In the Shadow of the Moon

by Amy Cherrix

  “Their recent progress is phenomenal and the momentum of Soviet science is formidable,” von Braun wrote in an August 1958 article. “We must expect many more Soviet ‘firsts’ in the field of space rocketry before we can meet their challenge.” Soviet ICBMs had carried not one but two satellites into orbit. Eisenhower knew that America was going to need smart, educated, creative people to compete with the USSR in this rapidly evoloving field of science. In September of that year, he signed the National Defense Education Act into law, which set aside federal funds to emphasize the importance of math and science courses in public schools.

  Legislation was an important first step, but there was a more urgent organizational problem to be solved. If the US intended to win the space race and cement its position as the most scientifically powerful country in the world, a single entity devoted to the peaceful scientific pursuit of spaceflight was essential.

  Since 1915, NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) had been the organization devoted to the study and advancement of the science of flight. Simple enough if the aircraft were the types of planes flown by early NACA member Orville Wright. But a lot had changed in the forty-three years since the Wright brothers skipped off the sand and into the skies above Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, taking flight for the first time. On July 29, 1958, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act. NACA was replaced by a new civilian agency: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

  Vostok and Project Mercury

  Since the dawn of time, humankind’s dream of traveling to the stars had been a fantasy. Now the chains of gravity had been broken. Human beings were figuring out how to explore the cosmos, with Korolev and von Braun to lead the way. The mysterious chief designer had pulled off an impressive series of surprises, and von Braun expected more Soviet launches with their big R-7 rocket. The next phase for both countries would be their greatest challenge: manned spaceflight. If Korolev and von Braun hoped to realize their lifelong obsession of landing people on the moon, they first had to figure out how to get human beings to and from space safely. Both sides were developing new rockets and life-supporting space capsules. The Soviet program was called Vostok. In America, it was named Project Mercury.

  Chapter 24

  “The Right Stuff”

  Project Mercury was NASA’s first spaceflight mission. Its ambitious goals sounded simple when stated in the agency’s short, declarative lingo: “Place a manned spacecraft in orbital flight around the Earth. Investigate man’s performance capabilities and his ability to function in the environment of space. Recover the man and the spacecraft safely.” But the description understated the danger involved. The agency needed people willing to be strapped into a capsule on top of von Braun’s fully fueled missile and launched into space. There was no way to know if the rocket would soar or incinerate them when the agonizing countdown finally reached “zero.”

  Military test pilots made ideal astronaut candidates. They were daredevils by trade, the way some people were schoolteachers or stockbrokers. The highly skilled pilots flew experimental prototypes to the edges of their mechanical capability, gathering data as they tore through the skies at terrifying speeds and breathtaking altitudes. Journalist Tom Wolfe called this rare quality “the right stuff.” It was the ability, Wolfe wrote, “to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery” and “pull it back in the last yawning moment—and then go up again the next day and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite.”

  On a good day, test pilots didn’t crash their planes or die. But the unspoken reality of a test pilot’s life was that their job could be deadly. When a pilot took a seat in the cockpit of an untested airplane, he knew he might not survive. The pilots didn’t like to talk about it. What was the point? They were never going to be satisfied sitting behind a desk anyway, and NASA wasn’t exactly looking for office personnel. The new space agency needed astronauts. To find them, they scoured the country, recruiting skilled, college-educated aviators who had distinguished themselves as test pilots. From a total of 508 service names, the list was whittled down to seven: John Glenn Jr. (US Marine Corps); Walter “Wally” Schirra Jr., Alan Shepard, and Scott Carpenter (US Navy); and Gordon “Gordo” Cooper, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, and Donald “Deke” Slayton (US Air Force). Their service records read like a who’s who of American heroes. They flew risky missions in war zones, wore medals, logged thousands of hours in the cockpit, and had built reputations as the best of the best among the elite test-pilot ranks. They would be the first astronauts in America’s crewed spaceflight program, Project Mercury, and were known as the Mercury Seven.

