Live From Cape Canaveral : Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today

by Jay Barbree

  Atlas 10B lifts off with Project Score. (USAF).

  No one had ever seen before or will ever see again this incredible sight. The temperature, the moisture in the air, and the light rays from a hidden sun were just right. The stunning colors and lights glimmered and lingered in the heavens, and official phones were ringing off their walls. Some thought the world was ending. Others thought the rocket had blown up.

  Meanwhile, inside Range Control, those who were tracking the Atlas were watching the big rocket grab for all of Earth’s rotational push. 10B needed all the help it could get to make it into orbit. It was headed due east and off the safety charts. The range safety officer (RSO) was about to have a fit. He was reaching for the destruct button to blow the Atlas to harmless debris when he felt a hand grab his wrist. General Donald Yates stood over his shoulder with a firm grip. “Don’t push that button, Captain,” the general ordered. “I’ll take full responsibility.”

  “But, Sir,” the air force captain protested, “if we have a failure the missile could hit Africa.”

  “Big deal,” the general bellowed. “A lot of jungle out there.” Yates released his grip. “Don’t touch that damn button, Captain. That’s a direct order.”

  The range safety officer leaned back in his chair and began to sweat. General Yates held his breath, and an anxious White House awaited word.

  Five minutes after Atlas 10B’s magnificent liftoff, the rocket sailed into Earth orbit and became the planet’s largest and heaviest man-made satellite.

  Other press members reported it as a routine launch. I didn’t report anything. I grinned as NBC cameraman Powell sped away for his chartered plane to our Jacksonville affiliate. If the whole damn scheme worked, we’d have an NBC network report.

  The air force returned the news media to Headquarters Building 425 at Patrick Air Force Base, where we had left our cars. Immediately, everyone was off the bus and off to the bars, believing the story was over.

  Major Ken Grine, our air force escort, decided to stay in his office, and I decided to stay with him. We both knew why we were waiting, and two hours after 10B’s launch, direct from the White House we had confirmation from the President himself.

  “Tonight,” Ike began, “An Atlas satellite was launched into orbit from Cape Canaveral. On board is this recorded message by me.”

  The President turned and pointed to the White House radio technician:

  This is the President of the United States speaking. Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you from a satellite circling in outer space. My message is a simple one. Through this unique means I convey to you and all mankind America’s wish for peace on Earth and good will to men everywhere.

  NBC News was the only agency with film, and we enjoyed our little exclusive.

  In 1958, launches at Cape Canaveral had become the hottest news in the country. NBC’s Chet Huntley, America’s number-one broadcaster, was often at the Cape. From left to right: author Jay Barbree, Major Ken Grine, Chet Huntley. (Barbree Collection).

  Project Score reached orbit five months into my employ by NBC News, and by now I knew my way around the Cape and the military.

  As a farm boy of sixteen without a home, I lied about my age and talked myself into the air force, where I spent four years in search of an education. After basic training in Texas, I was assigned to Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. There, I spent my off-duty time studying for my general equivalency diploma and watching the fighters and bombers climb into the sky from Scott Field. Sometimes I would walk to the end of the runway and stand, drinking in the energy of an F–80 jet thundering over my head, tucking up its gear and fleeing into puffy white clouds.

  I was in awe of flying machines, and I began spending much of my spare time at a nearby private airport. I had no money for flying lessons, but I would stand there and watch the pilots shout “Contact!” to the mechanics that would grab the wooden props and swing them down suddenly; each aircraft engine would fire with a stuttering cough. I loved to stand behind the ships when the pilots revved them up for a power check. The air blast whipped back, throwing up dust and flattening the grass, blowing strong in my face.

  Soon, I was an airport fixture. I was the pilots’ “go-fer.” I gladly ran their errands and helped them with their planes, and they repaid me with local rides.

