort. This tactic gave the program wide political support.
The sweeping national effort to place Americans on the moon transformed the face, industry, science, and lifestyle of the nation. More than twenty thousand industrial contractors and four hundred thousand technicians, engineers, managers, plus those with administrative and other skills were swept up by NASA’s huge job vacuum cleaner.
The new missile and space programs culled their names from Greek and Roman and Norse legends and mythology until it became commonplace to talk of Thor, Jupiter, Juno, Atlas, Titan, Saturn, Mercury, Gemini, Pegasus, Orion, Polaris, Poseidon, and others.
Now there was Apollo on whose wings men would fly to the moon.
So went the plan.
But this was 1961. Never mind the miles; the moon was still an impossibly long way off. The difficulties of boosting, navigating, and then the thorny problems of traversing down to its lifeless surface seemed insurmountable.
In the meantime, it was a matter of taking one step at a time. The nation had flown only one space capsule and it had been weightless for just five minutes.
The second step was to repeat the first, to gather more data and confirm the lessons of the first. That’s how building blocks are made.
Gus Grissom would ride the second manned Redstone. Even as engineers and the astronauts readied the slim booster for its suborbital mission, eyes were turning to the launch pads closer to the beach.
The Atlas complex of four launch towers. A rocket with a skin so thin and sensitive it had to be pressurized internally to keep its balloon-like structure from collapsing.
A real confidence-builder, that.
The astronauts knew the Atlas was their ride into orbit. But at the moment there were no volunteers to ride the temperamental booster.
The odds on every Atlas flight were terrible. No one was running to the pad to sit atop 360,000 pounds of flaming thrust that had the nasty habit of exploding into an all consuming fireball.
Kennedy’s speech had been grand; utterly marvelous.
But the road to the moon still waited to be paved.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mercury
IT WAS EARLY EVENING, THE time of day when the road leading to the Cape Canaveral launch center was abandoned to creatures of the night: floods of skittering insects, raccoons, opossums, armadillos, and occasionally a stray wild hog large enough to cave in the front of a speeding car. A road just 65 miles south of the world famous Daytona Speedway, it was engineered to delight those who liked to drive fast. First a stretch running to the west, a wide turn, and then a long straight stretch that eased to the right in a great sweeping curve that ended in a long straightaway, dead east, toward the Cape’s main gate.
Jim Rathmann shifted expertly as he hammered the Corvette through the 100 mph mark on the speedometer. The speed was a gentle load for Rathmann, who only the year before had claimed the winner’s flag in the grueling Indianapolis 500. He loved the ’Vette as did the man in the right seat, the car’s owner. Gus Grissom loved speed since he was a tiny tot racing his self-built racer down an Indiana hill, but today he did his speeding about forty thousand feet above sea level.
Rathmann boomed across a bump in the road, the ’Vette easing into the air with all four wheels spinning, landing with a satisfying whoomp. It was like driving through falling snow; the lights reflected hordes of insects that splattered in a steady rain against the windshield.
“Whatta you usually take this turn at, Gus?” Rathmann asked.
“About a hundred and five,” came the answer.
“Whoo. Pretty good. But tonight we’ve got those Daytona racing tires under us,” Jim reminded him. “Slick as a baby’s ass.”
“Uh-huh,” Gus grunted. “Don’t matter, I can make it at 105.”
“That so? You really could make it with the slicks?”
Gus grinned. “Piece
of cake.”
“Yeah? Well, hold on to your hat, pard,” Rathmann growled. He kept heavy pressure on the pedal, the speed still coming up, and he gripped the wheel tight, cutting inside of the turn, the wheel firm in his expert hands.
Centrifugal force pulled Gus from his seat as they entered the turn, and he locked his fingers around the door handle. At the same moment the slick tires gave up the ghost, all traction vanished, and the Corvette came unglued from the road surface. In an instant the heavy car was in a wild flat spin, swapping ends as it headed directly for the salt marsh off the road. The Corvette, slung low and built like a small tank, crashed, plowing its way to a stop, its hubcaps sunk in muck and squashed bugs.
Gus glared at his friend. “Dammit, Jim, you scared the crap out of me!”
