Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

The place reminded them of what they had heard Edwards, or Muroc, was like in the legendary days of the late 1940's and early 1950's. It was one of those bleached, sandy, bare-boned stretches where the land that any sane man wants runs out… and the government takes it over for the testing of hot and dangerous machines, and the kings of the resulting rat-shack kingdom are those who test them. Just south of Cocoa Beach was Patrick Air Force Base, site for the headquarters of the Atlantic Missile Range, for the testing of the weaponry of the Cold War: guided missiles, intermediate-range ballistic missiles, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. North of Cocoa Beach, on the very tip of the Cape itself, was the huge new secret launching facility from which all these rockets and pilot-less aircraft were fired, a stone boondock dune plain with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Banana River on the other, with soil so sandy that the scrub pines had trouble growing fifteen feet high, and yet malarial and so marshy that the cottonmouth moccasins stood their ground and stared you down, the sort of hopeless stone boondock spit where the vertebrates give up and the slugs and the No See'um bugs take over. The few buildings on the base were of the World War II Beaverboard Temporary variety. And like Edwards of old, the Cape, this poor godforsaken afterthought in the march of terrestrial evolution, turned out to be a paradise of Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving and Driving & the rest, for those who cared about such things. Or of Drinking & Driving & the rest, in any event. There was still no flying.

Langley remained the astronauts' headquarters, but the Cape would be their launching site, eventually, and they went there increasingly for training. They would fly in by commercial airliner, landing in Melbourne or Orlando. Most of them would rent convertibles and head for the Holiday Inn on Route A1A just north of the old part of Cocoa Beach, a motel run by a man named Henry Landiwirth, who soon found himself becoming innkeeper to the astronauts. Quite a little 1960's-style American Rat-Shack Strip was beginning to develop on Route A1A near the Holiday Inn: hamburger restaurants with plate-glass walls and hot magenta lights, night spots with Kontiki roofs, and little shopping slabs by the side of the highway, slabs of concrete with one-story cinderblock sheds on them broken up into store fronts with SPACE AVAILABLE signs posted.

Military units had always been great ones for creating "traditions" instantly, on the spot, and this unofficial corps of astronauts was no exception. The tradition was: the Cape is off limits to wives. This came about rather naturally. The Cape was not a good place for wives and children, because you couldn't count on finding kitchen facilities in the motels and there were none of the usual beach resort amenities, and none of them could afford the plane fares for family trips to Florida in the first place. Besides that, the boys' training hours were very long, sometimes ten or twelve hours a day. They did nothing at the Cape but work their butts off all day and then fall into bed, albeit this was a matter open to interpretation.

The boys' training at the Cape was not so much arduous as tedious. It was sedentary, even. It involved no flying. Some days they would be briefed on launch procedures. Or they would drive out to the launching base and go inside an old converted rat-shack hangar, Hangar S, and sit all day in a simulator known as the "procedures trainer," which on the inside was a replica of the capsule they would ride in during flight. Or technically they sat in there all day; in fact, they were lying down. It was as if you took a chair and pushed it over backward, so that its back was on the floor, and then sat in it. That was the position the astronaut would be in during his launch atop the rocket and the position he would be in as he came down toward the water inside the capsule at the end of the flight.

It was hard for Glenn or anyone else to explain exactly what you did for ten or twelve hours inside this thing. But clearly, once a man had had a day full of this tedious regimen, he was ready to limber up a little, get the blood flowing again, wiggle his fanny a bit. For Glenn it was enough to go out to that hardtack strand at Cocoa Beach and run two or three miles. It was the greatest longdistance running track you could possibly ask for, with pure ocean air to help your pump get going efficiently. And there would be John Glenn, the very picture of astronaut dedication, pounding along the same shore from which he would one day be hurled into the heavens. John Glenn Running for the Big One at Cocoa Beach was an even better picture than the one he had put on display at Langley. Glenn noticed that some of his confreres were loosening up in quite another way, however. Which is to say, they were checking in at the holy coordinates. After a long day of make-believe flying in the simulator… a little Drinking & Driving & the rest of the real pilot's life.

The driving eventually took on an extraordinary dimension here at the Cape. Gus Grissom and Gordon Cooper, and then Al Shepard and Wally Schirra, would discover Jim Rathmann. Rathmann was a big rugged character who had one of the largest automobile dealerships in the area, a General Motors agency about twenty miles south of Cocoa Beach near Melbourne. It was typical Air Force stuff that Gus and some of the others should become great pals of his. Rathmann was no ordinary auto dealer, however. He turned out to be a racing driver; the best, in fact. In 1960 he won the Indianapolis 500 after having finished second three times. Rathmann was a great friend of Ed Cole, the president of Chevrolet. Cole had helped Rathmann set up his agency. When he found out that Rathmann knew the Mercury astronauts, he became the astrobuff of all astrobuffs. America seemed to be full of businessmen like Cole who exercised considerable power and were strong leaders but who had never exercised power and leadership in its primal form: manly courage in the face of physical danger. When they met someone who had it , they wanted to establish a relationship with that righteous stuff. After meeting the astronauts, Cole, who had just turned fifty, was determined to learn to fly. Meantime, Rathmann set up a leasing arrangement whereby the boys could lease any type of Chevrolet they wanted for practically nothing per year. Eventually, Gus and Gordo had Corvettes like Al Shepard's; Wally moved up from an Austin-Healy to a Maserati; and Scott Carpenter got a Shelby Cobra, a true racing vehicle. Al was continually coming by Rathmann's to have his gear ratios changed. Gus wanted flared fenders and magnesium wheels. The fever gripped them all, but Gus and Gordo especially. They were determined to show the champ, Rathmann, and each other that they could handle these things. Gus would go out rat-racing at night at the Cape, racing full-bore for the next curve, dealing with the oncoming headlights by psychokinesis, spinning off the shoulders and then scrambling back up on the highway for more of it. It made you cover up your eyes and chuckle at the same time. The boys were fearless in an automobile, they were determined to hang their hides right out over the edge—and they had no idea what mediocre drivers they actually were, at least by the standards of professional racing. Which is to say they were like every group of pilot trainees at every base in America who ever reached that crazed hour of the night when it came time to prove that the right stuff works in all areas of life.

Cocoa Beach had begun to take on the raw excitement of a boom town and the manic and motley cast of characters that goes with it. In boom towns of the oil-gush or gold-rush variety the excitement had always come from simple greed. But Cocoa Beach was more like a Second World War boom town. There was enough greed in the air to make things spicy, but the true fervor was the joie de combat . People coming to work at the Cape, for NASA, private contractors, or whomever, felt like part of the mad rush to battle the Soviets for dominion over the heavens. At Edwards, or Muroc, in the old days, the worthy warriors used to repair in the evening to Pancho's, which, though theoretically a public place, was like a club for the adventurers over the high desert. At the Cape, by 1960, the warriors had the motels on the rat-shack strip along Route A1A. At night the pool areas of the motels became like the roaring fraternity house lounge of Project Mercury. Very few people, no matter what their rank in the project, had a place big enough, much less attractive enough, to entertain in. But every night the fraternal lounge was open, under the skies, in the salt air, out near the beach, and the party was on, and one and all braved the palmetto bugs and the No See'um bugs and celebrated the fact that they were on the scene where this great Cold War adventure was taking place. Naturally nothing gave the party quite so much magic as the presence of an astronaut.