The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

  By mid-1960 the engineers had developed the “procedures trainer,” which was in fact a simulator. There were identical procedures trainers at the Cape and at Langley. At the Cape the trainer was in Hangar S. It was there that the astronaut spent his long day’s training. He climbed into a cubicle and sat in a seat that was aimed straight up at the roof. The back of the seat was flat on the floor of the cubicle, so that the astronaut rested on his back. He looked up at a replica of a console that would be used in the Mercury capsule. It was as if he were on top of the rocket, with his face aimed at the sky. The console was wired to a bank of computers. About twenty feet behind the astronaut, on the floor of Hangar S, sat a technician at another console, feeding simulated problems into the system.

  The technician would start off saying, “Count is at T minus fifty seconds and counting.”

  From inside the trainer, over his microphone, the astronaut would answer: “Roger.”

  “Check your periscope—fully retracted?”

  “Periscope retracted.”

  “Ready switch on?”

  “Ready switch on.”

  “T minus ten seconds. Minus eight … seven … six … five … four … three … two … one … Fire!”

  Inside the trainer the dials in front of the astronaut would start indicating that he was on his way, and he was supposed to start reading the gauges and reporting to the ground. He would say, “Clock is operating … okay, twenty seconds … one thousand feet [altitude] … one-point-five g’s … Trajectory is good … Twelve thousand feet, one-point-nine g’s … Inner cabin pressure is five p.s.i … . Altitude forty-four thousand, g-level two-point-seven … one hundred thousand feet at two minutes and five seconds …” The instructor might pick this point to hit a button on his console marked “oxygen.” A red warning light marked O2EMERG would light up, and the astronaut would say: “Cabin pressure decreasing! … Oxygen is apparently leaking! … It’s still leaking … Switching to emergency reserve …” The astronaut could throw a switch that brought more oxygen into the simulator system—i.e., into its computer calculations—but the instructor could hit his “oxygen” button again, and that meant that the leak was continuing, and the astronaut would say: “Still leaking … It’s approaching zero-flow rate … Abort because of oxygen leak! Abort! Abort!” Then the astronaut would hit a button, and a button marked MAYDAY would light up red on the instructor’s console. In actual flight the escape tower was supposed to fire at this point, pulling the capsule free of the rocket and bringing it down by parachute.

  The astronauts spent so much time hitting the abort handle in the procedures trainer that it got to the point where it seemed as if they were training for an abort rather than for a launch. There was very little action that an astronaut could take in a Mercury capsule, other than to abort the flight and save his own life. So he was not being trained to fly the capsule. He was being trained to ride in it. In a “graded series of exposures” he was being introduced to all sights, sounds, and sensations he might conceivably experience. Then he was reintroduced to them, day after day, until the Mercury capsule and all its hums, g-forces, window views, panel displays, lights, buttons, switches, and peroxide squirts became as familiar, as routine, as workaday as an office. All flight training had a certain amount of desensitizing built into it. When a Navy pilot practiced carrier landings on the outline of a flight deck painted on an airfield, it was hoped that the maneuver might also desensitize his normal fear of landing a hurtling machine in such a small space. Nevertheless, he was there chiefly in order to learn to land the machine. Not until Project Mercury had there been a flight training program so long and detailed, so sophisticated, and yet so heavily devoted to desensitizing the trainee, to adapting out man’s ordinary fears, and enabling one to think and use his hands normally in a novel environment.

  Oh, all of this had been well known at the outset! … so much so that the original NASA selection committee had been afraid that the military test pilots they were interviewing would regard the job as boring or distasteful. Since they figured they needed six astronauts for Mercury, they had considered training twelve—on the assumption that half of them would resign once they fully understood how passive their role would be. And now, in 1960, they began to realize that they had been correct; or halfway, in any case. The boys were, indeed, finding the role of biomedical passenger in an automated pod, i.e., the role of human guinea pig, distasteful. That much had proved to be true. The boys’ response, however, had not been resignation or anything close to it. No, the engineers now looked on, eyebrows arched, as the guinea pigs set about … altering the experiment.

