American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  FOR A YEAR and a half, President Kennedy had been inspiring Americans to slip the bonds of Earth and literally reach for the moon, pushing past limits that had constrained mankind through its entire history. For some, however, there was still a glass ceiling beyond which they weren’t permitted to go.

  Inspired by Kennedy’s vision, women were lobbying hard to join America’s astronaut corps, applying to NASA, working behind the scenes, and inundating the White House with enlistment pleas. For example, Kennedy received a letter from Susan Marie Scott of Kentucky asking to audition for Gemini. His secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, forwarded the letter to O. B. Lloyd Jr., director of NASA’s Office of Public Services and Information. In his response to Scott, Lloyd wrote, “Many women are employed in the program—some of them are in extremely important scientific posts. But we have no present plans to employ women in spaceflights. There are no women pilots to our knowledge, who have the degrees of scientific and flight training required for the success of those missions. Since there is no shortage of qualified male candidates, there is no need to train women for space flight at this stage in the program.”

  As Scott found out, it was impossible for women to be genuinely considered for Project Gemini. An applicant needed a superior recommendation from a military or scientific employer and a laudable record as a test pilot. Service in the Korean War was also looked upon favorably. All the criteria were tilted toward male applicants only. “NASA did not state gender in its selection requirements, but more than two decades of discrimination by the military didn’t give the agency any qualified choice other than men,” Francis French and Colin Burgess wrote in Into the Silent Sea. “Not only did the military still bar women from flying high-performance aircraft except in extremely rare circumstances, but civilian companies rarely hired women pilots either, let alone trained them as test pilots.”

  While African Americans’ struggle for civil rights was beginning to shake the pillars of Jim Crow, female pilots were struggling for equality in their fight against NASA’s patriarchy. They did, however, have one offbeat ally in Dr. William “Randy” Lovelace II. An aeromedicine pioneer, Lovelace was chairman of the Special Advisory Committee on Life Science and from his office in New Mexico had conducted the intensive medical examinations that had helped winnow down the first class of likely astronauts to the final Mercury Seven. Although holding what were then traditional views on women’s roles in American society, Lovelace believed that women were better equipped physiologically for NASA space travel because they were, on average, shorter and smaller than men, needed less food and oxygen, and had better blood circulation and fewer cardiac problems.

  After meeting American aviator Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb in 1959, Lovelace invited her to take the same tests as the Mercury astronauts—and was amazed at her aptitude. Beginning in 1960, Lovelace had begun testing this hypothesis at his privately financed Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research, in Albuquerque. Intrigued as to whether Cobb was an anomaly, Lovelace accepted a financial gift from the fabled pilot Jackie Cochran, the leader of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program in World War II, to examine eighteen other seasoned female pilots at his New Mexico clinic for secret testing. These women, all dexterous airplane pilots with commercial ratings, were put through a series of rigorous tests on centrifuges to simulate the pressure of launch and reentry. They graduated with flying colors. When word of the tests leaked to the media, the top twelve, along with Jerrie Cobb, were christened the “Mercury 13.” These women pilots ranged in age from twenty-three to forty-one, and ran the gamut from flight instructors to homemakers and from scientists to bush pilots.

  Just before these women finalists were to gather at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine, in Pensacola, Florida, for advanced aeromedical examinations, they received telegrams informing them that their program was being effectively shut down. NASA hadn’t certified gender in Lovelace’s work. In fact, when NASA leadership learned of the experiment, they made it abundantly clear that the agency wasn’t going to employ women astronauts. The impetus for NASA’s decision was Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, moonshot announcement, and Webb’s belief that all the agency’s astronaut-training energy had to be targeted toward that lunar objective. In other words, it wasn’t the time for a shift on gender. That didn’t stop the American press from lionizing these women’s test results. Some of the choice headlines read: “Astrogals Can’t Wait for Space,” “Spunky Mom Eyes Heavens,” and “Why Not ‘Astronauttes’ Also?”