  I’ll never forget my first hop. The airplane was old, its fabric faded, splotched yellow, and the engine dripped oil. It smelled of gasoline in the air; it shook my teeth, but I didn’t care. After a few weeks, the pilots let me handle the stick and rudder foot pedals in flight, adding instructions when possible.

  Then there was the day the man with the red-and-white Stearman biplane landed at our field. I helped the pilot with the awesome ship, running behind the right wing and pushing on the struts. We got the machine refueled, and I answered all the pilot’s questions, bringing him coffee and a couple of fresh doughnuts. And while he downed the coffee, I stood on a box, cleaning the cockpit glass, polishing the gleaming red-and-white surface as the pilot watched in silence.

  “Hey, buddy!” he shouted. “Would you like a ride?”

  My grin was my answer and minutes later we were in the air, where, for the first time, I experienced aerobatics as earth and sky vanished and reappeared with startling rapidity. It began with me staring at a vertical horizon and realizing the edge of the world now stood on its end. But not for long, as the Stearman continued on over, rolling around the inside of an invisible barrel in the air, until the ground was up and the sky was down. I had just enough time to catch my breath when the nose went down and an invisible hand pushed me gently into my seat and glued me there as the nose came up, and up. The horizon disappeared again, and the engine screamed with the dive. Then the nose was coming up, higher and higher, and the engine began to protest. The sun flashed in my eyes, and I found myself on my back as the Stearman soared up and over in a beautiful loop.

  As we flew on, my pleasure grew, and my eyes were glazed with delight by the time the biplane whispered onto the grass landing strip.

  There could be no stopping me now. I lived and slept flying, and within a year I had my pilot’s license along with my high school diploma, and I earned two years of college credits in night aviation classes. I was transferred to the Scott AFB Link Trainer Section, where I was appointed an air force instrument flight simulator instructor at the age of eighteen.

  The author as an eighteen-year-old pilot at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois. (Barbree Collection).

  A couple of the other pilots in the Link Section and I bought an Aeronica Champion, and in the months to come, logged endless hours in the single-engine land aircraft. At that time I only saw my future in aviation, but I soon learned the pay wasn’t promising, and I met a portly radio-station owner endowed with both a full bosom and a desire to possess my young body. Broadcast crept into my life, pushing flying aside, and once out of the air force, a living I had to make.

  I kicked around a couple of radio stations before landing at WALB Radio & TV in Albany, Georgia, where, after three years, the “space bug” sunk its teeth in me and I was off to Cape Canaveral. I managed a little piece of bachelor’s heaven in a studio apartment on the beach, and when it came to making friends, I was lucky. Some of them were even famous, but I suppose the one I liked to hang out with the most was a wild New Yorker named Martin Caidin. Caidin stepped aside for no man, and he was arguably the greatest aviation and space writer ever. He lived in New York but when he finished writing a book, Caidin would be off to the Cape, where we would raise hell and get in some serious flying.

  We were an odd couple: he a wise-ass New Yorker, I a Georgia plowboy. We just seemed to piss off the right people, which I reasoned was because Caidin was an orphan and we’d both grown up without. When two people who never had much meet, well, there’s instant trust.

  Mostly, when Marty came down, we would go flying. He had bought a German World War II ME–108 fighter, and I remember one particular nigh
t when we were upstairs in calm air and the old Messerschmitt was rock steady, and we could see the Cape spread out before us; we could see where brilliant searchlights converged on an Atlas missile. It was too far away to make out details at first, but we could see the plume of escaping liquid-oxygen vapor flashing in the light.

  America’s new spaceport was an enchanted land of lights and colors, and as we flew closer, we could see along the northeast beach the four massive gantry towers for Atlas, including the missile undergoing a fueling test on its pad, and the dark shapes where engineers and construction workers were rushing the completion of four complexes and their towers for the mighty Titan. And south of the Cape’s point, there were the gantries for the family of intermediate-range ballistic missiles; Thor, Jupiter, Redstone, and Jupiter-C; and the new launch pads for Polaris.