  The difference between pilot and passenger in any flying craft came down to one point: control. The boys were able to present some practical, workmanlike arguments on this score. Even if an astronaut were to be a redundant component, an observer and repairman, he should be able to override any of the Mercury vehicle’s automatic systems manually, if only to correct malfunctions. So went the argument. But there was another argument that could not be put into so many words, since one was forbidden to state the premise itself: the right stuff.

  After all, the right stuff was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life (by riding on top of a Redstone or Atlas rocket). Any fool could do that (and many fools would no doubt volunteer, given the opportunity), just as any fool could throw his life away in the process. No, the idea (as all pilots understood) was that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back at the last yawning moment—but how in the name of God could you either hang it out or haul it back if you were a lab animal sealed in a pod?

  Every signal they received told the boys that the true brethren at Edwards looked upon them as glorified “klutzes,” to use Wally Schirra’s phrase. Schirra knew the Edwards outlook in such matters well enough. He had done some major testing of the F-4H at Edwards for the Navy in 1956. But it was Deke Slayton who felt the condescension of the brethren most of all. He had come into Project Mercury straight from Fighter Ops at Edwards, and his pals there kidded him unmercifully. “A monkey’s gonna make the first flight.” That was the typical refrain. When the boys went to Edwards for their briefings on the X–15 program and their weightless parabolas—riding backseat with Edwards pilots—they picked up a whiff of … contempt … It hadn’t helped any that Scott Carpenter and a couple of the others had taken over the controls on the F–100Fs and tried to fly the weightless parabolas from the front seat … and had failed. They hadn’t been able to fly the correct profile and produce the weightless interval. Of course, with a little practice they could have no doubt mastered it … Nevertheless! … Rightly or wrongly, some of the boys felt that rocket pilots like Crossfield were high-hatting them. And what about the Society of Experimental Test Pilots? The SETP was the main organization within the fraternity. Several of the boys didn’t even qualify for membership. The SETP required that a member have at least twelve months’ experience in the first flights of new aircraft, probing the outer limits of the envelope. The SETP was not about to accept astronauts until they had done a hell of a lot more than volunteer for Mercury and sign a contract with Life. On the upper elevations of the pyramid the brave lads—they could sense it—were viewed as seven green rookies; and all the while there was the infuriating question: “Are astronauts even pilots?”

  Deke Slayton, who was a member of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, had been invited to address the annual conference in Los Angeles in September 1959 on that very subject: the role of the astronaut in Project Mercury. The meeting happened to come just two weeks after Life had started its sunburst of stories categorizing the seven astronauts as the best and bravest pilots in American history. No reader of Life would have recognized the Deke Slayton who went to the podium in a hotel convention hall to speak to the brotherhood. From the start his tone was defensive. He said he had some �
�stubborn, frank” comments on the role of the pilot in Project Mercury. There were people in the military, he said, who wondered “whether a college-trained chimpanzee or the village idiot might not do as well in space as an experienced test pilot.” (A monkey’s gonna make the first flight!) He knew there was that kind of talk going around, and it annoyed him. These people were confusing Mercury “with the Air Force Man in Space Soonest or Army Adam programs, which were essentially man-in-a-barrel approaches.” His audience looked at him blankly, since such had been precisely the origin of the Mercury program. “I hate to hear anyone contend that present-day pilots have no place in the space age and that non-pilots can perform the space mission effectively,” he said. “If this were true, the aircraft driver could count himself among the dinosaurs not too many years hence.” That was hardly likely, he went on. A non-pilot might be able to do part of the job. But in those critical moments when it was necessary to keep your head and make observations and record data while cantilevered out over the bottomless Gulp … who else could cope with it but someone made of the stuff of the professional test pilot?