  Fueled by the media attention and desire to shatter the glass ceiling, Janey Briggs Hart refused to give up her space dream easily. The wife of Michigan senator Phil Hart and the mother of eight children, Hart orchestrated a letter-writing campaign to the White House, arguing that women deserved to be included in the NASA space program. The pressure became so intense that Kennedy booted the issue to Congress, where a special subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics convened. On the first day of testimony, Hart and the other women pilots spoke righteously on behalf of women’s equality, and they were gaining momentum. Then, a most unlikely spoiler appeared before the subcommittee: John Glenn, who echoed Webb’s contention that funding women in space drained money needed for the moonshot, and was generally a waste of tax dollars. “I think this gets back to the way our social order is organized,” Glenn testified. “It is just fact. The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in the field is a fact of our social order.”

  The Mercury 13 pilots were devastated that Glenn, whom they all admired, was opposed to female astronauts, putting the U.S. space program on the wrong side of history. The following year, the Soviets did what the Americans wouldn’t, making Valentina Tereshkova the first woman in space. At heart, this was a stunt to one-up the Americans. Lifting off aboard Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963, Tereshkova became a global hero after making forty-eight Earth orbits over the course of seventy hours, at one point coming within three kilometers of Cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky, who’d launched aboard Vostok 5 just two days earlier. Frustrated that NASA had flummoxed his Mercury 13 project, Lovelace kept fighting a rearguard action from his home in New Mexico, hoping for the inclusion of a woman astronaut on the Gemini roster. But in December 1965, he and his wife were killed in a plane crash, depriving the Mercury 13 of their most devoted advocate. It would be nearly twenty years before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space, lifting off aboard the Space Shuttle flight STS-7—the Challenger—on June 18, 1983.

  From a wide-lens historical perspective, the Mercury 13 were fighting an uphill battle for job equality that was central to the women’s movement. During the Kennedy years, women earned only 60 percent of the average wage for men. For the exact same job, a working man earned $5,147, to $3,283 for women; it was imperative that this gap be closed. While Kennedy was progressive on such women’s issues as day care centers, fair employment, and college admissions, he behaved as if the U.S. military workforce, with space exploration folded in, were a male prerogative. Nevertheless, Kennedy’s Equal Pay Act of 1963 (which prohibited arbitrary discrimination against women in the workforce) was a step in the right direction. Frances Perkins, America’s first woman cabinet secretary (under FDR), believed the law, along with the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, was the opening salvo of the modern women’s movement.

  The idea of an African American, Hispanic, Native American, or Jewish American astronaut quite simply wasn’t in NASA’s organizational plan for the early 1960s. WASP supremacy still held sway. Many of NASA’s facilities were in the Deep South and Southwest, where racial segregation roadblocks were only starting to be dismantled. For example, when the black mathematician Julius Montgomery was hired at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, he faced harassment from NASA employees who were members of the Ku Klux Klan. White employees wouldn’t say hello or even look at Montgomery. But in the end he prevailed by
performing flawlessly. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, NASA finally made long-overdue strides toward having a diversified, multicultural workforce.

  COMPARED TO THE other Gemini recruits and the stymied women of Mercury 13, Wally Schirra seemed, at age thirty-nine, a grand old man of space exploration. But after a series of delays, he was finally poised to become America’s newest space hero, scheduled to launch on October 3, 1962, aboard a Mercury-Atlas 8 (MA-8).

  Schirra was born into an aviation family in New Jersey in 1923. His father, Walter M. Schirra Sr., flew bombing sorties over Germany during World War I for the Royal Canadian Air Force. After the war, the elder Schirra made a living barnstorming at county fairs in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Florence Schirra, the astronaut’s mother, joined her husband doing wing-walking stunts to awestruck crowds. By the time Wally was fifteen, he was already flying airplanes by himself.

