Some people—particularly several Florida politicians—thought the eighty-eight thousand acres of flatland on Merritt Island, immediately west of Cape Canaveral across the narrow Banana River, that NASA had recently purchased was tailor-made for the home of the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), as the Space Task Group would henceforth be known. But Merritt would be used only for NASA’s new launch facilities, which included the world’s largest hangar, the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), where multiple huge moon rockets could be produced simultaneously, and several capacious launchpads. Vice President Lyndon Johnson argued that the activities of the air force launching ground on Cape Canaveral might interfere with communications during long missions, and other arguments were made against the Cape. Site requirements would shift over time, and in the end, the steamy city of Houston won out.
It was lost on no one that Texas was LBJ’s home state and that Houston was part of the district of Congressman Albert Thomas, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, which controlled funding for NASA projects. Thomas hadn’t been happy when another state had received a NASA field center when the agency opened in 1958. Now Thomas, Webb, and Kennedy engaged in a bit of quid pro quo that would not be made public until decades later—Thomas would help out on a few bills the president wanted passed if Houston got the MSC. (Webb would later insist that politics did not enter into the decision, despite the agreement between Kennedy and Thomas.) The plot got more byzantine: Thomas’s roommate at Rice had been George R. Brown, and his Brown and Root construction firms would become one of the largest in the world. Brown was also a good friend, and a major financial backer, of Lyndon Johnson. His company would receive most of the contracts to develop the many large buildings needed at the MSC.
Some NASA employees comfortably domiciled near the Langley or DC facilities were loath to move to a city with stifling summer heat and a state looked down upon by most East Coast residents. “Texas was someplace out west that they saw in a movie with Gene Autry,” recalled one engineer. Early visits reinforced their worries; the NASA site was nothing but cow pastures and mosquitoes, and the devastation left by Hurricane Carla was visible everywhere. Gilruth had some of the same concerns, but Webb said to him, “What has Senator Byrd ever done for you?”—the point being that Virginia Democrat Harry Byrd had provided little if any support for NASA. More than one person observed that the small body of water was neither clear nor a lake. Nonetheless, all but a few of Gilruth’s people made the move in the spring and summer of 1962, and after the enthusiastic welcome and strong support, both personal and political, they received from the city and its residents, most were glad they did.
While new facilities—a dozen or so large concrete buildings, with more to come—were being built, MSC’s various divisions were temporarily housed in offices spread out all over the city and up and down the Gulf Freeway, the main highway between downtown Houston and Clear Lake.
Most of the Mercury Seven and their families moved to Timber Cove, five minutes east of the MSC on the north side of Clear Lake, where they built modest houses—typically a three-bedroom, brick, midcentury-modern home with a spacious kitchen, if Mrs. Astronaut had a hand in designing it—and acclimated to the very different Texas culture and the more humid Houston weather.
The Glenns and the Carpenters split a lot on a tree-lined cul-de-sac, and the Grissoms and Schirras lived next door to each other just a block away. The Coopers settled across tiny Taylor Lake, a Clear Lake estuary, in another recent development called El Lago. The Slaytons built a home five miles southwest, in the town of Friendswood. Al Shepard and his family decided on a luxury apartment near downtown Houston, twenty-five miles away from Clear Lake, which gave Al a chance to race up and down the Gulf Freeway in his Corvette. And a couple of the men’s spouses had an idea. Almost every military post had its officers’ wives club, so why not an astronauts’ wives club? Their casual get-togethers would bloom into a full-fledged mutual-support system for both club members and their children, especially during the stressful flights. After the novelty of being astronauts’ wives wore off and the women realized what they’d signed on for—the thankless job of raising children who hardly ever saw their fathers and the constant threat of their spouses’ deaths always hanging over them—they would need the support, particularly when a husband died. That would happen all too frequently.
When Project Gemini was announced in December 1961, von Braun was strongly opposed to it. Nobody had consulted him about it, and NASA would use the air force’s Titan II as a booster and not his Saturn (which was too large for a souped-up Mercury craft). Grissom became the chief astronaut assigned to the development of the new program. While the others trained for their upcoming Mercury flights—Shepard believed he could wangle one more out of his superiors and continued to remain heavily involved in Mercury—Grissom began spending much of his time at the McDonnell plant in St. Louis, working with Jim Chamberlin on the new spacecraft. Since Gemini would be more or less an expansion of Mercury, no other firm had been considered for the project. He sat in the mock-up for hours at a time, delivering to its designers his opinions on virtually every aspect of the spacecraft—“From the way the cockpit was laid out to what instruments went where,” remembered astronaut John Young. Grissom was determined to ensure that the Gemini was a pilot’s spacecraft.
On the morning of October 3, 1962, an Atlas booster launched Schirra’s Sigma 7 capsule into space, and a group of clean-cut fellows stood close together on the Florida coastline a few miles away and watched intently. They were eight members of the New Nine, as they were known, NASA’s new astronaut trainees: Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Pete Conrad, Jim Lovell, Jim McDivitt, Tom Stafford, Ed White, and John Young. (Missing was Elliot See, who was clearing up personal business and hadn’t reported for duty yet.)
