Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

Well, thanks to the Life deal, Scott and Rene could now get mortgage money and afford to build a new house in a nice area like Timber Cove. Or thanks to that and the panting eagerness of the developers to have astronauts in their new developments. It was the best advertisement they could have. They gave the boys close to at-cost deals on the land and the houses, and they let them have the mortgage money at 4 percent, with very little down payment. And for astronauts like John and Scott, who had now flown, they couldn't do enough.

The contractors and developers and the public generally thought Scott and his flight were terrific… but within NASA something… was going on. Scott and Rene had both begun to detect it, although no one ever said anything openly. Scott had gotten all the medals and all the parades and the trip to the White House, but something was up, and not even the other wives would tell Rene what it was.

Scott had flown on May 24, three months. after John. Deke Slayton had been scheduled to take the flight, but then NASA made it known that Deke had a medical problem: idiopathic atrial fibrillation. This was a condition in which the electrical firing sequence of the heart went out of sync occasionally, causing an irregular pulse and a slight lowering of the pumping capacity of the organ. Idiopathic meant that the causes were unknown. The condition had been discovered, said NASA, during centrifuge runs in August 1959. Slayton had been examined at the Philadelphia Navy Hospital and the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine at San Antonio, where the verdict—or so Slayton was told—was that the condition was a minor anomaly and not serious enough to cost him his job as astronaut. But, in fact, one of the Air Force doctors at San Antonio, a highly regarded cardiologist, had written a letter to Webb recommending that Slayton not be assigned to a flight, since atrial fibrillation, idiopathic or not, did reduce the efficiency of the heart to some degree.

Webb just kept the letter on file. Slayton was assigned, in November 1961, to the second orbital flight. Early in January Webb ordered a complete reassessment of the man's heart condition. His argument was that Slayton was an Air Force pilot on loan to NASA, and an Air Force cardiologist had recommended that he not be used for flights. Therefore, the case should be reviewed. Slayton's case now went before two boards, one made up of high-ranking NASA doctors and the other made up of eight doctors convened by the Air Force Surgeon General. Both approved Slayton for the approaching Mercury flight. Nevertheless, Webb bucked the case up to three Washington cardiologists, including Eugene Braunwald of the National Institutes of Health, as a sort of blue-ribbon panel. He also requested an opinion from Paul Dudley White, who had become famous as Eisenhower's cardiologist. Why this was happening so late in the game, three months after Deke had been assigned to the flight, no one could figure. All four doctors came to the same conclusion, apparently out of sheer common sense as much as anything else. Here was a case concerning a pilot with a minor heart defect. He could probably make a space flight or any other flight with no problems. Nevertheless, from the administrator on down, the entire space agency seemed to be agonizing and oscillating and spinning its wheels over the matter, which by now had accumulated a file as thick as your arm. So if Project Mercury had plenty of ready and willing astronauts with no cardiovascular anomalies at all, why not use one of them and have done with it? That was it, so far as Webb was concerned. It was now the middle of March. Two months ago, in his set-to with Glenn, James E. Webb had run up against astropower and had lost. This time he had his way. Slayton was off the flight.

The great Victorian Animal was utterly baffled. The Animal had been dutifully cranking out human-interest stories about Slayton. How could NASA decide now that he was a washout with a bad heart? There was no…proper emotion… for the event.

According to the official NASA wording, Slayton was "keenly disappointed" about the decision That was putting it somewhat delicately. The man was furious. Slayton tried to keep a rein on himself in public statements, however, because he didn't want to jeopardize his chances of reinstatement. He was convinced that the whole thing had somehow been blown up into a specious issue and that they would all come to their senses by and by. Privately he was tying knots in the flagpole. He kept saying that Paul Dudley White had made an operational decision. His argument was that White and the other doctors had first delivered their medical opinion—he was fit to fly—and then they had delivered their operational opinion, which was: "Even so, why not choose somebody else?" They were entitled to their medical opinion; period. But they had made an operational decision! This word, operational , was a holy word to Slayton. He was the King of Operational. Operational referred to action, the real thing, piloting, the right stuff. Medical referred to one of the many accessories to the business at hand. You didn't call in doctors to make an operational decision. The Life reporters knew very well how angry Slayton was, and other reporters had strong hints of it. But the Genteel Beast could find no appropriate… tone… for it. So after a short time they just dropped it. They stuck with the NASA version: "Keenly disappointed." Few of them realized that it went beyond anger. Deke Slayton was crushed. He had not merely lost his ride on the next flight; he had lost everything. NASA had just announced that he no longer had… the right stuff. It could blow at any seam!—and his had blown. Idiopathic atrial fibrillation—it didn't matter! Any seam! His whole career, his ascension from the dour grim tundra of Wisconsin was based upon his indisputable possession of that righteous stuff. That was the most important thing he had ever possessed in this Trough of Mortal Error, and it was plenty. It was the ultimate. And it had blown , just like that! He felt humiliated. This thing would now be rubbed in his face everywhere he turned He couldn't go back to Edwards now, even if he wanted to. The Air Force was not going to use a NASA reject for major flight test work. Flight test? Hell, he couldn't even fly a fighter plane by himself any more! It was true. He could go up only in two-seaters with another pilot—someone who was still intact, with no ruptured seams from which his vital stuff had leaked. There was even the possibility that the Air Force might ground him altogether, notwithstanding the fact that the Surgeon General's board had pronounced him "fully qualified as an Air Force pilot and as an astronaut." Air Force pride was at stake. The Air Force's Chief of Staff himself, General Curtis LeMay, was taking the position that if he wasn't qualified to fly for NASA, how could he be qualified to fly for the Air Force? All this was being said about him , Deke Slayton, who had fought hardest of all to have the astronaut be treated as a pilot , even to the extent of insisting on airplane-style controls for the capsule, or, rather, damn it, spacecraft .

It wasn't likely to make him any happier, either, to know that Scott Carpenter had taken his place. Carpenter had the least flight test experience of any of them, and yet he was replacing Deke Slayton—Deke Slayton, who had stood up before the Society of Experimental Test Pilots and insisted that only an experienced test pilot could do this job correctly. Wally Schirra, a man with real flight test credentials, had been training as Deke's backup. Why had he been passed over in favor of Carpenter? The two buddies, Glenn and Carpenter, were getting the first two orbital flights… and Deke Slayton was being left behind … to hitch airplane rides with other pilots.