  Slayton possessed a forcefulness that people often failed to detect at first. His remarks may not have convinced many skeptics within the Society of Experimental Test Pilots. Nevertheless, they became, in effect, the keynote address of the campaign that began inside NASA.

  By now, September 1959, Slayton and the rest of them realized that, as Glenn had first divined, the astronaut corps was like a new branch of the service and that in this new branch no one outranked them. Certainly Robert Voas didn’t outrank them. Voas was a Navy lieutenant who had been designated as the astronauts’ training officer. Voas was neither a flight instructor nor an aeronautical engineer but an industrial psychologist who had been chosen precisely because the training of astronauts was regarded not as a form of pilot training but as a form of psychological adaptation. Voas was no older than they and ranked below them even in the regular military; so one of the boys’ first moves was to see that Voas, as training officer, functioned more like a trainer on a sports team and, in any case, not like the coach. They began telling him what their training schedule was going to be. Voas became a coordinator and spokesman for the astronauts in matters of training.

  Gordon Cooper had been frowned upon a few months before when he complained about the lack of supersonic fighter planes for “proficiency” flying, but now the boys took up his complaint within the corridors of NASA, with Slayton and Schirra leading the way and Voas arguing their case for them. Soon they had two F–102s on loan from the Air Force. The ships were somewhat the worse for wear, however—absolute junkers, in fact, in the eyes of the seven pilots. The Air Force had sloughed these wrecks off on them like hand-me-downs. The poor condition of the F–102s wasn’t the worst of it, however. The galling thing was that the F–102, which had been one of the first in the Century series, was by now a back number. It would go supersonic but just barely, Mach 1.25 being about top speed. Wally Schirra knew how to formulate the argument on this score. Wally was not merely an expert prankster; he could also turn stern and bang the table and conjure up the aura of the right stuff and its privileges and prerequisites without once uttering the unspoken things. Wally would say to the brass: You’re presenting us to the American people as the seven best test pilots in America, and we are among the best, all the p.r. aside, and yet you’re not even giving us the opportunity to keep up our proficiency! Before I joined this program I was flying fighter aircraft capable of Mach 2 or better. And now we’re supposed to keep up our proficiency with a couple of old clunkers that will hardly go Mach 1 even when they’re in half-decent shape. It doesn’t make any sense! It’s as if you decided to prepare a major-league ball club for World Series competition by having them take a year off to play against a bunch of old crocks in a Parks & Recreation league in south Jersey. Wally was terrific in moments like this; and by and by, the boys would get a couple of F–106s, which were second-generation F–102s and capable of Mach 2.3. In the meantime, they tried to make do with the F–102s. But, hell, even flying F–102s was a big step beyond the original training agenda—which assumed that proficiency flights of whatever sort would be of no use for the astronaut in Project Mercury. Nor had this assumption yet died, Wally and Deke or no Wally and Deke.

  At the Woods Hole conference Voas described the advantages of the F–102 flights in sustaining the astronauts’ “decision-making abilities,” and an aviation psychologist from the University of Illinois, Jack A. Adams, could scarcely believe what he was hearing.

  “Frankly,” he said, “I cannot see how decision making, or any other type of response, for that matter, in the F–102 can transfer significantly to the comparatively unique responding required of the astronaut in the Mercury vehicle.” Then he added: “The astronaut’s task is actually more like a radar observer’s job than a pilot’s.” Another aviation psychologist, Judson Brown of the University of Florida, was just as baffled: “It has been frequently mentioned that skilled pilots must be used for Mercury, for the X–15, and the Dyna-Soar projects. Clearly, the use of skilled pilots seems to be of much less importance for Mercury than for the other two. There is a serious question whether positive transfer will occur from pilot training to Mercury capsule operation.”