  I smiled. Before the week was finished, I would be covering the Polaris launch, the solid-fueled missile that would soon go to sea aboard nuclear submarines.

  There were other areas too dark to identify, but from the air, I realized I was seeing the Cape as I had never seen it before. This was not merely a site where buttons were pushed and missiles screamed into the sky. It was a vast assembly, the workshop of a laboratory that stretched more than five thousand miles across the Atlantic. It was vibrant, expensive, terribly complicated, and dangerous, but most of all, vital to all of us.

  Martin Caidin and Jay Barbree could often be seen flying this German World War II Messerschmitt ME–108 fighter over Florida. The German fighter with its original markings raised many eyebrows at local airports, and once Caidin had to make an emergency landing on U.S. 1, coming to a stop in front of a motel. He grinned and asked, “You have a room?” (Caidin Collection).

  I rolled the Messerschmitt westward, cutting power and trimming the World War II fighter for a rapid descent. Three brilliant lights flashed and disappeared, first white, then green. They were the flasher beacons from Titusville’s executive airport. I made a long, straight-in approach to the runway and the aircraft settled easily on the concrete.

  It was a beautiful Florida day for the first full-scale Polaris launch.

  We reporters and photographers were taken to the roof of a vacated radar building overlooking the missile’s launch pad.

  The Polaris was a white-and-black stubby thing. Both of its stages were packed full of solid fuel—something like candle wax instead of liquid. That was because the fifteen-hundred-mile-range missiles, with more destructive power than all the bombs dropped in World War II, were to ride inside silos on board nuclear submarines.

  The safety people had placed a standard, liquid-fuel missile’s destruct package on board. The explosives were there to blow the Polaris to shreds if it acted up, but this was unknown to the experts; this destruct package couldn’t get the job done. It needed about four times the explosives to blow the solid-fuel Polaris into harmless debris.

  The countdown moved through its final seconds, and Polaris leapt from its pad, racing skyward much faster than its liquid-fuel brethren. Cheering onlookers were hooting and hollering as Polaris, unlike the liquid-fuel rockets, climbed on a solid stack of white smoke. It was a joy to see until—you guessed it—Polaris decided to go its own way.

  Instantly, the range safety officer sent a radio signal to destroy the missile, to stop it from threatening life or property, but instead of blowing it into harmless burning trash, the underpowered destruct package simply separated the Polaris’s two stages.

  The first stage, the one that had been ignited at launch, continued to burn, and took a new course toward coastal towns.

  Suddenly, a panicked voice began screaming over the Cape’s squawk box, “All personnel on the Cape take cover!”

  No member of the press moved. We stood staring into the sky. The Polaris’s unlit second stage appeared like a huge white barrel tumbling over and over, heading directly toward us.

  The squawk box kept screaming for us to take cover, and our escort, Major Ken Grine, kept yelling, “Get the hell off this roof!”

  At that very moment, a naval commander was bringing a tray of sandwiches up the stairs, unaware of what was happening.

  “Come on, you guys,” Grine yelled again. “It’s my ass if you don’t get off this roof.”

  Again, no one moved, and the major stamped his foot and took off running down the stairs, sending tray and sandwiches and naval commander tumbling to the ground. I quickly refocused my attention skyward to see the Polaris’s second stage breaking apart. It was now in several pieces. A large chunk plunged into the roof of a car parked next to our building; it smashed the vehicle flat, including its tires. Other debris, most of it now burning, showered an area around us the size of a football field. One piece smacked into the roof in front of my feet.

  The instant smell of burning tar got our attention, but we still didn’t move. Associated Press photographer Jimmy Kerlin had his legs and arms wrapped around his tripod, shooting pictures of everything in sight.

  The Polaris’s first stage continued burning its way toward land. God, it could even hit Cocoa! Hundreds could soon be killed. Then, I moved. I ran down the stairs, demanding that Major Grine take us off the Cape so we could get to the impact site and report whatever happened.

