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

by Jay Barbree

  The astronauts and engineers clung to the boat, shouting, “More rum, wenches, more rum,” until Henri and crew jumped in the pool and heaved them overboard. It took two cranes and a house-mover to get the boat out of the pool the next day, but that wasn’t the end of it.

  Wally Schirra was a masterful practical joker by himself, and one afternoon Henri and Wally walked out of Wally’s room, the innkeeper supporting a wounded astronaut with a bloody towel wrapped around his arm. The pool was crowded with reporters and tourists, and we rushed to Schirra’s aid.

  Concerned, I asked, “What happened, Wally?”

  Wally turned, nodding toward a large field of palmetto and shaggy oaks. “In there, Jay. It was in there. I don’t know what,” he groaned with pain, “but we got it—we got the damn thing…. It tore my arm up good.”

  “Did you call a doctor?”

  “There’s one on his way,” Henri nodded.

  “Good,” I answered, staring at the thick, bloodied towel.

  “We need to wait for the doctor in the room,” Henri said, and some of us followed a moaning Wally Schirra inside.

  The bloodied astronaut pointed to a large box on his bed, covered with a blanket, and turned to me. “Be careful, Jay. That thing’s dangerous. I think it’s a mongoose.”

  “Big mongoose,” Henri agreed.

  I shook my head. “There are no mongooses in Florida.”

  “Maybe it got loose or something. Who the hell cares?” Wally argued, growing more agitated. “Damnit, look for yourself.”

  Being from a farm, I have never been too afraid of animals. I moved toward the box on the bed.

  “Careful!” Wally insisted.

  I was wondering why there was no movement in the box when—

  WHAM!

  A huge, spring-loaded hairy thing with long teeth and claws burst through the blanket into my face, knocking me backward onto the floor. Those who had followed me into the room shot outside, stopping a safe distance away. Wally was on the floor beside me, his arms around the “jack-in-the-box wild thing,” doubled over with laughter.

  In the coming months, the “mongoose” sent some of the country’s most daring astronauts and fighter pilots hurtling through doors and windows to safety.

  As of this writing, Wally tells me he still has his treasured mongoose in his garage.

  Project Mercury was running out of days in February 1961, and a serious tone settled over the upcoming launch teams. But the decision to mislead the public as to who was going to be first held. The media’s general consensus was that John Glenn would be chosen. I didn’t agree. Shepard and I had swallowed a little too much of Jack Daniel’s sour mash one evening and, off the record, he told me.

  I wished he hadn’t. Had I learned of his selection to be first another way, I could have used the information.

  The secrecy surrounding the selection was to continue right up to launch day, with Bob Gilruth deciding that Shepard’s name would be made public only after the Mercury-Redstone lifted off. There was even some incredible deceptive plan about bringing all three of the astronauts to the pad dressed to fly, with hoods over their heads. That way not even the launch team would know who had climbed in the Mercury spacecraft to be first.

  I ran into Gilruth in the Holiday Inn. I told him I had heard about this deception, and I asked him a simple question: “Why?”

  He stared back and finally muttered, “It’s my business.”

  I jumped in his face. “No, it is not your business,” I said bluntly. “It’s the American taxpayer’s business. NASA is a civilian, open agency. You want secrecy, join the CIA.”

  He was not pleased. He walked away without another word.

  No one in the know cared for Gilruth’s cover-up, but it was a minor irritation compared with the fact the chimpanzee was flying first. All that animal would do was bang levers and push buttons and get jolted with electricity if he didn’t perform as trained. The astronauts protested, but the medical folks insisted. There were too many unknowns about space flight to risk a human life without first sending up a chimp as a possible sacrifice. The fact that a chimpanzee is a highly intelligent anthropoid, an animal closely related to and resembling a human, didn’t matter. Killing one’s animal cousin appeared to be acceptable.

