The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

  Control—in the form of overrides at the very least—was the one thing that would neutralize the recurring taunt within the fraternity: A monkey’s gonna make the first flight. In his speech before the brotherhood Slayton had brought that out into the open with his crack about the “college-trained chimpanzee.” That had seemed like a Slayton sortie into sarcasm and hyperbole. He made no reference to the fact that such a college actually existed.

  But in the deserts of New Mexico, about eighty miles north of El Paso and the Mexican Border, at Holloman Air Force Base, which was part of the White Sands missile-range complex, NASA had set up a Project Mercury chimpanzee colony. There was nothing secret about it, but it attracted little notice. The chimpanzee program had been devised mainly to satisfy “the medical Cassandras.” From the moment Joint Armed Forces-National Research Council Committee on Bioastronautics had visited the new NASA facility at Langley in January 1959, there had been doctors warning that the weightless state or high g-forces, or both, could be devastating and that animal flights should be mandatory. So NASA had twenty veterinarians training forty chimpanzees in a compound at the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman. Eventually one of the beasts would be chosen for what amounted to a dress rehearsal of the first manned flight. The idea would be not only to see if the chimpanzee could stand the strain but also to see if he could use his brain and his hands normally throughout the ride.

  Chimpanzees were chosen as much for their intelligence as their physiological similarity to humans. They could be trained to do fairly complex manual tasks, on cue, particularly if one got hold of them when they were young. Once they were trained to do the tasks on the ground, it would be possible to give them the cues to do the same tasks during a space flight and see if the weightless condition impeded them. Early in the game the vets decided that rewards, mere positive reinforcement, would not be sufficient for the job at hand. The only sure-fire training technique was operant conditioning. The principle here was the avoidance of pain. Or, to put it another way, if the ape didn’t do the job right, he was punished with electric shocks in the soles of his feet.

  The Holloman veterinarians, like most veterinarians, were compassionate men who were interested in relieving pain in animals and not in inflicting it upon them. But this was war! The chimpanzee program was an essential part of the battle for the high ground! It was no time for halfway measures! As congressmen told you every day, national survival was at stake! The veterinarians’ brief was to get the job done with the utmost speed and efficacy. There were several ways of training animals, but only operant conditioning, based on concepts developed by B. F. Skinner, seemed anywhere near foolproof. In any case, the “psychomotor stimulus plates” were attached to the beasts’ feet and they were strapped into chairs, and the process began … And when the apes did well, you gave them hugs and nuzzles, to be sure, first taking the precaution of making certain they weren’t in a mood to bite your goddamned nose off.

  Oh, the apes knew a thing or two! Their intelligence was only just below that of man. They had memories; they could figure out the situation. At an early age they had been seized in West Africa and separated from their mothers by this new species, the humans, and removed from all familiar surroundings and put in cages and shipped to this godforsaken alien landscape, the New Mexico desert, where they remained in cages … when they weren’t in the hands of a bunch of human ballbreakers in white smocks who strapped them down and zapped them and put them through insane exercises and routines. The beasts tried everything they could think of to escape. They snapped, snarled, spit, bit, thrashed at the straps, and made runs for it. Or they bided their time and used their heads. They would go along with a training task, seeming to cooperate, until the white smocker seemed to let his guard down—then they’d make a break for it. But the resistance and the wiles were of no avail. All they got for their struggles was more zaps and blue bolts. Some of the brightest apes were also the most intractable and resourceful ; they would take the electric shocks and then seem to give up and submit to fate—and then try to tear the white smockers a new asshole or two and make a run for it. With these implacable little bastards it was sometimes necessary to give them a tap or two with a rubber hose, or whatever.

  Then, at last, the sophisticated part of the training could begin. It took two main forms: the desensitizing or adapting out of the fears that a rocket flight would ordinarily hold for the animal (just confining an untrained chimpanzee in a Mercury capsule would have driven him berserk with fear); and placing the animal in a procedures trainer, a replica of the capsule he would be inside in flight, and teaching him to respond to lights and buzzers and throw the proper switches on cue—and having him do this day after day until it became a thoroughly familiar environment, as familiar, routine, and workaday as an office.

