Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

For the most part, the men involved in the X-15 program were realistic about the situation. Technically there was no reason why the X-15 should not lead to the X-15B or the X-20 or some other aerodynamic spaceship. Politically, however, the chances were not good and hadn't been good since October 1957, when Sputnik 1 went up. The politics of the space race demanded a small manned vehicle that could be launched as soon as possible with existing rocket power. And as the Edwards brethren knew, there was no use trying to wish the politics of the situation away.

But now, in mid-1960, the political reality itself had begun to change. The first signs had come in May. This was the same month, it so happened, in which Walker and White had begun to unlimber the X-15 and the Little Engine. But the change was being caused by events quite outside of their control.

The starting point was the so-called U-2 incident. A Soviet surface-to-air missile—no one even knew the Soviets had created such a weapon—shot down an American CIA "spy plane," the U-2, flown by a former Air Force pilot named Francis Gary Powers. Khrushchev used the incident to humiliate President Eisenhower at a summit conference in Paris. This was an election year, of course, and both of the main Democratic contenders, Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy, began citing the Soviets' superiority in rockets as a means of attacking the Eisenhower Administration. Meanwhile, the Soviets and their mighty Integral began pouring it on in earnest. They sent up a series of huge, five-ton Korabl ("Cosmic") Sputniks, carrying dummy cosmonauts or dogs or both; they obviously had a system powerful enough and sophisticated enough to put a man into orbit. NASA was not only unable to keep up with its original schedule of a manned ballistic flight in 1960, it couldn't even deliver a finished capsule—and its test rocket launches, all public events, went from bad to worse.

On July 29, NASA brought the seven astronauts and hundreds of VIPs to Cape Canaveral for a highly publicized first test of the Mercury-Atlas vehicle, a Mercury capsule atop an Atlas rocket. The Atlas, with its 367,000 pounds of thrust, would be used for manned orbital flights; the first Mercury flights, which would be suborbital, would use the smaller Redstone. July 29 was a dark rainy day, which only made the lift-off of the mighty rocket all the more spectacular. The earth rumbled underfoot, and the rocket rose slowly on three columns of flame. It was a terrific show. After sixty seconds it seemed to be directly overhead and gradually nosing over on its long arc toward the horizon, and the astronauts and everybody else had their necks up and their heads bent back, watching the Ahura-Mazda surge, when— kaboom !—it blew up. Just like that, right over their heads. For a moment it seemed as if it was going to come down in a few thousand enormous flaming pieces, right on everybody's bean. There was no danger, in fact; the rocket's momentum carried the debris away from the launch site. It was damned sobering, however, with your gullet stuck up in the air like a bird's… And it was very bad news for Project Mercury.

It was not the ultimate fiasco, however. The ultimate fiasco came later in the year when NASA put on a test at Cape Canaveral designed to show all the politicians that the Mercury capsule-and-rocket system was now almost ready for manned flight. They flew five hundred VIPs, including many congressmen and prominent Democrats, down to the Cape for the big event. The rocket, the Redstone, was not powerful enough to place the capsule into orbit, but it was supposed to take it up more than one hundred miles, fifty miles above the earth's atmosphere, and then it would re-enter the atmosphere and splash down in the Atlantic by parachute about three hundred miles from the Cape, near Bermuda. Everything except an astronaut was on the launch pad. The dignitaries were all seated in grandstands, and the countdown was intoned over the public-address system: "Nine… eight… seven… six…" and so forth, and their "We have ignition!"… and the mighty belch of flames bursts out of the rocket in a tremendous show of power… The mighty white shaft rumbles and seems to bestir itself—and then seems to change its mind, its computerized central nervous system, about the whole thing, because the flames suddenly cut off, and the rocket settles back down on the pad, and there's a little pop . A cap on the tip of the rocket comes off. It goes shooting up in the air, a tiny little thing with a needle nose. In fact, it's the capsule's escape tower. As the great crowd watches, stone silent and befuddled, it goes up to about 4,000 feet and descends under a parachute. It looks like a little party favor. It lands about four hundred yards away from the rocket on the torpid banks of the Banana River. Five hundred VIPs had come all the way to Florida, to this goddamned Low Rent sandspit, where bugs you couldn't even see invaded your motel room and bit your ankles until they ran red onto the acrylic shag carpet—all the way to this rock-beach boondock they had come, to see the fires of Armageddon and hear the earth shake with the thunder—and instead they get this… this pop … and a cork pops out of a bottle of Spumante. It was the original Project Vanguard fiasco all over again, except that it was worse in a way. At least with Vanguard, back in December of 1957, the folks got lots of flames and explosion. It at least looked halfway like a catastrophe. Besides that, it was very early in the game, in the contest for the heavens. But this—it was ridiculous! It was pathetic!

Kennedy had won the election, and during the campaign he had made such a point of attacking NASA's ineptness that it was a foregone conclusion that NASA's chief, T. Keith Glennan, who was a Republican in any case, would be replaced. The question now was how many other heads would roll. What about Bob Gilruth? After all, he was in charge of Project Mercury, which was going nowhere. Or von Braun, the alleged German rocket genius? Much sarcasm was creeping into the debate, and even von Braun was being attacked. For that matter, what about the seven brave lads…

As this sort of talk began to circulate, people at Ed wards began to beam up the radar… For months the word within NASA had been that the X-15 project would be the last hurrah for "the flyboys." Now that was all changing. No one was saying it publicly yet, but the unthinkable was now possible: for the first time, Project Mercury itself was regarded as expendable. Kennedy's advisor in scientific areas was Jerome Wiesner of M.I.T. He had drawn up a report for Kennedy that said the following, in effect:

Project Mercury had been sold to the Eisenhower Administration during the original Sputnik panic as the "quick and dirty" solution to getting a man into space ahead of the Russians. It had merely proved to be dirty or, hopeless, as in the Popped Cork business, which demonstrated that NASA did not even have the primitive Mercury-Redstone system ready. Even if the system worked, the Redstone could put a man into only a suborbital trajectory, with just fifteen minutes in space. The mighty Soviet Integral had already launched a series of huge Korabls and was probably on the verge of putting a man not only into space but into earth orbit. But in one area, Wiesner was telling Kennedy, the United States was ahead of the Soviets, and this was in unmanned scientific satellites. Why not concentrate on that program for the time being and play down—in effect, forfeit—the losing race to put a man into space? Why not abandon all these frantic attempts to convert the underpowered Redstone and Atlas missiles into space rockets and instead develop a careful, solid, long-range program using bigger rockets, such as the Titan, which might be ready in eighteen months?

And there you had it! As Joe Walker and everyone at Edwards knew, the "solid, long-range program" using the Titan was the X-20 or Dyna-Soar program, which would begin at Edwards as soon as the X-15 project was completed. The Air Force, which was in charge of the X-20 project, had never abandoned its hopes of running the entire manned space program. All along it had seemed unjust that NASA had been able to appropriate all the research and planning that had gone into Flickinger's Man-in-Space-Soonest program and convert it into Project Mercury. Perhaps with the change in administrations the situation could be corrected.