Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

In Washington, at Langley, and at the Cape, NASA was deluged with telephone calls from newspapers, wire services, magazines, radio stations—and most callers wanted to know what the astronauts' reaction was to Gagarin's flight. So the First Three, Glenn, Grissom, and Shepard, all prepared statements. Shepard cranked out something that said next to nothing at all; standard government issue. Privately he was put out with Gilruth and von Braun and everyone else for not sending him up in March, as it now appeared they could have.

As usual, it was Glenn whom the press quoted most. He as much as said: "Well, they just beat the pants off us, that's all, and there's no use kidding ourselves about that. But now that the space age has begun, there's going to be plenty of work for everybody." Glenn was considered especially forthright, gracious, and magnanimous. He was big about the thing, as the saying goes—and that seemed especially commendable, since he was still considered the American front runner for the flight that would have made him "the first man in space." He had swallowed his own disappointment like a man.

Alan Shepard finally got his turn on May 5. He was inserted in the capsule, on top of a Redstone rocket, about an hoar before dawn, with an eye toward a launch shortly after daybreak. But as in the case of the ape, there was a four-hour hold in the countdown, caused mainly by an overheating inverter. Now the sun was up, and all across the eastern half of the country people were doing the usual, turning on their radios and television sets, rolling the knobs in search of something to give the nerve endings a little tingle—and what suspense awaited them! An astronaut sat on the tip of a rocket, preparing to get himself blown to pieces.

Even in California, where it was very early, highway patrolmen reported a strange and troubling sight. For no apparent reason drivers, hordes of them, were pulling off the highways and stopping on the shoulders, as if controlled by Mars. The patrolmen were slow in figuring it out, because they did not have AM radios. But the citizenry did, and they had become so excited as the countdown progressed at Cape Canaveral, so ravenously curious as to what would happen to the mortal hide of Alan Shepard when they fired the rocket, it was too much. Even the simple act of driving overloaded the nervous system. They stopped; they turned up the volume; they were transfixed by the prospect of the lonely volunteer about to be exploded into hash.

This tiny lad, up on the tip of that enormous white bullet, appeared to have about one chance in ten of living through it. Over the three weeks since the great Soviet triumph of Gagarin's flight, one terrible event had followed another. The United States had sent in a puppet army of Cuban exiles to conquer the Soviets' puppet regime in Cuba, and instead suffered the humiliation that became known as the Bay of Pigs. This had nothing directly to do with the space flight, of course, but it heightened the feeling that this was not the time to be trying brave and desperate deeds in the contest with the Soviets. The sad truth was, our boys always botch it . Eight days after that, on April 25, NASA had another big test of an Atlas rocket. It was supposed to carry a dummy astronaut into orbit, but it went off course and had to be blown up by remote control after forty seconds. The explosion nearly wiped out Gus Grissom, who was following the rocket's ascent as chase pilot in an F-106. Three days after that, April 28, a so-called Little Joe rocket with a Mercury capsule on top of it went off on another crazy trajectory and had to be aborted after thirty-three seconds. Both of these were tests of the Mercury-Atlas system, which would be used for orbital flights, and they had nothing to do with the Mercury-Redstone system, which Shepard would be riding—but it was far too late to make fine points. Our rockets always blow up and our boys always botch it .

And so now, on the morning of May 5, thousands, millions, stopped by the side of the road, paralyzed by the drama. This was the greatest death-defying hell-driver stunt ever broadcast, a patriotic stunt, a hash-mad stunt bound up with the fate of the country. People were beside themselves.

What must be going through the man's mind? Him and his poor wife… Then the radio announcer would tell how Shepard's wife, Louise, was following the countdown over television inside their home in Virginia Beach, Virginia. What a state the poor woman must be in! And so forth and so on. Brave lad! He hasn't resigned yet!

As for Shepard, what was going through his mind at that moment, and through much of his body, from his brain to his pelvic saddle, was a steadily increasing desire to urinate. It was no joke. He had been through 120 complete simulations of his flight, simulations that included the smallest details anyone could imagine: the early-morning wakeup by the official astronaut physician, Dr. William Douglas, the physical exam, the attaching of all the biosensors, the slipping of the thermometer tube up the rectum, the putting on of the suit, the hooking up of the oxygen tube and the communications lead, the ride out to the launch pad, the insertion, as it was known, into the capsule, the closing of the hatch, the works. They even went through the process of sucking the air out of the capsule with a hose and pressurizing the interior with pure oxygen. Then Shepard would go through yet more simulated rides and aborts, using the capsule itself as if it was a procedures trainer.

Three days ago, it turned out, even the mental atmosphere of the real thing was simulated. It was three days ago, May 2, that Shepard was originally scheduled to be launched. The weather made it a doubtful proposition, but they went ahead with the countdown, and Shepard had dinner in crew quarters the night before the flight, with much comradely banter, and Dr. Douglas tiptoed into his room the next morning and woke him up, and then he had the pre-launch breakfast, steak wrapped in bacon, plus eggs—in fact, Shepard went through everything, right up to the point where he would have climbed into the van and ridden out to the rocket, in the belief that this just might be it. Then the launch was postponed because of bad weather. Only at this point did NASA finally reveal that it was Shepard who had been assigned to the flight and was suited up and waiting behind the door in Hangar S. So Shepard had even been through the actual feeling of… this is the day . But no one had ever seriously envisioned the problem he now faced.

There was no easy way out when one's bladder kept getting larger and the capsule kept getting smaller. The dimensions of this little pod had been kept as tight as possible in order to hold down the weight. Once the various tanks, tubes, electrical circuits, instrument panels, radio hookups, and so on, were crammed in, along with the astronaut's emergency parachute, the space left over was not much more than a holster you could slip two legs and a torso into, with a tiny bit of room remaining for arms. The word they used, insertion , was not far off. The seat was literally a mold of Shepard's back and legs. They had packed the plaster right onto his body up at Langley Field. He was now in his seat, but resting on his back. It was as if a man were sitting in a very small sports car that had been upended so that it pointed straight up at the sky. In the rehearsals Shepard had reached the point where he could slip into his slot with one continuous series of moves. But this time, for the real thing, he had on a new pair of white boots, and the boot slipped on the armrest of the couch when he was snaking his right leg up into the capsule. That threw him off, and he wound up with everything inside except his left arm. The capsule was so small that getting his left arm inside became a terrific operation, with him wrenching this way and that and crewmen out on the gantry offering advice. Now he was so jammed in that the cuff on his right wrist, where his glove joined the sleeve of the pressure suit, kept catching on the parachute. He looked at the parachute and all of a sudden wondered what good it was. Technicians were craning in and fastening him to the couch with knee straps and a lap belt and a chest strap and screwing hoses to his pressure suit to maintain the pressure and control the temperature and wiring up leads for the biomedical sensors and the radio hookup and attaching and sealing a hose to the face plate of his helmet, for oxygen. In all likelihood, if he ever needed the parachute, he'd be a hole in the ground before he could get all these rigs undone. Then they closed the hatch, and he could feel his heartbeat quicken. But it soon subsided, and he was stuffed into this little thimble, lying on his back, practically immobile, with his legs jack-knifed.