They had been presented at a press conference two weeks earlier, and their jobs were to help man the many Gemini and Apollo missions planned over the next several years; there were far too many for the original Mercury Seven, and each flight would also require a backup crew. In his new position as coordinator of astronaut activities, Deke Slayton had overseen the selection of the nine, culling them from 253 applications. They had endured the same battery of physical and psychological tests that the original seven had, from treadmills and steel eels to ink blots and cold water in the ears, though since NASA now knew that a human being could survive at least a day in space, a few of the wackier trials had been dropped. (These men were also test pilots, so someone had sensibly decided that they didn’t need more time on the centrifuge.) Two of them were civilians, though that term was misleading—both See and Armstrong were former navy aviators.
The day before they were introduced at the press conference, the New Nine had gathered together for the first time at Ellington Air Force Base, near the new Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, to be briefed on their jobs, their schedules, and their responsibilities. “There’ll be plenty of missions for all of you,” Bob Gilruth told them. With ten manned Gemini and more than a dozen Apollo missions planned—about sixty seats to fill, plus backup crews—there would be more than enough flights for everyone in the room.
Slayton got up and discussed the many pressures they would face, including business propositions and freebies. “With regard to gratuities,” he said in typically blunt Deke-speak, “if there is any question, just follow the old test pilot’s creed: Anything you can eat, drink, or screw within twenty-four hours is perfectly acceptable, but beyond that, take a pass!”
The men smiled nervously. Walt Williams held up his hand and said, “Within reason, within reason.”
Unlike the Mercury Seven, this new group of astronaut trainees was, on average, slightly more educated—three of them had master’s degrees—and since NASA had raised the maximum height to six feet and lowered the age limit to thirty-five, they were slightly younger and a tad taller and heavier. And like their predecessors, they were all married with children. Most of the Mercury Seven were too bus
y to offer much of a welcome, and the fact that nine new guys meant that each man’s piece of the $500,000 Life pie was now only $16,000 didn’t increase their hospitality. Nevertheless, soon after the nine’s arrival, John Glenn invited all of them to dinner at his house in Timber Cove.
The new astronaut trainees would find that people believed their predecessors’ after-hours reputation applied to them too. But the complexity of the post-Mercury spacecraft would mean more time devoted to simulation, training, and interacting with contractors, leaving them fewer off-hours—though many of them managed to squeeze in some playtime. In that era, celebrity infidelity, provided it was discreetly conducted, was ignored by the press. In the eyes of most of the public, the reputations of these American heroes remained lily-white. And though most of them were good family men, others found it hard to resist the companionship of the many women eager to meet America’s space heroes and partake of their high-test testosterone. Like their predecessors, they moved their families to Houston, mostly settling in the Clear Lake area, and began adjusting to the frenetic schedule of an astronaut.
Also like the Mercury Seven before them, they underwent an intensive education program about space operations. Each one received a two-inch-thick flight manual that he became intimately familiar with. They were taught by experts in various fields—computers, guidance and navigation, communications, rocket flight, astronomy, orbital and reentry mechanics, meteorology, environmental control systems, and much more. With the Mercury Seven, the New Nine underwent survival training for contingency landings in jungle, desert, and water. And after their basic training, each received a technical assignment in a different area. Besides steady visits to the Cape, they made frequent field trips to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville; to St. Louis, where McDonnell was producing their Gemini spacecraft; and occasionally to Boston, to familiarize themselves with MIT’s computer-guidance system, and Worcester, Massachusetts, to get fitted for spacesuits. And they began spending hundreds of hours in the Gemini simulators, running through every conceivable abort situation, each performance recorded and assessed, and making many thirty-second-long flights on the C-135 for experience in weightlessness.
With the help of their cut from the Life deal, the New Nine also moved into the Clear Lake area, most of them to Timber Cove or El Lago. (One moved into Nassau Bay, a new development just south of the MSC.) The astronaut candidates settled into their new routines, and their families settled into their new lives, new homes, new schools, new friends, and new surroundings.
By now, with the addition of the Gemini and Apollo flights, NASA was preparing more definite schedules. Some of the astronauts might fly more than once, but the increasingly complex missions required extensive and intensive training and preparation and were so tightly scheduled that each crewman would have his hands full for a while. And attrition was inevitable, due to injury, death, or some other reason, such as Scott Carpenter’s blackballing. Even more astronauts would be needed. Based on a point system he had developed using academics, pilot performance, and character/motivation as criteria, Slayton got on the job.
On October 18, 1963, just a year after the New Nine’s selection, NASA held a press conference to introduce a third group of astronauts: Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, William Anders, Charles Bassett, Alan Bean, Eugene Cernan, Roger Chaffee, Michael Collins, Walter Cunningham, Donn Eisele, Ted Freeman, Richard Gordon, Russell Schweickart, David Scott, and Clifton Williams. The Final Fourteen, they called themselves. They were slightly younger and slightly more educated than their predecessors. The test-pilot requirement had been dropped, and new candidates were expected to have a background flying military jet fighters, so while they were less flight-experienced, they were even more engineering- and research-oriented than those in the previous class.
