Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

How could they be serious!—the engineers would say. Any chance of a man being able to guide a rocket from inside a ballistic vehicle, a projectile, was so remote as to be laughable. This proposal was so radical the engineers knew they would be able to block it. It was no laughing matter to the seven pilots, however. They also wanted complete control of the re-entry procedure. They wanted to establish the capsule's angle of attack manually and fire the retro-rockets themselves without any help from the automatic control system. This suggestion made the engineers wince. Slayton even wanted to redesign the hand controller that would activate the hydrogen peroxide thrusters to make the capsule pitch, roll, or yaw. He wanted the hand controller to operate the pitch and roll thrusters only; yaw would be controlled by pedals which the astronaut would operate with his feet. That was the conventional setup on aircraft: a two-axis stick plus pedals. That was the way pilots established attitude control.

Life magazine and the worshipful public and the worshipful politicians and all the others who had already exalted the seven astronauts did not care in the slightest whether they functioned like pilots or not. It was enough that they were willing to climb atop the rocket at all, in the name of the battle with the Soviets for the high ground, and be exploded into space or to the harp farm. It was not enough for the men themselves, however. All of them were veteran military pilots, and five of them had already reached the higher elevations of the invisible ziggurat when Project Mercury began, and they were determined to go into space as pilots and as nothing else.

Control—in the form of overrides at the very least—was the one thing that would neutralize the recurring taunt within the fraternity: A monkey's gonna make the first flight . In his speech before the brotherhood Slayton had brought that out into the open with his crack about the "college-trained chimpanzee." That had seemed like a Slayton sortie into sarcasm and hyperbole. He made no reference to the fact that such a college actually existed.

But in the deserts of New Mexico, about eighty miles north of El Paso and the Mexican Border, at Holloman Air Force Base, which was part of the White Sands missile-range complex, NASA had set up a Project Mercury chimpanzee colony. There was nothing secret about it, but it attracted little notice. The chimpanzee program had been devised mainly to satisfy "the medical Cassandras." From the moment a Joint Armed Forces-National Research Council Committee on Bioastronautics had visited the new NASA facility at Langley in January 1959, there had been doctors warning that the weightless state or high g-forces, or both, could be devastating and that animal flights should be mandatory. So NASA had twenty veterinarians training forty chimpanzees in a compound at the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman. Eventually one of the beasts would be chosen for what amounted to a dress rehearsal of the first manned flight. The idea would be not only to see if the chimpanzee could stand the strain but also to see if he could use his brain and his hands normally throughout the ride.

Chimpanzees were chosen as much for their intelligence as their physiological similarity to humans. They could be trained to do fairly complex manual tasks, on cue, particularly if one got hold of them when they were young. Once they were trained to do the tasks on the ground, it would be possible to give them the cues to do the same tasks during a space flight and see if the weightless condition impeded them. Early in the game the vets decided that rewards, mere positive reinforcement, would not be sufficient for the job at hand. The only sure-fire training technique was operant conditioning . The principle here was the avoidance of pain. Or, to put it another way, if the ape didn't do the job right, he was punished with electric shocks in the soles of his feet.

The Holloman veterinarians, like most veterinarians, were compassionate men who were interested in relieving pain in animals and not in inflicting it upon them. But this was war! The chimpanzee program was an essential part of the battle for the high ground! It was no time for halfway measures! As congressmen told you every day, national survival was at stake! The veterinarians' brief was to get the job done with the utmost speed and efficacy. There were several ways of training animals, but only operant conditioning , based on concepts developed by B. F. Skinner, seemed anywhere near foolproof. In any case, the "psychomotor stimulus plates" were attached to the beasts' feet and they were strapped into chairs, and the process began… And when the apes did well, you gave them hugs and nuzzles, to be sure, first taking the precaution of making certain they weren't in a mood to bite your goddamned nose off.

Oh, the apes knew a thing or two! Their intelligence was only just below that of man. They had memories; they could figure out the situation. At an early age they had been seized in West Africa and separated from their mothers by this new species, the humans, and removed from all familiar surroundings and put in cages and shipped to this godforsaken alien landscape, the New Mexico desert, where they remained in cages… when they weren't in the hands of a bunch of human ball-breakers in white smocks who strapped them down and zapped them and put them through insane exercises and routines. The beasts tried everything they could think of to escape. They snapped, snarled, spit, bit, thrashed at the straps, and made runs for it. Or they bided their time and used their heads. They would go along with a training task, seeming to cooperate, until the white smocker seemed to let his guard down—then they'd make a break for it. But the resistance and the wiles were of no avail. All they got for their struggles was more zaps and blue bolts. Some of the brightest apes were also the most intractable and resourceful; they would take the electric shocks and then seem to give up and submit to fate—and then try to tear the white smockers a new asshole or two and make a run for it. With these implacable little bastards it was sometimes necessary to give them a tap or two with a rubber hose, or whatever.

Then, at last, the sophisticated part of the training could begin. It took two main forms: the desensitizing or adapting out of the fears that a rocket flight would ordinarily hold for the animal (just confining an untrained chimpanzee in a Mercury capsule would have driven him berserk with fear); and placing the animal in a procedures trainer, a replica of the capsule he would be inside in flight, and teaching him to respond to lights and buzzers and throw the proper switches on cue—and having him do this day after day until it became a thoroughly familiar environment, as familiar, routine, and workaday as an office.

The vets took the chimpanzees by airplane to Wright-Patterson for rides on the centrifuge the Air Force had there. They would strap each ape into the gondola, close the hatch, and pipe in the sound of a Redstone rocket launch and start him spinning, gradually introducing him to higher g-forces. They took them for parabolic rides backseat in fighter planes to familiarize them with the feeling of weightlessness. They put them in the simulator for endless hours and endless days of on-cue manual-task training. Since the chimpanzee would not be wearing a pressure suit in flight, he was put inside a pressurized cubicle, which in turn would be placed in the Mercury capsule. The monkey's instrument panel was inside the inner cubicle. Therein, day by day, month by month, the monkey learned to operate certain switches in different sequences when cued by flashing lights. If he did the job incorrectly, he received an electric shock. If he did it correctly, he received banana-flavored pellets, plus some attaboys and nuzzles from the vets. Gradually the beasts were worn down. They were tractable now. The operant conditioning was taking place. A life of avoiding the blue bolts and gratefully accepting the attaboys and pellets had become the better part of valor. Rebellion had proved to be a dead end.