Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

Gus stayed at the Holiday Inn until practically the day before his flight, maintaining an even strain. He cut down a little on the waterskiing, which was his main form of exercise, and on the nocturnal proficiency runs on the highways, in order to avoid getting banged up on the eve of the flight, but otherwise life went on pretty much as usual at the Cape, here in Fighter Jock Heaven.

One night just before the flight, when he was in the cocktail lounge evening out the strain a bit, who should Gus run into but Joe Walker. NASA had given Joe a few days off from Edwards to attend the launch, and so here he was. By this time, July 1961, Walker and Bob White had been flying up a storm in the X-15. In April, White had set a new speed record of Mach 4.62, which was just over 3,000 miles an hour, and in May Joe Walker had topped that by going Mach 4.95, and White had come right back in June and flown Mach 5.27. The X-15 now had the Big Engine, the XLR-99, with its 57,000 pounds of thrust. The True Brothers were ready to go all-out toward their goal of exceeding Mach 6 and an altitude of more than fifty miles… in piloted flight. Piloted ! These developments could be found in the press… if one cared to look for them… but they were obscured by Gagarin's flight, followed by Shepard's flight… the single combat for the heavens. As a matter of fact, Joe Walker had taken the X-15 to Mach 4.95, the highest speed in the history of aviation, on the same day that Kennedy addressed Congress to propose the race for the moon… Next to the notion of a moon voyage Walker's Mach 4.95 was pretty pedestrian stuff. But surely the truth would dawn on them eventually! It was with that in mind… the simple truth!… that Joe Walker happened to run into Gus Grissom at the Holiday Inn's cocktail lounge.

Both Gus and Joe had knocked back a few, it being after dark, after all, and Joe starts in with a little Yeager-style country-boy banter about how Gus and his pals had better hurry up or him and his boys would pass them on the way up. Oh, yeah, says Gus, how's that? Well, says Joe Walker, we've got a 57,000-pound rocket engine now, and the Redstone that shoots your little peapod up there only puts out 78,000, so we're almost up with you—and we fly the damn thing. We actually fly it and we land it. Joe Walker meant to keep it light and just rag Grissom a little bit, but he couldn't hold back a note in his voice concerning where things actually stood in the true scheme of things, on the real pyramid of flying competition. Everybody is looking at Grissom, the astronaut, to see what he's going to say. Grissom, who is a tough little nut when he wants to be, stares at Walker… and then he breaks into a grin and starts a kind of gruff-gus chuckle. Oh, I'll be looking over my shoulder the whole time, Joe, and if you come by, I swear I'll wave.

And so much for Joe Walker and the True Brothers! It was all right there in that scene, the new simple truth. Grissom didn't even feel angry. There was nothing that Joe Walker could say or do—and nothing that even Chuck Yeager himself could say or do—that would change the new order. The astronaut was now at the apex of the pyramid. The rocket pilots were already… the old guys, the eternal remember-whens… Oh, it didn't even have to be said ! It was in the air, and everyone knew it. Hell, when they started flying jets and rocket planes at Muroc, somewhere there must have been the old guys, the bitter old bastards, the remember-whens, who could just fly the hell out of a propeller plane and were still insisting that that was what it was all about. Flying wasn't a competition like baseball or football. No, in flying any major advance in technology could change the rules. The Mercury rocket-capsule system—the word "system" was now on everybody's lips—was the new cutting edge. No, Gus had no need to get excited any more over Joe Walker or anybody else at Edwards.

Gus seemed like a pretty relaxed man all the way around. He would get a little irritated at the engineering sessions he sat in on during the last couple of weeks before the flight and would give them a few gus-gruff growls if they seemed to want to tinker with this and that at the last minute, but that seemed to be sheer eagerness to get on with the flight. There was even a bit of the old boondock Edwards broomstick-and-baling wire spirit about the whole thing. Just two nights before the flight it dawned on one of the doctors that they had never made provisions for a urine receptacle for Gus, to avoid the sort of thing Shepard had experienced. That was a hell of a note. They figured they could make do with an ordinary rubber condom for the receptacle. But what would hold it in place and keep it from coming off? Dee O'Hara, the nurse, helped out. She drove into Cocoa Beach and bought a panty girdle, and they rigged that up with the condom. The goddamned girdle gave you a hell of a tight grip on the groin, but Gus figured he could get by with it. All in all, he seemed pretty loose, a test pilot of the old school. He even had a foretaste of the mental atmosphere of the real thing, just as Shepard had. On July 19 he was inserted into the capsule, and the hatch was sealed, when the flight was canceled because of bad weather. The flight finally took place on July 21. Judging by his pulse rate and respiration, which was transmitted via his body sensors, Gus was more nervous than Shepard during the countdown. These rates, taken by themselves, didn't mean a great deal, however, and no one would have thought twice about it except for what happened at the end of the flight. The flight itself was very nearly a duplicate of Shepard's, except that Grissom's capsule had a window, not just a periscope, giving him a much better view of the world, and he had a more sophisticated hand controller. His pulse stayed up around 150 throughout the five minutes he was weightless—Shepard's pulse had never reached 140, not even during lift-off—and went up to 171 during the firing of the retro-rockets before the re-entry through the earth's atmosphere. The informal consensus among the program's doctors was that if an astronaut's pulse rate went above 180, the mission should be aborted. The capsule splashed down almost precisely on target, just as Shepard's had, within three miles of the recovery ship, the carrier Randolph . The capsule hit the water, then keeled over on one side, just as Shepard's had, and took its own sweet time righting itself. Grissom thought he heard a gurgling noise inside the capsule—as had Shepard—and began looking for water seeping in, but didn't see any. The recovery helicopter, designated Hunt Club 1, was over the capsule within less than two minutes. Grissom was still in the seat, resting on his back, as he had been at the outset of the flight, and the capsule was bobbing around in the water.

Over his microphone Grissom said, "Okay, give me how much longer it'll be before you get here."

The helicopter pilot, a Navy lieutenant named James Lewis, said, "This is Hunt Club 1. We are in orbit now at this time, around the capsule."

Grissom said, "Roger, give me about another five minutes here, to mark these switch positions here, before I give you a call to come in and hook on. Are you ready to come in and hook on any time?"

Lewis said, "Hunt Club 1, roger, we are ready any time you are."

There was a chart on which the astronaut was supposed to record the switch positions (on or off) with a grease pencil.

Five and a half minutes later Grissom radioed Lewis in the helicopter again:

"Okay, Hunt Club, this is Liberty Bell. Are you ready for the pickup?"

Lewis said, "This is Hunt Club 1, this is affirmative."

Grissom said, "Okay, latch on, then give me a call and I'll power down and blow the hatch, okay?"

"This is Hunt Club 1, roger, will give you a call when we're ready for you to blow."