Shoot for the Moon

by James Donovan

  Shepard was pleased, and unsurprised, at being selected. First to fly Mercury, first to fly Gemini—the first Apollo flight, he hoped, would be next, and perhaps he’d even be in on the first moon landing. He and Stafford began training, spending many hours in the Gemini flight simulator, which could run through a full mission with all its potential abort situations.

  But Shepard had been keeping a secret. He’d been suffering from dizzy spells, many severe enough to incapacitate him. The first had occurred a few months after his Mercury selection. The next one hadn’t happened until late 1963, years later; he began having them in the morning, soon after he rose. The attacks were so bad that they left him helpless on the floor, his head spinning and his stomach roiling. It was all he could do to drag himself to the bathroom to vomit. He’d tried everything—a private doctor, medication, vitamins—but nothing worked. And then the episodes began occurring more frequently and were joined by a ringing in his left ear. When he had an attack one day while giving a lecture and had to be helped off the stage, he had no choice but to tell Slayton, who convinced him to see the NASA flight surgeons. The diagnosis—Ménière’s syndrome—was a serious one; doctors didn’t know what caused it, and there was no known cure. Shepard was grounded. He couldn’t even fly a NASA jet alone. He and Slayton, also still unable to fly due to his heart arrhythmia, shared that embarrassment.

  Shepard, who had just turned forty, considered leaving NASA—it looked like his astronaut career was over. But in June 1964, Slayton, who had moved up to assistant director of flight crew operations, offered Shepard his old job as head of the astronaut office, and Shepard took it.

  Shepard didn’t handle being grounded nearly as well as Slayton had, and having to act as mother hen to the astronauts wasn’t easy for him. He came down on them hard, earning himself the nickname of the Ice Commander. He believed he was just running a tight ship, but even Slayton thought he was excessively critical and told him to ease up. (During the interview part of the astronaut-selection process, Shepard seemed to delight in asking tough questions and intimidating interviewees. “His cold eyes seemed to look right through me,” remembered one.) He started dabbling in investments, some of them requiring his time as well as his money. He became part owner and vice president of Baytown National Bank and got involved in wildcatting and a cattle ranch. Often, he’d go to the office for an hour or two and then spend the rest of his day handling his outside business interests; “He was never there,” recalled one astronaut. But he was Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and rules seemed to be bent for him. No one else could have criticized one of his charges for not being an astronaut twenty-four hours a day and gotten away with it—but Shepard did.

  He and the rest of the original seven didn’t let the new guys forget that there was a pecking order. “Don’t feel so smart,” Grissom told a member of the New Nine one day. “You’re just an astronaut trainee,” Schirra told another. “You don’t count for anything around here.” In their view, no one was a true astronaut until he’d flown into space. Those who hadn’t were just apprentices.

  Grissom had been Shepard’s backup command pilot for the first Gemini flight, so when Shepard was grounded, Grissom was named prime crew. And after Gus got through with it, the spacecraft—no longer just a capsule, since its more powerful translational rocket thrusters could change its course and orbit, unlike the primitive Mercury—was a pilot’s dream, a smooth-handling sports car compared to the Model T Mercury. Even the myriad controls and displays were laid out in a way that made it clear a pilot had had a direct hand in the design.

  The idea to make it a two-man vessel had come from Max Faget, who had been named the MSC’s director of engineering and development after the move to Houston. It seemed like common sense to use two men, especially given the longer missions and more complex operations now involved. Faget’s shop also favored a landing system that included a parachute that could be steered and had retro-rockets to cushion touchdowns on the ground. But problems in that system’s development seriously delayed implementation, and it was finally scrapped.

  Faget did not like the proposed landing system that was officially a part of the Gemini program and was planned for use in the last few flights: the Rogallo wing, an inflatable paraglider that would allow the craft to land on a runway using skids and would grant its pilot some maneuvering capability. Grissom and NASA civilian research pilot Neil Armstrong tested an early trainer version of the wing, but there were too many kinks to work out, and it was canceled after twenty-seven million dollars and years of development had gone into it. So the spacecraft would land as Mercury had—with an unguided splashdown into the water, which required a huge fleet of naval vessels to be ready in the primary, secondary, and contingent recovery areas.

  The new, improved Mercury Mark II would also be twice as heavy as the original Mercury capsule, with 50 percent more space inside, so it would need a more powerful launcher. A new ICBM booster called the Titan II caught Chamberlin’s eye. It was being developed for the air force to launch nuclear warheads, and its total thrust of 430,000 pounds would be the most powerful in the nation’s arsenal. The first version of the Titan had an overly complicated engine, and early tests revealed its unreliability—“If the rocket got out of sight where you couldn’t see it, it was classified a success,” remembered one engineer. Another problem was its “pogo”—a liquid-fueled rocket’s tendency to vibrate longitudinally, which could result in structural failure, blur its occupants’ vision, and possibly inflict serious injury. These problems delayed the program by more than a year. But after some simplification and once the pogo and the other problems were fixed, Titan proved a reliable and powerful booster, and the final version of it received accolades from the astronauts. “A young fighter pilot’s ride,” one described its quicker acceleration at liftoff. But the bigger rocket was also louder at launch; one astronaut said it was “deafening…like a large freight train bearing down on you.”