  Of the seven candidates that came to the Cape for final flight training, a chimp named Chang was considered to be prime, and Elvis was the backup. The only problem was that Elvis was a female, so named because of her long sideburns. In order to cause no offense, the names had to be changed. Chang became Ham and Elvis was christened Patti. Ham stood for “Holloman Aero Med,” his home in New Mexico, and (known to just a very few) Patti stood for “Patrice Lumumba,” the African tyrant, because the chimps came from the French Cameroon.

  NASA selected the newly crowned Ham, and on January 31, 1961, the astronauts gathered to watch the launch. The flight turned out to be a bit more interesting. Redstone had a “hot engine.” It burned all of its fuel five seconds early. The control system sensed that something was wrong. Instantly it ignited the escape tower hooked to the Mercury capsule, and it blew the spacecraft away. This sent Ham higher, faster, and farther. The chimpanaut landed 122 miles beyond his target and came down hard, hitting the ocean with a teeth-jarring stop.

  Space chimp Ham, looking worn from his near drowning and harrowing suborbital flight, is greeted by the captain of his recovery ship. (NASA).

  The rough splashdown was followed with the stomach-churning motion of six-foot waves, and by the time the recovery choppers showed up, Ham’s capsule was on its side. More than eight hundred pounds of water had rolled in and they had a sputtering, choking, almost-drowned chimp on their hands.

  Alan Shepard reviewed Ham’s flight. He knew he could have survived it, but he also knew his own flight was in deep trouble. If only the damn chimp ride had been on the money, then he would have been off the launch pad in March.

  But Ham’s flight wasn’t on the money, it was a disaster, and Dr. von Braun was worried. He had the responsibility for the astronauts’ lives. “We require another unmanned flight,” he said soberly.

  Working with the engineers, Shepard confirmed that the problem with Ham’s Redstone had been nothing more than a minor electrical relay. The fix was quick and Shepard said, “Even von Braun should be satisfied with what we found!”

  Shepard was wrong. Dr. von Braun stood fast. “Another test flight.”

  The March 24 repeat Redstone launch was perfect. Shepard could have killed. He knew he should have been on that flight. America would now have the first astronaut in space.

  Over drinks, he told me, “We had them, Barbree. We had the Russians by the gonads and we gave it away.”

  “Maybe not,” I said, trying to resurrect hope. “You could still be first. May’s not that far away.”

  “Not a chance,” he said in that distant manner of his. “It’s the damn Sputnik thing all over again.”

  FOUR

  First in Space

  He drifted between sleep and wakefulness. That’s how it had been most of this night of remembering. They were memories he welcomed, the ones that reminded him of his father, a skilled carpenter who had worked daily to make their wooden home special, and the special memories of his mother. The memories of her smile, of her working in their home, making it warm and comfortable—memories of her kitchen, memories of something good to eat, especially her borscht.

  Those were the memories he chose. Not his boyhood memories of the great guns, the ear-splitting thunder of the exploding shells, the earth-shaking rumble of German tanks moving through his hometown; the memories of a boy watching his parents obey the Nazis just so, whenever possible, they could forage for food inside the battlefields.

  Only as he was nearing his teens would the other, good memories come—those memories with the welcoming sounds. The airplanes with red stars on their wings followed by terrible fighting, and the tanks pushing into their village, were Russian. The Germans fled, and the
Russian tanks stayed. And as quickly as the war ended, young Yuri Gagarin studied day and night in school and at home so that one day he would qualify to become a pilot in the Red Air Force.

  In 1955 he was accepted in flight school. Two years later he won his wings, the wings of a jet fighter pilot. He had become an expert parachutist, too, and in 1959 he volunteered for an exciting new program.

  Cosmonaut!

  He moved through the demanding training at the head of his class, and on April 8, 1961, only four days before this night of memories, his commander gave him the news: “You will be the first. You will travel first into space.”

  Until now he really hadn’t believed it; it seemed so unreal. But suddenly Gagarin’s door opened, and it was real enough. They had come to get him prepared. He met with the doctors and the political commissar. Everything moved smoothly. Breakfast was fun. The flight surgeons said he was ready. Sensors were attached to his body, and his backup and close friend, cosmonaut Gherman Titov, helped him climb into his pressure suit and heavy helmet.