  Becoming an astronaut tested the limits of each Mercury Seven astronaut’s endurance. They studied advanced math and physics and suffered through an extensive battery of invasive psychological and physical examinations. Each test was designed to simulate conditions and situations they might encounter during spaceflight. Some of the more excruciating exams involved needles. Others were downright weird.

  “We were treated like a bunch of lab rats,” Mercury Seven astronaut Gordo Cooper remembered. “The doctors got real creative, coming up with some unusual tests.” One involved inserting a water hose in the ear of a blindfolded astronaut and then pumping cold water into their ear canal. “Just when you thought your eyeballs were going to float away, they would take out the hose and remove the blindfold and jot down some notes on a pad,” Cooper wrote. When he asked what the test was for, Cooper was told he didn’t need to know. “We were probed, poked, sampled, tested, and in general completely humiliated on a regular basis for the better part of a week.”

  On April 9, 1959, the Mercury Seven reported to the ballroom of the historic Dolley Madison House in Washington, DC, which thrummed with the voices of eager journalists. Reporters and photographers battled for the best angle to capture the historic scene as America’s first astronauts entered the conference room. Cameras and notebooks were temporarily forgotten as the crowd applauded and cheered. With close shaves, short hair, dark suits, and neatly pressed button-down shirts, they were portraits of professionalism, military precision, and dignity. It wasn’t enough that the astronauts were qualified pilots. NASA needed them to look the part in order to inspire confidence in the new space program.

  Dr. Keith Glennan, NASA’s first administrator, stepped to the podium. “These men, the nation’s Project Mercury astronauts, are here after a long and perhaps unprecedented series of evaluations which told our medical consultants and scientists of their superb adaptability to their coming flight.” The astronauts answered questions about everything from their training and professional backgrounds to how their wives and children felt about their work.

  Finally, a reporter fired off the question every American wanted answered: “Could I ask for a show of hands,” he asked, “of how many are confident they will come back from outer space?” There was a brief pause. The astronauts glanced around at one another. Then every single hand shot into the air. The room erupted into camera flashes and another round of thunderous applause.

  The next week, Time magazine declared: “Rarely were history’s explorers and discoverers so clearly marked in advance as men of destiny.”

  All the Mercury Seven astronauts raise their hands when asked who among them expected to return safely from space.

  “The Steel Balloon”

  MAY 18, 1959

  CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA

  The rocket NASA planned to use for the Project Mercury missions was America’s first ICBM, the Atlas. The air force had first conceived of the rocket in early 1946. Nine days after the Mercury Seven were introduced to the world, John Glenn and his fellow astronauts observed the Atlas in a test launch at the cape. Glenn recalled the mid-May evening when they gathered about half a mile from the launch complex to observe the test.

  “The sight of the Atlas on the launchpad was dramatic enough to have been designed by Disney,” he wrote in his memoir. “Searchlights
played on the silver rocket, and clouds of water vapor came off it.” The rocket appeared solid, he remembered, but it was actually “thin-skinned, basically a steel balloon.” At liftoff, “we watched it gain speed, a brilliant phoenix rising into the night sky.” When the rocket exploded just one minute after liftoff, the blast “looked like a hydrogen bomb.” The astronauts instinctively ducked before remembering they were a safe distance away. Only Alan Shepard spoke. “Well, I’m glad they got that out of the way.”

  Chapter 25

  Squirrel and Little Arrow

  In the USSR, Korolev moved ahead with his own plans for a future crewed space vehicle. The Vostok capsule was equipped with a life-support system, and for the first time, it would be possible to return passengers safely to Earth. Before Vostok could be approved for testing with a cosmonaut, however, Soviet engineers would risk the lives of more Soviet dogs like Laika.

  Korolev’s busy schedule did not leave time for the simple comforts of life. He was stern and his temper flared when people fell short of his expectations. However, he seemed to like dogs, visiting the kennels before launches.

