Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

Came time for the launch, and now Rene and the children watched the countdown on the TV in the safe house, with Wainwright and a Life photographer in attendance. Then the children rushed out and watched part of the rocket's slow ascent through a telescope mounted on a garage roof. The children didn't seem at all apprehensive. Flying was what their father did . They were in high spirits… And now they were following the re-entry, as best they could, on television. They had CBS turned on. There was Walter Cronkite. Rene knew him. Cronkite had become an astrobuff. He had more than the usual reasons to like the astronauts. It was his coverage of John Glenn's flight that, in the strange workings of the television news business, had led to his current eminence among the network anchormen. Cronkite had been explaining Scott's fuel problem as he entered the atmosphere. Then Cronkite's voice began to take on more and more concern. They didn't know where Scott was. They weren't sure he had begun his re-entry at the proper angle. All at once Cronkite's voice broke. Tears came into his eyes. "I'm afraid that…" There was a catch in his voice. His eyes glistened. He had the waterworks turned on. "I'm afraid… we may have… lost an astronaut …" What instincts the man had! There was the Press, the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion… live … with no prompting whatsoever! Rene's children were very quiet, staring at the screen. Yet Rene herself did not believe for a moment that Scott had perished. She was like every military pilot's wife in that respect. If he were merely missing—if no dead body had been found—then he was alive and would come through it all right. There were no two ways about it. Rene had known of a case in which a cargo plane had crash-landed in the Pacific and broken in two on impact, the rear half sinking like a brick. Some men were rescued from the front half, which stayed afloat a few minutes. And yet the wives of the men who had been in the rear of the craft refused to believe that they were lost. They were out there somewhere; it was only a matter of time. Rene had marveled at how long it had taken them to accept the obvious. But her reaction was precisely the same. Scott was all right, because there was no real proof that he wasn't. Cronkite gulped on the television screen. No tears came to her eyes at all. Scott was all right. He would turn up… No two ways about it

As a matter of fact, she was correct. Scott had come through the atmosphere in good shape. The capsule began rocking violently in the dense atmosphere below 50,000 feet, and he had to release his parachute early and by hand, the automatic system being out of fuel. The capsule had overshot the target area by some 250 miles. A reconnaissance plane found him in about forty minutes, but throughout that period the impression created on television was that he might be dead. When a rescue aircraft reached Scott, they found him bobbing contentedly on a life raft beside the capsule. He was very pleased with the whole adventure. When he reached the aircraft carrier Intrepid , he was in terrific spirits. He talked and talked into the night. He wanted to stay up and keep talking about the grand adventure he had been through. He was really pleased about all the experiments he had been able to do, despite the overcrowded checklist he had, and about solving or at least greatly narrowing down the mystery of the "fireflies." He hadn't determined precisely what they were, but he had proved that they were produced by the spacecraft itself; they were not some extraterrestrial material, and so on… He could have gone on all night… He was content… a job well done… He felt that he had helped create one of the most important roles in astronautics: man as scientist in space…

Over the next two weeks Scott received a hero's homage. It was not on the scale of John's, which was understandable, but it was sweet enough. There were parades in the East and parades in the West. He rode in a motorcade through Boulder, his old hometown, and through Denver, which was just down the highway. It was a great day. The sun was out and it was a light fluffy Rocky Mountain day in May, and Rene was beside him, sitting up on the ridge of the seat back in the convertible, wearing white gloves, like a proper Navy wife, and smiling and looking absolutely beautiful and radiant. Well, Scott thought he had just shot the moon.

Back at the Cape, Chris Kraft was telling his colleagues: "That sonofabitch will never fly for me again."

Kraft was furious. The truth was, he had been quietly put out before… about the seven brave lads. As he saw it, Carpenter had ignored repeated warnings from capcoms all around the world about wasting fuel, and this had almost resulted in a disaster, one that might have done irreparable damage to the program. As it was, Carpenter's performance had cast doubt on the capability of the Mercury system to carry out a long flight such as Titov's seventeen orbits. And why had this catastrophe nearly occurred? Because Carpenter had insisted on comporting himself like an Omnipotent and Omniscient Mercury Astronaut. He didn't have to pay attention to suggestions and warnings from mere groundlings. He apparently believed that the astronaut , the passenger in the capsule, was the heart and soul of the space program. All of the resentment that the engineers had about the top-lofty status of the astronauts now crept out of its cage… at least within NASA. Outside of NASA, publicly, nothing was to change. Carpenter, like Grissom before him, was an exemplary brave lad; just a little dicey scrape at the end of the flight, that was all. Very successful flight; go ahead, let him have his medals and his receiving lines.

And now that the wound had been opened, there were those who were only too pleased to see the following line develop concerning the Carpenter flight: Carpenter had not merely wasted fuel while up there playing with the capsule's attitude controls, doing his beloved "experiments." No, he had also become… rattled … when he finally realized he was getting low on fuel. The evidence for this was that he forgot to turn off the manual system when he switched to fly-by-wire and thereby really blew his fuel supply. And then he… panicked! … That was why he couldn't line the capsule up at the right angle and that was why he couldn't fire the retro-rockets right on the button… and that was why he hit the atmosphere at such a shallow angle. He nearly skipped off it instead of going through it… he nearly skipped off into eternity… because… he panicked ! There! We've said it! That was the worst charge that could be brought against a pilot on the great ziggurat of flying. It said that a man had lost whatever stuff he had in the most awful manner. He had funked it. It was a sin for which there was no redemption. Damned eternally! Once such a verdict had been pronounced, no judgment was too vile. Did you hear his voice on the tape just before the blackout? You could hear the panic! In fact, they could hear no such thing. Carpenter sounded very much the way Glenn had sounded and a good deal less excited than Grissom. But if one wanted to hear panic, especially in the words that a man had to force out after the g-forces built up, if that was what one was after… then you could hear panic. But, then, Carpenter never had the right stuff to begin with! That much was obvious. He had given up long ago. He had opted for multi-engine planes! (Now we know why!) He had only two hundred hours in jets. He was here only through a fluke of the selection process. And so forth and so on. Certain objective data had to be ignored, of course. Carpenter's pulse rate remained lower, during the re-entry as well as during the launch and orbital flight, than any other astronaut's, including Glenn's. It never rose above 105, even during the most critical point of the re-entry. One could argue that pulse rate was not a dependable indication of a pilot's coolness. Scott Crossfield had a chronically rapid pulse rate, and he was in the league with Yeager. Nevertheless, it was inconceivable that a man in a state of panic —in a life-or-death emergency—in a crisis that did not last for a matter of seconds but for twenty minutes —it was inconceivable that such a man would maintain a heart rate of less than 105 throughout. Even a pilot's heart rate could jump to more than 105 for nothing more than the fact that some cocky bastard had cut into line ahead of him at the PX. One might argue that Carpenter had mishandled the re-entry, but to accuse him of panic made no sense in light of the telemetered data concerning his heart rate and his respiratory rate. Therefore, the objective data would be ignored. Once it had begun, the denigration of Carpenter had to proceed at any cost.