  Sunrise swept over the launch pad, and Yuri Gagarin stood quietly for several minutes, studying the enormous SS–6 ICBM that would haul him into Earth orbit. No warhead atop this baby. Up there was Swallow, his Vostok spacecraft, weighing more than five tons.

  Gagarin stopped on the ramp partway up the stairs to the elevator. He turned to speak to the fortunate group who would witness this dividing moment in history. They stood silently, not wanting to miss a word.

  “The whole of my life seems to be condensed into this one wonderful moment,” Gagarin began with humility. “Everything that I have been, everything that I have done, was for this. Could anyone dream of more?”

  He waved farewell, entered the elevator, and when they reached the top, Gagarin climbed aboard Swallow. Technicians secured his harness to the specially designed seat. He raised a hand and signaled he was ready. Technicians closed the hatch, and Yuri Gagarin was sealed inside with his destiny.

  The countdown moved through its normal stops and starts, checks and rechecks, and then the final minutes…

  “Gotovnosty dyesyat minut.”

  Two minutes to go…

  He braced himself and relaxed his muscles as he felt motors whining. The gantry with the service level was pulling away. He moved with the bumps and thuds as power cables were ejected from their slots in the rocket. He knew what the sounds meant. Now the mighty SS–6 was on its own, drawing power from its internal systems.

  He heard a voice shout:

  “Zazhiganiye!”

  Gagarin needed no one to tell him he had ignition.

  His body was suddenly shuddering. The SS–6’s rockets were burning with an explosive fury of 900,000 pounds of thrust. There were twenty main rocket motors and a dozen small vernier control engines firing. The first man to leave Earth headed for an orbital track around his planet.

  It was 11:07 A.M. local time.

  It was 9:07 A.M. in Moscow.

  It was 1:07 A.M. in New York.

  America slept.

  Only a few in this country’s intelligence groups were aware that on the steppes of Kazakhstan, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was shouting, “Off we go,” bringing smiles and grins to his launch team and flight controllers. With the SS–6 well clear of the launch site, many of those whose duties were completed rushed outside to watch their rocket roar skyward—to see Yuri Gagarin travel faster than any man in history. They watched and jumped and cheered until the rocket was far above the Aral Sea and about to disappear over the eastern horizon.

  On board, in spite of his constantly increasing weight under the pull of gravity, Gagarin maintained steady reports. He was young and muscular, and he absorbed the punishment easily. The acceleration generated a force of six times normal gravity.

  Gagarin now weighed more than a thousand pounds.

  Suddenly, he heard and felt a loud jolt, then a series of bumps and thuds as the protective shroud covering Vostok was jettisoned. Through his portholes, he looked out at a brilliant horizon and a universe of blackness.

  His sightseeing was short lived.

  His rocket shut down on time.

  All was silent.

  Then more jolts and thuds as his spaceship was released from its rocket’s final stage.

  The miracle was at hand. Gagarin, in Swallow, had entered Earth orbit.

  Those on the ground listened in wonder to the cosmonaut’s calm reports of what he was feeling, how his equipment was working. Then he went silent as a never-before-known sensation overwhelmed him. He was feeling the magic of weightlessness, feeling as if he were a stranger in his own body. Up or down had no meaning. He was suspended. He was being kept from floating only by the harness strapping him to his seat. About him papers and pencils drifted.

  He shook his head to clear his mind. He reported the readings of his instruments. He checked Swallow’s critical systems. All was okay. Now he could continue his tales of what he saw and felt: “The sky looks very, very dark and the Earth is bluish.” He told those on Earth about the startling brightness of the sunlit side of their planet. And by the time he had raced through a rapid orbital sunset and marveled at the wonders of a night in space, he was through an orbital sunrise, nearing the end of his single scheduled trip around Earth.