  Belka (“Squirrel”) and Strelka (“Little Arrow”) were the dogs selected to test the Vostok. They lifted off on August 19, 1960, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. While it’s impossible to know precisely what the dogs endured, flight data from their body sensors proved that the animals suffered as Laika had before them. Two onboard cameras showed both dogs barely moving during the first part of the flight. Without the sensors, it would have been reasonable for engineers inside Soviet ground control to assume they were dead. Soviet scientists worried that the dogs were proving that the human body could not endure weightlessness. Later on, however, the dogs became more animated, suffering convulsions. During the fourth orbit, the struggling Belka vomited. The sad sight prompted a flight doctor to recommend limiting the flight of a human pilot to a single orbit.

  Russian space dogs Belka and Strelka.

  Despite their ordeal, the dogs survived eighteen orbits, spending one day and two hours in space. After a safe landing, Belka and Strelka were declared healthy in a postflight examination. Months later, Strelka gave birth to a litter of puppies, and Khrushchev seized the opportunity to gloat about the health of his country’s canine cosmonauts and their mission.

  President Kennedy’s young daughter, Caroline, received one of Strelka’s puppies, named Pushinka (“Fluffy”), as a gift from Khrushchev. Kennedy responded with a polite thank-you note expressing gratitude for remembering his daughter and wrote that the dog’s flight from the Soviet Union “was not as dramatic as the flight of her mother, nevertheless, it was a long voyage and she stood it well.”

  With the successful launch of Vostok and the safe recovery of Belka and Strelka, the Soviets claimed another victory in the space race. They had proven that it was possible to safely return living creatures to Earth with their spacecraft and had taken the lead in the space race. As both countries proceeded with their plans for a human launch, it remained to be seen whether the first person in space would be an American or a Russian.

  That question would be answered in the 1960s.

  Chapter 26

  Growing Pains at NASA

  In September 1960, von Braun and his group at the Redstone Arsenal were swept up in the tide of NASA’s rapid expansion. His team became part of the new civilian space agency. The Redstone Arsenal was renamed the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), and von Braun was appointed its director. For the first time in his life, the engineer was not working for the military. At last, he could devote all his energy to spaceflight.

  NASA was growing, but its early Mercury program struggled to keep pace. The air force’s unpredictable Atlas rocket had exploded during mutliple test launches. NASA needed a rocket that could be trusted, and pivoted to a less powerful but tried-and-true rocket, von Braun’s “Old Reliable” Redstone. The Redstone wasn’t powerful enough to achieve the speed and altitude necessary to carry a Mercury space capsule into orbit. Instead of following a flight path around the Earth, the first Mercury mission would be suborbital—flying up and back down in a simple arc. To make it flight ready for an astronout, however, the Redstone required an astounding eight hundred modifications.

  These obstacles, and those that would inevitably follow in the race to space, could be overcome with enough money. In November, von Braun had reason to hope when America elected John F. Kennedy as president of the United States. The progressive forty-three-year-old vowed to “get the nation moving again,” during a time in which it was mired in the Cold War against the USSR. Von Braun was optimistic that Kennedy would “get the nation moving” toward the moon by allocating lots and lots of money to NASA.

  The Four-Inch Flight

  On November 21, 1960, thousands of onlookers streamed onto Cocoa Beach in Florida, near Cape Canaveral, to witness the testing of the rocket that was scheduled to eventually carry the first American into space. The modified Redstone was several miles away from spectators but visible on the launch stand in the distance. News crews staged cameras on top of vans and pointed their lenses toward the cape.

  In these early days of the space program, basic procedures for launching a rocket were still being developed. At NASA, everyone from the administrators to the engineers and the astronauts was still learning everything they needed to know about how to safely launch, orbit, and land spacecraft. “We were inventing it all as we went along,” NASA ground control veteran Gene Kranz wrote in his memoir. Without astronauts aboard, there was no risk to human life. Instead, Redstone’s first test would be a public trial by fire for NASA after hundreds of painstaking modifications to von Braun’s rocket.