  Its fuel system used hypergolic propellants that ignited on contact with each other and required neither an ignition system nor the super-cold storage facilities that liquid oxygen demanded. This greatly simplified launching, though the spontaneous combustion also made it more dangerous.

  With that in mind, Chamberlin decided to use ejection seats instead of Mercury’s escape tower, in case of an explosion during launch. Neither Faget nor Kraft supported that decision—the force of the ejection would subject the astronauts to twenty g’s, which might mean serious injury or death, and it was so dangerous that the system was never actually tested with a human—but the two were overruled. Chamberlin’s background was in jet aircraft, and jets used ejection seats. For easier access and egress, two large hatches would be installed. But the interior was still so cramped that an astronaut couldn’t stretch his legs out straight. There was about as much space as you’d have in the front seat of a Volkswagen Bug.

  Despite the cramped quarters, astronauts loved the Gemini. They would no longer be glorified passengers unable to fly the craft—this spacecraft was all “stick,” with the pilot controlling virtually every movement. “My Gemini spacecraft was the orbital equivalent of a fighter aircraft…my favorite flying vehicle,” said Schirra. The only thing the ground control could do was update the computer. And the astronauts would no longer have to put up with jokes about sweeping the monkey shit off the seat, since no chimp alive could learn to fly it. Each man would have his own set of controls, though they would share the joystick, which was mounted between them. And the Titan, for all its quirks, offered a smoother, quieter post-liftoff ride than the Atlas.

  The McDonnell company had learned much from creating the Mercury capsule, and Gemini was an improvement on it in virtually every way. A primitive but helpful onboard computer, a rendezvous radar, and after the first few missions, instead of large batteries, compact fuel cells that produced more electricity, weighed much less, and yielded a useful by-product, water, came standard on the Gemini, like disc brakes on t
he new 1965 Corvette.

  To the astronauts in the NASA bubble—working and training long days and nights at Cape Canaveral and the new Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, visiting aerospace contractors’ plants for weeks at a time, spending barely enough time at home to reacquaint themselves with their families—real-world events only occasionally seeped into their consciousness. Politics, sports, popular culture, entertainment, and even the violent race riots and the civil rights protests and opposition to the Vietnam War sparked by the emerging counterculture of the new Left—to the astronauts, this was mostly background noise. But not the events that occurred on November 22, 1963, in Dallas.

  Earlier that year, President Kennedy’s fervor for manned spaceflight had flagged; were the results really worth the money? In a September 20 speech to the United Nations, he had even suggested that the United States and the USSR combine their efforts toward a lunar landing, though the Soviet system was still too deeply entrenched in insularity to accept such an invitation. In congressional hearings, the space program and its massive budget had experienced its first solid opposition. Jim Webb had been forced to use all his powers of persuasion and to resort to scare tactics—The Russians are still ahead in the space race—to keep the Senate from cutting NASA’s 1964 budget by half a billion dollars. On November 12, the president had issued a memorandum calling on Webb to begin developing a program of cooperation with the Soviet Union in the field of outer space—a program that would include lunar landings.

  That order would not be carried out. On November 18, President Kennedy toured the new “moonport” facilities at Cape Canaveral. Wernher von Braun had flown down to give him a guided tour of pad 37B, which was being prepared for an unmanned Saturn I launch. In dark sunglasses, Kennedy posed for photos under the mammoth booster while Secret Service agents stood by nervously. He walked around the prototype of the rocket that would launch three men to the moon, hopefully before the end of the decade, per his directive. Gus Grissom and Gordon Cooper took him up in a navy copter to give him a bird’s-eye view of the new moonport. Then he flew to Houston, the first stop on a quick jaunt through Texas to shore up political support for the ’64 elections, and took a look at the fast-growing MSC. On November 21, at a NASA facility in San Antonio, he gave a speech in which he told the story of a group of boys hiking across the Irish countryside who came to a high orchard wall and tossed their caps over it, forcing them to find a way over: “This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space and we have no choice but to follow it. Whatever the difficulties, they will be overcome.” His initial indifference to manned spaceflight and his previous waffling on its importance became enthusiastic approval in public.

  From San Antonio he flew to Fort Worth and spent the night there. The next morning, the president and his entourage made the short flight to Dallas’s Love Field. At a luncheon later that day, he was planning to give a speech defending the space program’s cost. “This effort is expensive,” it went, “but it pays for its own way, for freedom and for America.” In Dallas, in an open limousine, he and the First Lady, along with Governor John Connally and his wife, were driven through the large friendly crowds lining the streets. At 12:30 p.m. in downtown’s Dealey Plaza, the president was shot dead.