  After excelling in high school, Schirra attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis from 1942 to 1945 and served during the final months of the war aboard a navy cruiser. After the war, he married Josephine “Jo” Cook of Seattle (stepdaughter of Admiral James L. Holloway) and trained as an aviator at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, earning his wings and joining Fighter Squadron 71 in 1948. Other pilots were in awe of Schirra’s natural ability and technical skills. Determined to shatter aviation records, he became only the second navy pilot to log one thousand hours in jet aircraft. When the Korean War erupted, Schirra was seconded by the navy to the air force, where he became operations officer with the 154th Fighter-Bomber Squadron. Between 1951 and 1952, Schirra flew ninety combat missions, usually in an F-84 Thunderjet, downing one MiG-15 and inflicting serious damage on two others. After receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with oak leaf cluster for distinguished wartime service, he moved on to a career as a test pilot and aeronautical engineer.

  In the late 1950s, Schirra bounced around navy test schools, participating in the unveiling of the Sidewinder missile and the F7U-3 Cutlass jet fighter. At one test, Schirra fired a Sidewinder missile, and the projectile doubled back and started trailing his jet, forcing him into evasive maneuvers. Nobody ever doubted that Wally had the right stuff. Once chosen as a Mercury Seven astronaut, he earned the reputation of being the comedian of the bunch, loving to muck it up with reporters. “Levity is the lubricant of a crisis,” he explained of his prankish nature. In truth, his carefree personality belied an extremely careful and diligent work ethic. “My rambunctious approach to the off-duty aspect of life may have fooled some people, but this was not a game, I often said to myself. This is for real. I was not interested in the glamour of being a space hero. Instead, I was interested in getting up and getting back.”

  Set to become the fifth American in space and to make the country’s third orbital spaceflight, Schirra named his spacecraft Sigma 7—“7” for the Mercury Seven and “Sigma” after the Greek symbol for the sum of the elements of an equation, a mark long adopted for engineering excellence. “Not a fancy name like Freedom or Faith,” he recalled. “Not that I didn’t appreciate those names, but I wanted to prove that it was a team of people working together to make this vehicle go. . . . I thought that it was a very well-made machine, and very, very carefully designed.”

  During his nine-hour-plus mission on October 3, Schirra reported back to Mercury Control everything he did or encountered, his voice relayed via the Telstar satellite to TV and radio audiences around the world. As Schirra checked off his list, it became clear to Flight Director Chris Kraft at NASA that MA-8 was going to be the smoothest mission yet. After orbiting six times, Sigma 7 splashed down northeast of Midway Island in the Pacific, where Schirra was retrieved by Navy SEALs from the recovery ship USS Kearsarge. “In mission control, I winked at Deke Slayton and lit up my now traditional cigar,” Kraft wrote in Flight. “Schirra was the perfect astronaut and he’d just carried out a perfect mission.”

  At the White House, a busy Kennedy couldn’t watch the whole nine-hour MA-8 mission, but he received a constant flow of updates. “The President was always extremely interested in these flights,” Evelyn Lincoln recalled, “and there was a great deal of excitement around the White House. Commander Walter Schirra was in the space ship early in the morning, waiting. I had my television set tuned in for the event. What a relief when he got into orbit.” A delighted and breathless Lincoln kept her boss apprised of the flight every half hour.

  Rather than scientific experimentation, the mission of Sigma 7 focused mostly on engineering: the performance and operation of the spacecraft, the capabilities of global spacecraft tracking and communication systems, and the effects of prolonged microgravity on Schirra himself. However, Schirra had also carried a special two-and-a-half-pound handheld camera while aboard, recording the marvelous imagery of the star-filled adventure. With preparation considered meticulous even for a well-trained NASA astronaut, Schirra piloted his mission so free of flaws that reporters considered the feat almost mundane. “I ate and I wasn’t hungry,” he said. “The tubes of peaches, meat, and vegetables were tasty.” He even refined a method of cruising that saved enough fuel to repeat the six orbits, had he been allowed and had there been enough oxygen on board. Slayton and Shepard later wrote that Schirra’s efficiency “would have turned a robot green with envy.”