“Hell, we’re just fine, pardner,” Rathmann laughed. “It’s like I said. Those slick tires wouldn’t hold the road.”
“No shit, Jose,” Gus cursed. He looked around. “Dammit, I’ve gotta fly in a couple of days!”
“Really?” Rathmann growled, as if he didn’t know.
“If Walt Williams or some other NASA brass sees my car here like this, I’m dead.”
“No sweat. I’ll have us outta here in no time.”
“Out of here?” Gus shook his head in dismay. “It better be less than no time. The cops could be along any minute.”
“I told you, don’t sweat it,” Rathmann laughed. “They all drive my cars. They won’t see a thing if I ask them to look the other way.”
“That so?”
“That’s so. Just stay low, cowboy,” Rathmann said, climbing from the car. “I’ll be back with the Lone Ranger.”
He disappeared into the night. Gus slouched in the car, knowing his hide was on the line. If Williams got hold of this, he could easily ground Gus. No Redstone mission. Williams would replace him with Glenn, and space flight would be out for Gus Grissom.
“Stupid!” Gus railed against himself. “Plain stupid!”
He was right. NASA was tightening up on the antics of its astronauts. One man hurt or killed shortly before a flight could mess up carefully planned schedules. The minutes passed, and Gus really began to worry. He saw lights coming closer, around the turn.
He couldn’t believe it. Rathmann with two wreckers! It took some time and skill, but soon the heavy car was out of the muck and hauled off to be hidden—and repaired—in Rathmann’s garage.
Again and again Gus Grissom berated himself for risking both his neck and his space flight. He knew he shouldn’t take any more unnecessary risks, but the urge to get even with Rathmann was too great. A few days later, without authorization, Gus took Rathmann, a civilian, to Patrick Air Force Base, breaking all variety of federal regulations. The two climbed into a supersonic jet fighter, fully suited up with oxygen masks and helmets.
Moments later the jet streaked down the runway. Grissom lifted off the field in a steady, fast high climb and bored for high blue. When he reached eight miles above the earth, Rathmann was startled to see the sky suddenly vanish. Instantly a spinning vertical line replaced it, which Rathmann realized was the earth’s horizon. The jet rolled around the inside of a great invisible barrel, snapped out in wicked high-speed vertical rolls. The rolls stopped with a bone-jarring snap. Blue sky was below, ocean above, and for a while it was impossible to tell which was which. Gus did things with the jet Rathmann found impossible either to describe or even understand. His stomach screamed at him, his head was mashed into his neck and alternately shoved the other way with eyes and ears popping. He was on the edge of yielding his breakfast to the inside of his oxygen mask when Gus decided he’d paid back Rathmann for skidding off the road at Canaveral.
On the ground, the two buddies laughed at each other, pounded each other’s shoulders. “Gus, you scared the crap out of me!”
Gus let out a boom of laughter. “Now, where have I heard that before?”
While the launch team readied his Redstone and spacecraft, Gus was pretty much laid-back, letting his crew do their jobs without interference.
But the old rule is that everybody isn’t equal on a team, and Gus demanded the best, and he had an eagle eye for missed detail and a short fuse for slop. He could handle honest mistakes just as long as they didn’t grow but when they did, his irritation took dead aim on the blockheads responsible, which he wanted off his team right then and there. Petty excuses were to him utter bullshit, and woe to the incompetent he found working on the ship his life depended on.
Engineers working on the spacecraft until now had labored on unmanned robots. The machines didn’t see, speak, suffer, or lose their cool. When it came to engineering it was Gus Grissom’s second love. He held his own with the best and when he spotted someone slacking instead of doing serious work, Gus would give the man his choice of taking the stairs or getting thrown off the gantry.
The one problem that drove Gus Grissom mad was the same one detected by former President Harry Truman when he was first shown the Mercury spacecraft. “How in the hell do these guys take a leak?” asked Truman. There was a lot of feet shuffling before someone finally responded, “Uh, sir, they don’t.” Truman walked away convinced the country’s space engineers were loonies.
After Alan’s experience soaking up the contents of his bladder with his heavy underwear, Gus was after an answer to Truman’s question.
