Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

It served many purposes at once. It made the rest of them seem like real pilots after all and not mere riders in a pod. A man either had it or he didn't… in space as in the air. As every pilot knew in his secret heart—deny it, if you wish!—it required washouts to make your own righteous stuff stand out. So was Carpenter, by implication, to be designated the washout ? Logic no longer mattered—especially since none of this could be talked of openly in any case: publicly there were to be no flaws in the manned space program whatsoever. Sheer logic would have raised the question: why pick Carpenter and not Grissom? Grissom had lost the capsule and had then come back with the classic pilot's response to gross error: "I don't know what happened—the machine malfunctioned." The telemetry showed that Grissom's heart was on the edge of tachycardia at times. Just before re-entry his heart rate had reached 171 beats per minute. Even after Grissom was safe and sound on the carrier Lake Champlain , his heart rate was 160 beats a minute, his breathing was rapid, his skin was warm and moist; he didn't want to talk about it, he wanted to go to sleep. Here was the clinical picture of a man who had abandoned himself to panic. Then why was not Grissom designated the washout —if anybody cared to find one? But logic had nothing to do with it. One was in the area of magical beliefs now. In his everyday life doughty little Gus lived the life of the right stuff. He was a staunch bearer of the Operational banner. Here Gus's fate and Deke's fate came together. Deke had said all along: You need a proven operational test pilot up there. Gus and Deke were great pals. For three years they had flown together, hunted together, drunk together; their children had played together. They were both committed to the holy word: operational . Schirra was with them on this particular commitment, and Shepard threw his weight toward them, too, as did Cooper.

Deke had plenty to be thankful to Shepard for. One day Al had gotten the other boys together and said, "Listen, we've got to do something for Deke. We've got to do something to give him back his pride." Shepard's suggestion was that Deke be made a sort of chief of the astronauts, with an office and a title and official duties. They all went for the idea and took it to Gilruth, and in no time Deke had the title "Coordinator of Astronaut Activities." There may have been people at NASA who figured this would be a supernumerary make-work job for the fallen astronaut; if so, they underestimated Deke. He was a far shrewder and more determined individual than his Wisconsin tundra manner let on. The job gave him something to channel his tremendous thwarted energy into. The NASA hierarchy was still a political vacuum, and Deke set about filling it… with a vengeance, as it were. Soon Deke was a power within NASA, a man to be reckoned with, and his motivation never varied: the more powerful he became, the better his chances of reversing the decision that prevented him from flying. Justice, simple operational justice… in the name of the right stuff.

Operational; the word had new clout now, and a corollary to the theory of the Carpenter flight began to develop. Carpenter's flight agenda had been loaded with Larry Lightbulb experiments. The scientists, lowest men in the NASA pecking order up to now, had been given their heads on this flight… and the results were there for your inspection. Carpenter had taken all this Mad Professor stuff seriously, and that was what led to his problems. He became so wrapped up in his various "observations" that he fell behind in the checklist and became rattled and then blew it. All this science nonsense could wait. Just now, in the critical operational phase of the program, the crucial period of real flight test , it wasn't just ding-a-ling stuff, it was dangerous. There were too many goddamned doctors involved in this thing, too. (Look what they did to Deke!) On top of that, they had the two psychiatrists to contend with. They were nice enough men personally, Ruff and Korchin were, but they were… in the way ! What the hell was all this pissing into bags and hitting little circles with a pencil… after you've just hung your hide out over the edge in a space flight? They hadn't even picked up the fact that Carpenter had panicked . They found him exhilarated, alert, full of energy, ready to take off and do it all over again… The two men were not invited to continue with the program after the move from Langley to Houston. Thanks a lot, gentlemen, and don't let the doorknob hit you in the butt.

Here the outlook of Grissom, Slayton, and Schirra coincided with that of Kraft and Walt Williams. Kraft and Williams also felt that non-operational experiments should be kept to a minimum at this stage of the space program. From now on, whenever anyone said otherwise, one had only to roll his eyeballs and turn his palms up and say: You want another Carpenter flight?

On August 11 and 12 the mighty Integral struck again, and now there was absolutely no stopping the operational theory. On August 11 the Soviets launched Vostok 3 on what at first looked as if it would be a repetition of Titov's day-long flight. But no! Exactly twenty-four hours later the Chief Designer sent up Vostok 4 , and the two craft flew together, in tandem, within three miles of each other. Within three miles of one another in the infinity of space! The Soviets spoke of a "group flight," as if the two cosmonauts, Nikolayev and Popovich, were flying in formation. In fact, neither could change his flight path in the slightest, and their proximity was due solely to the precision with which the second Vostok was launched as the first came orbiting overhead—but even this seemed to be a feat of incalculable sophistication. The Genteel Beast and many congressmen seemed to be on the edge of hysteria! Entire formations of Soviet space warriors, hurling thunderbolts at Schenectady… Grand Forks… Oklahoma City… Once again the Chief Designer was toying with them! God knew what his next surprise would be… (It would be a big one.) Well, that settled it. No more densitometers and varicolored balloons and other White Smock accessories. (No more pilots with non-operational stuff!) Which explained the singular nature of Wally Schirra's flight on October 3.

Schirra named his capsule Sigma 7 , and there you had it. Scott Carpenter had named his Aurora 7 … Aurora … the rosy dawn… the dawn of the intergalactic age… the unknowns, the mystery of the universe… the music of the spheres… Petrarch on the mountain top… and all that. Whereas Sigma… Sigma was a purely engineering symbol. It stood for the summation, the solution of the problem. Unless he had come right out and named the capsule Operational , he couldn't have chosen a better name. For the purpose of Schirra's flight was to prove that Carpenter's need not have happened. Schirra would make six orbits—twice as many as Carpenter—and yet use half as much fuel and land right on target. Whatever did not have to do with that goal tended to be eliminated from the flight. The flight of Sigma 7 was designed to be Armageddon… the final and decisive rout of the forces of experimental science in the manned space program. And that it was.

Schirra cut the jolly fun-loving figure so well that people sometimes failed to notice how formidable he could be. But his emphasis, after all, was on maintaining an even strain. His pranksterish, rib-shaking, wild-driving gotcha intervals gave him plenty of slack when the time came to wind things up tight and get tough. Every bit as much as Shepard, Wally had the instincts of an Academy man, a leader of men, the commander, the captain of the ship. He merely operated in a different fashion. He was cool; he had "the uncritical willingness to face danger," but he wasn't afraid to show his feelings when strategy seemed to dictate it. If it was going to be his show, he insisted on running it; and he was shrewd enough to recognize the political outlines of a situation. Having seen four nights from up close, Wally couldn't help but have noticed that the secret of a successful mission lay in a simplified checklist with white space between tasks. The fewer tasks you had, the better chance you had for a one hundred percent performance. Not only that, if you could control the checklist, then you could give your flight a theme, a clear-cut goal that everyone could immediately appreciate and respond to. Wally's theme for this flight was Operational Precision, which, being translated, meant conserving fuel and landing on target. Now that the operational forces were lined up shoulder to shoulder, it was possible to keep offboard most novel items that engineers or scientists had dreamed up for the flight.