  Kranz had been on the job for a little more than a month when he took his seat at the console as a procedures officer that day. As the countdown began, there was “a change in the intensity of the atmosphere in the control room,” he wrote. Seconds ticked by. Cameras situated at the launchpad were trained on the rocket, ready to record every moment of the flight. “Precisely at zero on the clock, there was a great cloud of smoke. . . . For a few seconds, there was nothing on the screen in the control room but a smoky sky.” It looked as if the rocket had launched so fast that it had already flown out of camera range, but as the control team stared at the smoke-filled image on their monitors, Mercury Redstone came into view.

  In a humiliating moment reminiscent of the navy’s first Vanguard failure, the Redstone had only risen four inches from the platform before resettling quietly back into place. The failed rocket’s saving grace was that it had not exploded on the launchpad.

  Chapter 27

  Blast Radius

  There is a reason ground control centers are constructed miles away from launchpads. Any rocket, whether it’s carrying a nuclear warhead or a space capsule, can be a weapon of mass destruction if it misfires on the ground. Rockets are filled with highly combustible fuel and hold pressurized gases under tremendous force. If they explode, they are capable of obliterating anything within their blast radius, the area of impact around a rocket. Korolev and von Braun both knew a good and reliable rocket could go bad. It wasn’t a question of “if,” but “when.”

  As von Braun struggled to perfect his Redstone rocket for Project Mercury, he didn’t know Korolev was also suffering failures with his own crewed spaceflight program, Vostok. Despite a mounting list of space spectaculars, by October 1960, Korolev was back at his desk after an epic streak of bad luck at the test range.

  “Over a period of ten months,” remembered engineer Boris Chertok, “there had been six failures. The spacecraft hadn’t even made it into near-Earth orbit.” And that wasn’t his biggest problem. Khrushchev, hungry for more propaganda opportunities, expected Korolev to launch a Soviet cosmonaut into orbit in December—just two months away.

  Korolev joked that the string of failures occurred because it was a leap year. Superstitious Russians believed leap years brought bad luck. The chief designer knew better, of course. The solution was
always the same: more tests, data collection, and if necessary, redesign.

  An exacting taskmaster, Korolev dazzled with his genius for managing the sprawling rocket manufacturing enterprise he supervised. He refused to tolerate carelessness. His team fell in lockstep with their leader. Delays were inevitable in big rocket manufacturing. That was the cost of doing business with the cosmos. But Korolev’s work ethic did not protect him from rival engineers repeatedly pitching their own proposals to Soviet leadership. Korolev’s greatest achievements were never enough to guarantee his position with Khruschchev.

  Mikhail Yangel was the latest Russian rocket designer to step up and offer an alternative to Korolev’s R-7, the Soviet Union’s only intercontinental ballistic missile. A prominent figure in the Soviet space program, Yangel hoped his own rocket, the R-16, would replace Korolev’s R-7 as the country’s primary ICBM for defense.

  Early in his career, Yangel had worked under Korolev, but he had quickly risen through the ranks. Then, during a particularly uncomfortable period in the early 1950s, Yangel was Korolev’s superior. During those years, their working relationship was tense, both men possessing domineering personalities. They avoided one another when possible. Korolev preferred to communicate with Yangel through a deputy.

  Korolev and Yangel maintained a “friendly rivalry” but parted ways on a fundamental design philosophy: fuel. Yangel’s rocket engines burned a particularly nasty fuel comprised of hypergolic propellants—substances that catch fire when they come into contact with one another. Korolev distrusted the highly volatile fuel. He rightly called it “devil’s venom.” The fumes were capable of liquefying human organs. Korolev preferred the proven stability and reliability of liquid oxygen engines. But the hypergolic propellants in Yangel’s rocket made it appealing to military leaders. It could be stored with a full tank of gas, reducing the amount of time it took to launch it. By contrast, Korolev’s R-7 missile needed an entire day to fuel.