  Inside NASA, however, this position was no longer tenable. From a sheerly political or public relations standpoint, the astronaut was NASA’s prize possession, and the seven Mercury astronauts had been presented to the public and the Congress as great pilots, not as test subjects. If they now insisted on being pilots, great or otherwise—who was going to step in and say no? The boys sensed this; or as Wally Schirra put it, they realized they had “a fair amount of prestige around the country.” So next they began whittling down the number of medical and scientific experiments they were expected to take part in—the guinea-pig stuff—simply by characterizing them as useless or stupid and cutting them out of their schedules. Here they tended to have the support of Gilruth’s chief of operations, Walt Williams. Williams was a big hearty powerful-looking engineer who had been one of the true geniuses of the X series at Edwards, the man who had turned supersonic flight test into a precise and rational science. Williams was a flight-line engineer; he didn’t have much patience with matters of flight test that were not operational. The one engineer who didn’t mind letting it be known that Astropower, as it came to be called, was getting out of hand was one of Williams’s lieutenants, Christopher Columbus Kraft, Jr. Chris Kraft was a hard-driving young man, thirty-six years old, urbane and sharp-witted, as aeronautical engineers went, and he was scheduled to be flight director for Mercury; but he didn’t yet have the clout to do much of anything where the astronauts were concerned. The seven men pressed on. They were tired of the designation of “capsule” for the Mercury vehicle. The term as much as declared that the man inside was not a pilot but an experimental animal in a pod. Gradually, everybody began trying to work the term “spacecraft” into NASA publications and syllabuses. Next the men raised the question of a cockpit window for the spacecraft. As it was now designed, the Mercury capsule had no window, just a small porthole on either side of the astronaut’s head. His main way of seeing the outside world would be through a periscope. A window had been regarded as an unnecessary way of inviting rupture due to changes in pressure. Now the astronauts insisted on a window. So the engineers went to work designing a window. Next the men insisted on a hatch they could open by themselves. The hatch, as currently designed, would be bolted shut by the ground crew. In order to leave the capsule after splashing down, the astronaut would either have to slither out through the neck, as if he were coming out of a bottle, or wait for another crew to unbolt the hatch from the outside. So the engineers went to work designing a hatch with explosive bolts so that the astronaut could blow it off by hitting a detonator. It was too late to incorporate the new items into the capsule—the spacecraft—that would be used for the first Mercury flight. That vehicle was already badly behind schedule
as it was. But they would be in each craft thereafter …

  And why? Because pilots had windows in their cockpits and hatches they could open on their own. That was what it was all about: being a pilot as opposed to a guinea pig. The men hadn’t stopped with the window and the hatch, either. Not for a moment. Now they wanted … manual control of the rocket. They weren’t kidding! This was to take the form of an override system: if the astronaut believed, in his judgment, as captain of the ship (not capsule), that the booster rocket engine was malfunctioning, he could take over and guide it himself—like any proper pilot.

  How could they be serious!—the engineers would say. Any chance of a man being able to guide a rocket from inside a ballistic vehicle, a projectile, was so remote as to be laughable. This proposal was so radical the engineers knew they would be able to block it. It was no laughing matter to the seven pilots, however. They also wanted complete control of the re-entry procedure. They wanted to establish the capsule’s angle of attack manually and fire the retro-rockets themselves without any help from the automatic control system. This suggestion made the engineers wince. Slayton even wanted to redesign the hand controller that would activate the hydrogen peroxide thrusters to make the capsule pitch, roll, or yaw. He wanted the hand controller to operate the pitch and roll thrusters only; yaw would be controlled by pedals which the astronaut would operate with his feet. That was the conventional setup on aircraft: a two-axis stick plus pedals. That was the way pilots established attitude control.

  Life magazine and the worshipful public and the worshipful politicians and all the others who had already exalted the seven astronauts did not care in the slightest whether they functioned like pilots or not. It was enough that they were willing to climb atop the rocket at all, in the name of the battle with the Soviets for the high ground, and be exploded into space or to the harp farm. It was not enough for the men themselves, however. All of them were veteran military pilots, and five of them had already reached the higher elevations of the invisible ziggurat when Project Mercury began, and they were determined to go into space as pilots and as nothing else.