  Grine agreed. We quickly got on the bus and as we moved through the guarded gate, I jumped off to the safety of civilian soil. I ran for the same public phone booth where I had covered the Vanguard blowup. I was on the air within a minute, telling NBC network listeners what I knew; and when I completed my report I ran onto the highway, waving down the first car coming my way. The driver gave me a ride to the Hitching Post Trailer Park, where the crowd was still growing. The steaming first stage of the Polaris was in the Banana River, only a couple of hundred feet behind rows of house trailers.

  “We get all the tornadoes, God,” someone yelled. “Why us? Why stray missiles too?”

  “Anyone hurt?” I yelled back, and voices from among the crowd reported, “No!”

  I stopped long enough to catch my breath before I started checking the place out, interviewing eyewitnesses.

  There were no apparent injuries or damages, but what had the crowd buzzing, of more interest even than the wayward missile, was the woman who had been taking a shower in her trailer. When the Polaris thundered into the river, she ran out to see what was going on. Yep, she had forgotten one important item—her clothes. The Lady Godiva of Cape Canaveral’s Hitching Post Trailer Park received as much print in the local paper the next day as did the runaway Polaris. Go figure.

  THREE

  The Astronauts

  NASA could not have gone looking for astronauts in a more inhospitable place, a barren, snake-infested high desert where sand and sun had whitened the bones of the long-forgotten foolhardy, where winds sliced through the snarled Joshua trees which stood like sentries, and where a flat, dry lake bed offered America’s most skilled test pilots the longest runways in any direction: California’s Edwards Air Force Base.

  It was from this high-tech flight center, as well as from the homes of the country’s best naval and marine aviators, that NASA gathered its future astronauts. Each candidate had to have at least fifteen hundred hours’ flight time in America’s fastest, most unforgiving jets. Fifty-eight air force, forty-seven navy, and five from the marine corps applied.

  Early in 1959, these applicants were undergoing extreme physiological, psychological, and leadership tests at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. NBC thought that, being a pilot, I should crawl in these same horror chambers. But there was a difference. There was no way I was going to ride a temperamental rocket, and I could not think of a single reason why I should put my cowardly body through such torture.

  But NBC did not agree, and I headed north to join Jim Kitchell. Kitch and crew were at Wright Patterson shooting a Chet Huntley Reporting, a thirty-minute news show aired Sunday evenings. For the next four days I held a microphone in my hand, trying to say something that made sense while I
was frozen, roasted, shaken, and isolated in chambers so quiet my own heart sounded like the loudest drum in the parade.

  I survived, NBC got its twelve “How I Became an Astronaut” reports for our old weekend radio show Monitor, and later that week, April 9, 1959, the Mercury Seven astronauts were named—names that would, within a few short years, become legendary.

  There was Malcolm Scott Carpenter, a navy lieutenant from the Korean War; Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr., an air force captain who flew the hottest jets; John Herschel Glenn, a marine lieutenant colonel—a fighter pilot from two wars; Virgil “Gus” Grissom, an air force captain with one hundred combat missions over Korea; Walter M. “Wally” Schirra, a navy lieutenant commander, a veteran of ninety fighter-bomber missions in Korea; carrier and test pilot Alan Bartlet Shepard, a navy lieutenant commander; and Donald K. “Deke” Slayton, an air force captain who flew fifty-six combat missions over Europe and seven combat missions over Japan in World War II.

  NASA announced their selection at a high-profile news conference in the nation’s capital. Since we happened to be in Dayton, Jim Kitchell decided to see if any of the seven were stationed at Wright Patterson. We were in luck. Gus Grissom’s home was a short drive, and we were off to interview his wife, Betty. Mrs. Grissom was most gracious. She invited us in and as the camera rolled, I asked, “How do you feel about your husband going into space?”