But even with intensive training and classroom instruction, frequent visits to the various plants scattered across the country that were manufacturing the myriad spacecraft parts, and countless other duties, they too found time for fun, both with their families and without them.
The space race had intensified, and Steve Bales, the boy from Fremont, Iowa, had not lost his childhood desire to be part of it. But his family didn’t have much extra for college; his mother worked in a beauty salon, his father in a hardware store. From the age of twelve, Steve had mowed yards—at one time he had forty that he kept up—and saved his money. When he got older, he worked summers as a hired hand on a farm, cleaning out hog pens, walking fields cutting thistle and sour dock, and driving a tractor to mow hay. In the end, all his savings wouldn’t be enough.
But Sputnik had sparked an encouragement of science and technology, and scholarships and low-interest loans were available to those who wanted to major in those subjects. In 1960, Bales applied for and received a scholarship to study aerospace engineering at Iowa State, 107 miles away from home. In February 1962, he watched John Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission on TV, and when footage of Mercury Mission Control was shown, Bales wondered what it would be like to work there. He began reading all he could about NASA, and in the spring of 1964, during his senior year, he filled out a federal-government job application and sent it to Houston. Though he was a few credits short of his degree, he was hired as an intern that May. He decided to finish school the following semester, and soon he was in Houston giving tours of the new Mission Control Center. That summer he learned as much as possible about every job in the Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR—pronounced “moaker”) by talking to every flight controller he could. He went back to college and finished his degree, then returned to Houston in December with a job.
The Gemini program was gearing up, and soon Bales was assigned to the complex area of Mission Control handled by the flight dynamics officer (FIDO), who was responsible for determining the location of the spacecraft and its trajectory. Mostly he observed and learned, helping to write mission rules. Eventually he switched to the guidance officer (GUIDO) console, where he helped monitor the guidance systems of the spacecraft, including its computer. He was not much younger than most of the other flight controllers in the room, and, like them, after a lot of self-instruction, classwork, and on-the-job training, he had gotten thrown onto the hot skillet of Mission Control. The ones who survived their trial by fire might someday become “steely-eyed missile men,” the people who made informed life-or-death decisions: go, no-go, and, occasionally, something in between. Bales survived and thrived; at the age of twenty-three, he graduated to full-fledged controller—GUIDO—on Gemini 9.
About that time another new guy came aboard: Jack Garman, a big, friendly twenty-one-year-old whiz kid born in Oak Park, Illinois, and hired right out of the University of Michigan. His major in engineering and minor in computers had helped get him a job working on Apollo’s onboard software system, then being developed by MIT. He’d interviewed with several companies, most of which were involved in some way with the space program, and he’d picked NASA even though it offered the lowest starting salary—he wanted to be on the inside of the program, not the outside.
As soon as he finished his last class, he drove to his parents’ house in Chicago, then got back in his car and headed south—he didn’t know exactly where Houston was, only that it was somewhere below Dallas, but he figured he’d be able to find it. Upon arriving there, he was given a choice: he could work with the big Mission Control Center ground computers or the onboard software, the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). He chose the one that would fly, the AGC, and though he felt intimidated at first, he found that almost no one there knew much about computers. After a month’s worth of intensive computer classes in Houston, he returned to find that he knew more about the machines than anyone at Mission Control, and since he was now an “expert,” they made him a group leader. When Mission Control asked for help with the AGC, he volunteered to man the GUIDO staff support room down the hall, where a group of experts were on hand to advise each of the MOCR positions during a mission. For the next few years, he lived and breathed th
e AGC, flying up to MIT frequently to confer with its inventors. He had little time for recreation, but he didn’t care. He loved what he was doing. Besides, when he did go out, if people found out that he worked for NASA, he was treated like a king. Houstonites loved what the agency had brought to their city.
Sometimes the sense of magic that had lured him into the space program would disappear. But during a flight, Garman could sit at a console and read the cascading numbers on his screen and realize he was “looking at a computer that literally was out in space,” and, as he would remember later, “it got to be awesome again.”
Bales and Garman were only two of the many brilliant—and very young—flight controllers who thrived in the high-pressure environment of Mission Control. Managers like Chris Kraft rarely had to fire those who weren’t working out, since the people who couldn’t take the pressure usually left of their own accord. The ones who stayed helped define the role of flight controller, and they became legends to generations of their successors.
In late 1963, after his bid to fly one last Mercury flight was denied, Alan Shepard had been chosen to command the first Gemini mission, a short five-hour shakedown cruise designed to test the new spacecraft’s maneuverability. Tom Stafford, a standout among the New Nine, would be his copilot—except he wouldn’t be called that. Though Stafford’s duties as Shepard’s crewmate could accurately be described as those of a copilot, Deke Slayton had decided that no astronaut on a Gemini or an Apollo flight would ever be referred to by that term. Shepard and every other lead pilot on every mission would be the command pilot, or commander. His crewmate would be the mission’s pilot.
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