  It was time to come home and Gagarin relaxed his body, exercised his fingers in his gloves, and began monitoring the automatic systems that were turning Swallow around, setting the ship up for retrofire.

  Suddenly, he was rammed hard into the back of his contoured couch. The retro-rockets had ignited. He smiled. Everything was working perfectly. Wham! There it was. He had felt the sharp explosion, and Swallow and its electronics pack were now separated from the equipment module.

  Around the world in eighty-nine minutes, not eighty days.

  That was all. He was coming home, flying backward. Swallow was plunging downward into thickening atmosphere, and he felt weight again. It was building from the hammering deceleration. He was a passenger inside a blazing comet. Outside, he could see flames, thickening and becoming intense as friction from the atmosphere heated his spaceship to 4,000 degrees. Inside, Gagarin was enjoying temperatures in the comfortable 80s.

  Six minutes later, Swallow had slowed to subsonic speed, and at 23,000 feet the escape hatch blew away. The first man into space was now seeing blue skies and white clouds again as ejection rockets beneath his seat fired, sending him and his contour couch flying away from Swallow.

  He and his couch were all that were left, and Gagarin watched as the stabilization chute billowed upward. Everything was working perfectly, and for ten thousand feet he rode downward before separating from the ejection seat and deploying his main parachute. He opened his helmet’s faceplate as he drifted through puffy white clouds and took deep breaths of the fresh spring air. What a marvelous ride!

  On the ground, two startled peasants and their cow watched the white-helmeted man drift from the heavens. Gagarin hit the ground running. He tumbled and rolled over, jumping to his feet to gather his parachute. The first man in space unhooked his harness and looked up to see a woman and a girl staring at him. The cow decided to keep grazing.

  “Have you come from outer space?” asked the astonished woman.

  “Yes, yes, would you believe it?” the first cosmonaut answered with a wide grin.

  Within months, Yuri Gagarin shared his memories of his historic flight with my colleague Martin Caidin when Caidin was writing cosmonaut Gherman Titov’s book. Titov was Gagarin’s backup, and he orbited Earth a full day. He named his book I Am Eagle.

  The ringing phone was not welcome. Especially at 3:42 A.M.

  I reached for the noisy necessity. “What?” I barked.

  The voice at the other end was soft, polite. “Jay, this is Jerry Jacobs on the desk.”

  “Uh-huh, sorry, Jerry.”

  “Have you heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “The Russians have put a man in orbit.”

  �
�You’re kidding.” I sat straight up, rubbing my eyes. “How many orbits?”

  “One,” Jacobs said. “Get on it.”

  “I’m moving, boss.”

  I replaced the phone in its cradle, patted a disturbed young bride of seven months on her derriere, and leapt out of bed. I had only one thought: NASA could have had Alan Shepard up there three weeks ago.

  I hit the on button on the radio. Jo groaned and pulled the covers over her head as excited voices spoke of Yuri Gagarin, of Earth orbit. I splashed water on my face, shaved, quickly brushed my teeth, and while putting most of my clothes on I went out the door. Following the six-minute drive, I was in the office.

  I phoned Colonel John “Shorty” Powers, the spokesman for the Mercury Seven. I wanted to know if the astronauts had a statement, and if NASA had scheduled a news conference.

  “Morning, Shorty,” I said in my most pleasant voice. “Sorry about the hour.”

  He definitely wasn’t a morning person.

  “Morning, my ass,” he growled. “Whatta you want?”

  “The reaction? NASA’s reaction to the Russians orbiting a cosmonaut?”

  “Fuck you, Barbree, we’re asleep here,” he yelled, slamming the phone in my ear.

  I laughed and went on the NBC Radio Network with the following:

  Overnight the Russians put a man into space, and Colonel John Powers, the spokesman for the Mercury Seven Astronauts, tells me “NASA’s asleep.” The space agency will wait to hear about man’s first flight into Earth orbit over eggs and bacon.

  Colonel Powers’s “NASA’s asleep” remark made the same headline in some of the morning papers.