Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

The day only got hotter. After the little ceremony, with Webb waxing sonorous, they drove Gus and Betty and the boys to the VIP guesthouse at Patrick Air Force Base. This was supposed to be a big deal. They were told that these were secret quarters where they would be completely screened off from the press and the gawkers. The VIP guesthouse… Betty looked around. Even the military VIP quarters here at Cocoa Beach were Low Rent. This VIP guesthouse was like some musty cabin court from the late 1930's. She looked out the window. Over there was the beach, that amazing hot-brick Cocoa Beach. But between the guesthouse and the beach was Route A1A, with cars roaring back and forth in the screaming heat of mid-July. She would never even make it across the highway to the beach with the children. Well, they could watch TV—but there was no TV; and no pool. Then she looked in the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was stuffed with food, everything you could imagine. For some reason this made her furious. She could see the afternoon shaping up and the rest of the day and tomorrow, too. She would stay here with the children, cooking and risking her life dragging them to the worst beach in Florida… and Gus would no doubt go to the space center or into town…

Town meant the Holiday Inn, where the other fellows and their wives would be. That's where they would be celebrating and having the good times.

Listen, while you're getting settled, I think I'll—

Suddenly Betty was furious: She was not staying in this place ! Gus didn't know what had gotten into her.

She said she wanted to go to the Holiday Inn. That was where everybody would be. She told Gus to call the Holiday Inn and get a room.

She gruffed it out with such fury that Gus called the Holiday and pulled the strings and got them a room. If Gus had managed to park her here in this faded VIP mausoleum and vanish, so that she could sit here in the heat of the slab watching the hours go by while he tooled around the pool at the Holiday as the big shot—she would have slit a wrist. That was how grim it was. That was how shabbily they had treated her. That was how grossly they had welshed on the compact. Now… they truly owed her .

Since the pooch proved to be unscrewable, officially, and Gus Grissom's flight was therefore on the record as a success, NASA was suddenly in great shape. John Kennedy was happy. "We have started our long voyage to the moon." That was the idea. Neither Shepard's nor Grissom's suborbital flight measured up to Yuri Gagarin's orbit of the earth, but the fact that NASA had completed two successful manned flights seemed to mean that the United States was battling back successfully in the competition for the heavens.

Naturally, true to form, that was the moment the anonymous and uncanny Chief Designer, D-503, Builder of the Integral, chose to show the world who actually ruled the heavens.

Just sixteen days after Grissom's flight, which is to say, on August 6, 1961, the Soviets sent Vostok 2 into orbit with a cosmonaut named Gherman Titov aboard. Titov circled the earth for an entire day, completing seventeen full orbits, and landing where he had started, on Soviet soil. Three times he came over the United States, 125 miles overhead. Once again, all over the country, politicians and the press seemed profoundly alarmed, and the awful vision was presented: suppose the cosmonaut were armed with hydrogen bombs and flung them as he came over, like Thor flinging thunderbolts… one here, one there… Toledo disappears off the face of the earth… Kansas City… Lubbock… Titov's flight seemed so awesome it made the Shepard and Grissom flights look terribly insignificant. The Integral and its Chief Designer could apparently do anything they wanted, and at any time.

Seven days later, August 13, 1961, Nikita Khrushchev began the steps that led to the building of a wall, precisely like a penitentiary wall, through the middle of an entire city, Berlin, to prevent the population of East Berlin from crossing over to the West. But the world was still blinking at the radiance of the day-long space flight. "They're a bit brutal—but you have to admit they're geniuses. Imagine keeping a man in space for twenty-four hours!"

So far as NASA was concerned, the Titov flight put an end to the Mercury-Redstone program then and there. The next astronaut in line to ride on top of the Redstone, John Glenn, was now assigned to attempt an orbital flight, using the Atlas rocket, which had done so poorly in unmanned tests. Later there were those who speculated that NASA had been "saving Glenn for the big one" all along. But Glenn did not have that kind of status within NASA. He had learned that to his bitter regret. No, he had only the invisible Chief Designer, Builder of the Integral, to thank for the fact that he was assigned to be the first American to orbit the earth.

After Titov's flight the phrase the space gap began to be repeated throughout the American press. Space gap was a superstitious condition. It began to seem of urgent importance for NASA to put a man into space before the sands stopped flowing in the hourglass on the last day of the year 1961. The great cowboy rush of the winter of 1960-61 started all over again. The hell with fastidious precautions… For example, the Soviets revealed that Titov had suffered from nausea throughout his flight. Later they changed that to say that he had suffered nausea after "prolonged" flight. They would have probably not revealed even that much, except that they decided to participate in international scientific conferences in order to publicize their space feats. It also came out—although few specifics were given—that the Soviet manned space-flight program, from selection of their cosmonauts (from among military pilots) and their training (centrifuge rides, parabolic rides in jet fighters, and so forth) to capsule design and launching and retro-rocket systems, was remarkably similar to NASA's. Everyone at NASA regarded this as vastly reassuring. We're on the right track, anyway ! Of course, the Soviet rockets were far more powerful. That was the given. And if a cosmonaut of the Integral had suffered nausea in orbit, then astronauts probably would, too. But there was no time to worry about that now. Find out about it the way Titov did: up there. Mas alla Over the next hill!

In September NASA successfully launched a Mercury-Atlas capsule with a dummy astronaut aboard and brought it back on target into the Atlantic, near Bermuda, after one orbit of the earth. The press speculated that Kennedy would pressure NASA to put an astronaut on the next flight, but Hugh Dryden and Bob Gilruth managed to hold out for an additional test. They wanted to send a chimpanzee into orbit with the Atlas rocket first.

This time, out at Edwards, the True Brothers didn't even derive a chilly smile from the fact that once more in the exalted Project Mercury an ape would be taking the first flight . An ape would make the first orbit of the earth for the U.S.A. The prestige of Project Mercury had by now rendered such considerations meaningless. On October 11, at Edwards, Bob White had made an extraordinary flight in the X-15—and the country hardly noticed. White took the X-15 up to 217,000 feet with the Big Engine—and the press merely nodded perfunctorily. So a man had just flown very high in an airplane; how interesting; and that was that. The fact that White was on top of a rocket, the same sort of rocket as the Redstone or the Atlas, the fact that his flight to 217,000 feet was in effect piloted space flight —none of this was likely to impress Kennedy or the public amid the panic over Titov and the space gap . White had gone forty miles up, ten miles short of the arbitrarily set boundary of "space." The XLR-99, the Big Engine, had delivered 57,000 pounds of thrust, just 21,000 short of the thrust of the Redstones that took Shepard and Grissom aloft. White's speed reached Mach 5.21, or 3,647 miles an hour; Shepard's and Grissom's rocket velocities were only slightly greater, about 5,180 miles per hour. White was weightless for three minutes during his tremendous arc over the top, as compared to Shepard's and Grissom's five minutes. White saw all the things that Shepard and Grissom saw (and Shepard, only barely)… including the entire blue band of atmosphere at the horizon of the earth. Above all, White was a pilot . He controlled his plane's ascent. He used hydrogen-peroxide thrusters to control his attitude once the air became too thin for aileron control—the same system of hydrogen-peroxide thrusters that Shepard and Grissom had used—and he did it all without benefit of any automatic backup. And he brought the ship back down through the earth's atmosphere himself… and landed it himself on the holy plateau of Edwards… on the dome of the world. A rocket pilot (quoth the brethren), but the national press barely noticed.