  NASA officials congratulated themselves that it had been the right mission at exactly the right time. There were plenty of reasons for American pride in Sigma 7. Nevertheless, its nine-hour flight still paled in comparison to the latest Soviet space accomplishments. Two months before Schirra’s flight, the USSR had smashed the record for human endurance in space when cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev piloted Vostok 3 through sixty-four Earth orbits over the course of a three-day, twenty-two-hour, and twenty-eight-minute flight. Nikolayev also made a creditable attempt at staging a space rendezvous with Vostok 4, which had been launched one day after his own flight. In the United States, space enthusiasts were acutely aware that America’s deficit in the space race was not closing.

  Eleven days passed before arrangements were made for Schirra to visit the White House. In the interim, he was honored fifty different ways in Houston. At a press conference at Rice University, Schirra boasted that the flight had been free of problems, that he’d experienced no difficulties with weightlessness, and that Mercury was now ready for a full one-day mission. Finally, on October 16, Schirra, Jo, and their two young children arrived at the White House at meet the president.

  At 9:25 a.m., the Schirras were led into the Oval Office. Five-year-old Suzanne Schirra lit up the room as she gazed wide-eyed and bashful at the handsome president and said quietly, “I know who you are!” Kennedy responded with the delight he naturally found in children, taking special care to entertain the girl and her twelve-year-old brother, Walter III. Sitting in his favorite seat, a rocking chair, he chatted with each member of the family. JFK’s composed ability to contain his darkest concerns that morning was so effective that Schirra detected nothing out of the ordinary. At ten o’clock, the astronaut and his family were politely escorted out. The Associated Press reporter covering the half-hour visit described the president’s demeanor as “homey” and “relaxed.” But this time, his elusive charm masked a darker reality.

  TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES BEFORE the Schirras had arrived, McGeorge Bundy had asked to see the president in the White House family quarters. The national security advisor disclosed that the CIA had analyzed surveillance photos of Cuba taken on October 14, confirming the construction of launch bases for Soviet nuclear missiles just a hundred miles from American soil. It was the news that Kennedy had dreaded.

  Starting at 11:30 a.m., Kennedy spent hours in the Cabinet Room with the senior advisors who comprised the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm). Deputy CIA director General Marshall Carter showed Kennedy the top-secret U-2 photos taken over Cuba, pinpointing fourteen canvas-covered missile trailers. As various possibilities for a U.S. response were proposed and discussed
(including air strikes, invasion, and naval blockade), it became clear that any military response could easily result in all-out war. The president calmly wondered aloud about Khrushchev’s ballsy gamble. “Why would the Soviets permit nuclear war to begin under that sort of half-assed way?” he mused.

  As ExComm members and their staffs worked to game out America’s options, Kennedy attempted to carry on with his other presidential duties, including a campaign swing through the Midwest on behalf of Democratic candidates. Seemingly undistracted, he pulled off speeches in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Muskegon, Michigan, with aplomb. At a hundred-dollar-a-seat fund-raiser in Chicago, however, speaking before five thousand people and a large broadcast audience, a distracted JFK skipped over large sections of his prepared text, ending well short of his allotted time. With dead air looming on televisions across metropolitan Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley rushed to the podium and hastily called for a benediction. Claiming a head cold, Kennedy canceled the rest of his Midwest tour and returned to Washington.

  On October 18, the National Photograph Interpretation Center advised the administration that two medium-range ballistic missile sites in Cuba could be operational within weeks. Two days of ExComm meetings in the White House ensued, and on October 22, an unruffled Kennedy made the missile crisis public in a televised address. Stating firmly that the United States would never tolerate Soviet offensive weapons in the Caribbean, the president announced the implementation of a naval quarantine designed to prevent any Soviet ships carrying offensive weapons from reaching Cuba.

  Like the rest of the country, officials and staff at NASA wrestled with anxiety as the long-burning fuse of the Cold War seemed close to reaching its charge. “For almost two weeks,” recalled Assistant Flight Director Gene Krantz, “the space program was understandably preoccupied with the blockade and possible invasion of Cuba, which could presage an all-out nuclear conflict with Russia.” Krantz, an air force veteran like many of his NASA colleagues, had already been notified that his reserve unit was on standby, and he could be called up at any time.