Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

Al was now in training as backup for Gordon Cooper's flight, which would be in May 1963. Gordo, the last in line, had drawn what was shaping up as the final flight in the Mercury series, thirty-four hours, twenty-two orbits, designed to put the United States into the game with the Soviets, who had now achieved flights of seventeen, sixty-four, and forty-eight orbits. The original planning had called for four long-duration flights, with the second one lasting three days. Shepard had been counting on that. He was desperate for an orbital flight. His suborbital flight, as well as Grissom's, now seemed terribly insignificant. As for Gus, he was already getting revved up for the Gemini program, spending a lot of time in St. Louis, where McDonnell was building the Gemini spacecraft. Gus had put the gloom of his flight behind him and was looking ahead to Gemini and Apollo. His friend Deke was in charge of crew selection for the two new programs and was throwing himself heart and soul into the job, and not just because he enjoyed the exercise of his newly found power. The main thing was that he would be on top of every flight from beginning to end, familiar with every detail of every mission. It seemed to be Deke's fervent belief that it would be only a matter of time—following the next physical or the one after that, or the one next year—before he was back on full flight status and into the rotation. And Wally—Wally was riding high. Wally's flight was still the shining example of what an operational space flight should be. It had taken Wally's performance to show that Cooper's twenty-two-orbit flight would be possible. Wally couldn't have been in better shape in the program. He had been as efficient and as cool as they made them.

Wally had come back from his flight and landed in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis. For a week Kennedy and Khrushchev had their showdown, which appeared to bring the world to the brink of a nuclear war, but then Khrushchev backed off and withdrew all Soviet missiles from Cuba. After that things cooled down considerably. Like everyone else, the boys noticed that negotiations for a nuclear test ban and for "cooperation in space," whatever that might prove to be, were in the news a lot. But to tell the truth, it didn't seem like much more than the usual drizzle of words. For that matter, on May 11, four days before Cooper was to go up, Lyndon Johnson drew the lines the same way they had been drawn ever since October of 1957, when the first Sputnik went up. He made a speech answering charges that some congressmen were making about the high cost of the new programs, Gemini and Apollo, and he said: "I, for one, don't want to go to bed by the light of a Communist moon." Christ, that was worse than Sputnik: every night, overhead, sails the silvery moon, occupied by the Russians.

As for Gordo himself, he was already on top of the world. There were those among his brethren who had their doubts about the man, but he never had a moment's doubt about himself. Once more his light shone 'round about him. Was he the last of the seven to be assigned a flight? Well, so what… it wasn't a contest… the press had dreamed up all that crap… Shepard, Glenn, and the others had paved the way for his endurance test. The potential hazards? They didn't bother him in the slightest. They hadn't from the beginning.

Confronted with any feasible form of manned flight, Gordo was a picture of righteous aplomb. This was a side of Cooper that Jim Rathmann understood better than any of his confreres in the corps. Gordo had been in Florida for a long stretch, preparing for his flight, and he saw Rathmann a lot. Thanks to Rathmann, he, like Gus and Wally and Al, had become crazy about automobile racing. Rathmann, in turn, had decided to learn to fly. Cooper took him up in a Beechcraft one day and told him: "Never fly under a sea gull—they'll shit on your airplane." Rathmann made the mistake of laughing, as if he thought Gordo was kidding, whereupon Gordo said, "I'll show you," and headed for a flock of sea gulls flying low over the Everglades. The first thing Rathmann knew, Cooper was down so low he could hear a sound that went whup whup whup whup whup whup whup whup . It was the propellers cutting the marsh grass. For more than a mile old Gordo mowed the marsh grass to make sure he stayed under the sea gulls. Rathmann could hear it the whole time: whup whup whup whup whup whup . By the time they landed, Rathmann was Jell-O. But Cooper just popped open the cockpit door and stood up on the lower frame and pointed triumphantly at the roof and yelled to Rathmann:"Look here—I told you!"

So far as a Mercury flight was concerned, he seemed to regard it as easy enough. He had lobbied as hard as Deke Slayton himself for more pilot control of the spacecraft. But since you didn't have it, why get excited? Why get your bowels in an uproar? Just take the ride and relax.

Early in the morning of May 15, while it was still dark, Gordo was inserted into the little human holster atop the rocket. As usual there was a long hold before the lift-off. The doctors monitoring the biomedical telemetry began noticing something very odd. In fact, they couldn't believe it. Every objective reading of the calibrations and printouts indicated… the astronaut had gone to sleep! The man was up there stacking Z's on top of a rocket loaded with 200,000 pounds of liquid oxygen and RP-1!

Well, why the hell not? Gordo had had plenty of opportunity to see how the launch days always went. You hit the sack in Hangar S about ten or eleven the night before, and then they woke you up about three in the morning, in the dark, and they took you out to the rocket and they laid you down on a contoured couch for two, three, four hours while they tuned in all the systems for the lift-off. You didn't have a damned thing to do, really, during most of this; so why not catch up on all the sleep you'd missed?

Throughout America, throughout the world, untold millions were by their radios and in front of television sets, waiting for the moment of lift-off, wondering, as always: My God, what goes through a man's mind at a moment like this ! Scarcely able to believe it themselves, NASA never supplied the answer.

By the moment of lift-off there was quite a circus in progress out front of Gordo's house in Timber Cove. The Genteel Beast was outdoing itself in the death-watch department. One of the television networks had erected a stupendous aerial on the lawn of a house across the way, a gigantic thing, about eight stories high, the better to beam to the world live pictures of the house inside which Astronaut Cooper's wife, Trudy, was maintaining her anxious vigil in front of the TV set. Milling around underneath the aerial and in the street and on the sidewalks was the biggest mob of reporters and camera crewmen you could imagine. Slovenly but nevertheless seemly they were. They treated Trudy Cooper, in their coverage, as if she had stepped right out of Life magazine, as if she were wearing a pageboy bob and playing "Moonlight in Vermont" on the old upright in the family room to keep up the spirits of herself and the children while Gordon's life Was on the line in the longest American mission yet.

That was rich. By now the very presence of the Beast itself had made any such private and personal response to the event impossible, even in households where the marriage was a lot more solid than Gordo and Trudy's. For the astronaut's wife the days of the lonely vigil by the telephone with the little ones tugging at her skirt, Edwards- or Pax River-style, were over. First had come the Danger Wake, as Louise Shepard had experienced it, with a big crowd in the house and a bigger one—the Genteel Animal—out on the front lawn. Since then the Astronaut's Wife had been converted from an individual to a performer, at least for the duration of the flight—ready or willing or good at it or not. It had become an immutable part of the drill: at the completion of the flight the astronaut's wife had to leave the house and confront the Beast and all his cameras and microphones and submit to a press conference and answer questions and be the Perfect Astronaut's Wife with merely the entire world watching. It was this grim prospect that truly lacerated one's heart while Mr. Wonderful was aloft. It was this that gave the test pilot's wife a royal case of nerves in the space age. For the astronaut the flight consisted of riding the rocket and, God willing, not fucking up. For the wife the flight consisted of… the Press Conference.