Flight Surgeon Bill Douglas knew better than to put off Grissom, and he went after an immediate solution. Douglas sent the astronauts’ nurse, Dee O’Hara, into Cocoa Beach to buy a panty girdle. He reasoned the snug garment would serve quite well as a liquid container. Gus, who first looked aghast at the “medical solution,” finally murmured, “Oh, what the hell, I’ve dealt with worse make-do crap before,” and when he climbed into his Mercury capsule, he became the only male astronaut prepared to risk space flight in women’s lingerie.
Gus Grissom’s Mercury-Redstone lifted from its launch pad on July 21, 1961, and he flew an almost exact duplication of Alan Shepard’s flight—115 miles up, 300 miles downrange. The parallels were stunning, and Gus boomed out of the sky with a perfect splashdown, but that’s where any similarities to Shepard’s mission ended.
Gus went through the drill of readying the capsule, which he had named Liberty Bell Seven, for helicopter recovery, reviewing his recovery checklist while waiting for the hookup. He was lying back when an explosion blasted one side of his spacecraft. The hatch, modified to use an explosive primer cord instead of the mechanical locks of Shepard’s capsule, had inexplicably ignited and blown away the emergency exit hatch.
Gus saw the waves coming in and scrambled out and swam for his life. Pounds of dimes in the legs of his suit he’d taken up for souvenirs almost pulled him under. He fought to stay afloat as he watched the three-thousand-pound spacecraft sink in fifteen thousand feet of ocean.
Engineers puzzled over the detonation. Some asserted that the design of the capsule made an accidental explosion impossible and theorized Grissom may have inadvertently hit an emergency plunger that triggered the hatch release. Grissom denied the charge, repeatedly insisting, “The damn thing just blew.” His fellow astronauts backed him all the way, and an accident review board cleared Gus of any wrongdoing. Four decades would pass before Liberty Bell Seven was brought up from the Ocean’s floor. Gus was right.
In Washington, a few hours after the Grissom scare, President Kennedy signed a bill allocating NASA $1.8 billion in additional funding, including money to start the Apollo program. Congress had given him every penny he asked for.
If the loss of the Liberty Bell Seven wiped some of the shine off an otherwise perfect flight, the rest of the luster vanished sixteen days after Gus’s splashdown when another powerful SS-6 booster thundered skyward from its launch pad in Russia with Vostok II—Eagle—carrying Major Gherman S. Titov, who had been backup pilot for Yuri Gagarin. Titov went aloft in a ship weighing nearly eleven thousand pounds and stayed in orbit for a full day.
NASA managers and the se
ven astronauts could only shake their heads. They looked at one another and agreed that the Redstone had done its job. It was time to get on with launching an American into orbit, and suddenly America’s most urgent goal was to send a man circling around the earth before the end of 1961. That’s the year the Soviets did it, not once but twice, and they did it first. But history could record that both nations did it in the same year.
If. And it was a big if.
Of all the available rockets in the American arsenal, only the Atlas ICBM was capable of lofting the Mercury capsule into orbit. The Atlas worked well as an intercontinental range war rocket, but its thin skin often collapsed under the heavy burden of the Mercury spacecraft and all the heavy features built in to protect human life. As a space booster to kick Mercury into orbit, it was unproven and full of risk.
Three times Atlas rockets had blasted away from the launch pad with unmanned Mercury spacecraft on top, and on two of those flights the big rocket had exploded, spewing blazing wreckage of booster and spacecraft into the sea.
The pressure mounted on Mercury Operations Director Walt Williams. The White House wanted an American in space, and they wanted him to go as high and as fast as any of the Russians had. Williams had to balance the angry impatience of the White House against the realities of a non-performing booster. Finally Williams went through the roof. He was sick of listening to the Convair officials, manufacturers of the Atlas, and the miserable litany of nonstop excuses they offered when flights ended in explosions after repeated assurances that the rocket was capable. He was ready to dump Convair and Atlas and tell the president that Atlas was a piece of junk. He wanted to recommend that NASA wait out the development of the Air Force’s new Titan ICBM, now undergoing testing. That would slow down the astronaut orbital program, but at least the pilots would have better than a one-in-three chance of getting into orbit.