  Americans were devastated, and millions around the world shared their sorrow. Everyone in NASA was grief-stricken; von Braun, in his office three days later doing paperwork while the funeral played on TV, broke down and cried, the only time his secretary ever saw him do so. Many in NASA worried about what would happen to the United States space program now that its biggest public supporter was gone. Lyndon Johnson, the new president, had been a strong advocate of it, but a vice president had the luxury to choose and nurture his pet projects. A president had far less leeway. And consuming an increasing amount of Kennedy’s attention over the past year had been the growing conflict in Vietnam, where Communist forces from the north were threatening to take over U.S.-backed South Vietnam. The attempt to stem the “red tide of Communism” before it spread through the rest of Southeast Asia was demanding more American soldiers and dollars every day, and it showed no signs of slowing down.

  Many of the astronauts had met President Kennedy, and the Mercury Seven had spent time with him at the White House and at NASA facilities. But his assassination hit John Glenn especially hard. Since his triumphant flight twenty months before, Glenn had become close to the Kennedy clan, much to the amusement—and, likely, jealousy—of some of the other Mercury astronauts. The president and his brother Robert had adopted him into their extended family, and the Glenns had spent time at various Kennedy houses and compounds. Glenn became especially close to attorney general Robert Kennedy; he and his brother had even suggested that Glenn challenge an aging incumbent in the Ohio Democratic primary for a Senate seat. Glenn was interested, but he thought he still had something to give the space program—and there remained that outside chance of a moon flight, the astronaut’s holy grail. He had continued to train with the astronauts, and he had asked Slayton and even Bob Gilruth for a Gemini flight assignment.

  But they hadn’t given him a definitive answer, and Glenn began to suspect he’d never get a mission. Then a NASA official told him that Washington believed that he was too valuable to the program to risk losing him on another flight…and then he asked if Glenn was interested in becoming an administrator.

  The death of the president helped Glenn make up his mind. Seven weeks after the assassination, on January 16, 1964, Glenn resigned from the space program. The next day he announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate seat in Ohio and began campaigning. The initial reaction was promising.

  Six weeks later, in a hotel while on the road, Glenn slipped while adjusting a bathroom mirror and smacked his head on the shower door’s metal track, knocking himself out. He came to and found himself in a pool of blood. Worse than the concussion he sustained was the damage to his inner ear’s vestibular system, which controls balance. His symptoms were much like those of his rival Shepard—extreme dizziness and nausea. After weeks in a hospital bed, he withdrew from the Senate race. His political career appeared over before it ever started.

  The Russians, meanwhile, were not flying as often as they had been. Since the June 1963 Vostok 6 flight that had included Valentina Tereshkova, there had been no manned missions…or at least none made public. That hiatus ended with another Russian space first on October 12, 1964: three men were launched in Voskhod 1.

  It was only much later that the West learned the men went up in a stripped-down, one-man Vostok capsule modified to carry three cosmonauts, a strategy insisted on by Soviet politicians to upstage the announced two-man Gemini program. There was so little space in the cabin that there were no ejection seats, and the three short men—a pilot, a physician, and one of Korolev’s design engineers—could not wear spacesuits. They underwent just a few months of training, and for most of that time they had to diet to reduce the capsule’s payload to a sustainable level. When they squeezed into their spacecraft, they wore nothing but lightweight clothing. Fortunately, there was neither a booster accident during the launch nor a cabin depressurization during the brief sixteen-orbit, single-day flight. The spherical capsule dropped to Earth safely with the help of a braking rocket added to the parachute lines, since the cosmonauts had to make a ground landing. Besides being the first multi-person space mission and the first with no one wearing a spacesuit, Voskhod 1 set an altitude record of 209 miles.

  During the flight, the crew spoke by radiotelephone to Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who was at his villa on the Black Sea. This would be the last time he spoke publicly as the leader of his country. Though he had overseen a relaxation of the Stalinist terror tactics and introduced some academic and cultural openness, many of his policies were unsuccessful, and other Soviet politicians decided it was time for a change. Later that same day, he was summoned to Moscow, where he was removed from office on October 14. Two offices, actually—Leonid Brezhnev replaced him as first secretary, and A
lexei Kosygin took his job as premier. The country’s two new leaders greeted the cosmonauts upon their arrival in Moscow eight days later.

  Five months after that, on March 18, 1965, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov accomplished the world’s first EVA—extravehicular activity, or space walk—when he crawled through an inflatable air lock and floated out of Voskhod 2 at the end of an eighteen-foot umbilical cord. He spent twelve minutes floating and cavorting outside as the spacecraft orbited the Earth—the first human satellite. But when he tried to reenter the craft, he found that his spacesuit had expanded and stiffened so much that he couldn’t bend his legs to fit through the air lock. As his oxygen supply dwindled down, he decided on an extreme measure. He partially depressurized his suit by opening a valve and letting air bleed out, then jammed himself inside headfirst; his crewmate, Pavel Belyayev, hauled him through the air lock.

  Leonov was exhausted. He had expended so much energy that he was up to his knees in sweat. Years later, he would reveal that he had a suicide pill to swallow in case he was unable to reenter the craft and his crewmate was forced to abandon him. (This was an option no American astronaut would ever be given, despite persistent rumors to the contrary.) Leonov would later insist that he hadn’t been scared; “There was only a sense of the infinite expanse and depth of the universe,” he said.