  The vets took the chimpanzees by airplane to Wright-Patterson for rides on the centrifuge the Air Force had there. They would strap each ape into the gondola, close the hatch, and pipe in the sound of a Redstone rocket launch and start him spinning, gradually introducing him to higher g-forces. They took them for parabolic rides backseat in fighter planes to familiarize them with the feeling of weightlessness. They put them in the simulator for endless hours and endless days of on-cue manual-task training. Since the chimpanzee would not be wearing a pressure suit in flight, he was put inside a pressurized cubicle, which in turn would be placed in the Mercury capsule. The monkey’s instrument panel was inside the inner cubicle. Therein, day by day, month by month, the monkey learned to operate certain switches in different sequences when cued by flashing lights. If he did the job incorrectly, he received an electric shock. If he did it correctly, he received banana-flavored pellets, plus some attaboys and nuzzles from the vets. Gradually the beasts were worn down. They were tractable now. The operant conditioning was taking place. A life of avoiding the blue bolts and gratefully accepting the attaboys and pellets had become the better part of valor. Rebellion had proved to be a dead end.

  The apes had begun their training at the same time as the astronauts, i.e., in the late spring of 1959. By now, 1960, they had been through almost every phase of astronaut training, other than abort and re-entry emergency sequences and attitude control.

  Some of the apes could operate their procedures trainer like a breeze, almost as rapidly as a man. The vets had every reason to be proud of what they had accomplished. On the outside the animals were as mild, tractable, smart, and lovable as the best little boy on the block, although inside … something was building up like Code Blue in the boiler room.

  About eight hundred miles west of Holloman Air Force Base, in the same latitude of the great American desert, was Edwards. The X–15 program had begun to pick up some momentum. There were even journalists coming to Edwards—in the midst of this, the Era of the Astronaut—and talking about the X–15 as “America’s first spaceship.” There were two men on hand at the base writing books about the project; one of them was Richard Tregaskis, who had written the best seller Guadalcanal Diary. The X–15, America’s first spaceship ... could it be? A year ago it would have seemed impossible. But now the Mercury program was beginning to lag. NASA had talked of making the first manned flight in mid-1960; well, it was now mid-1960, and they didn’t even have the capsule ready for unmanned testing.

  NASA’s prime pilot for the X–15 project was Joe Walker. He looked like a young towheaded version of Chuck Yeager, the country boy who loved to fly. He talked like Yeager. Well, hell, who didn’t around here? But with Walker it came naturally. Just as Yeager was from the coal country of West Virginia, Walker was from the coal country of Pennsylvania, and Walker liked to do that Yeager thing where you mixed up a lot of up-hollow talk—“The mother liked to blowed up on me”—with postwar engineerese about parameters, inputs, and extrapolations. As a matter of fact, Yeager had let it be known that he thought Walker was the pick of the litter at Edwards now.

  Yes, Walker looked and sounded like a younger version of Yeager—but in fac
t he was two years older. Yeager was still only thirty-seven, and Walker was thirty-nine. Walker was seven months older than Scott Crossfield. So aside from everything else, Walker didn’t have time to cool his heels. If the X–15 and X–20 programs at Edwards got stalled while all the money and attention went to Project Mercury, it would be bad news.

  Edwards had grown until it was about twenty times the size it was during the heyday of Yeager. Pancho Barnes’s Happy Bottom Riding Club was long gone. The Air Force had taken her property by eminent domain for the building of a new runway. There had been a bitter fight in court, during which a base commander had accused Pancho of running a whorehouse, and Pancho had told the court that she had it on good authority that the old peckerwood had instructed his pilots to accidentally-on-purpose napalm her ranch. Pancho had gone into retirement, with her fourth husband, her erstwhile ranch foreman, over in the town of Boron, to the northeast of the base.

  There were now about three thousand Air Force personnel at Edwards and about seven thousand civilians, some with NASA, including Walker himself. Yet the high desert was so vast and so open that it swallowed up all ten thousand of them with no trouble at all, and the place didn’t look terribly different except during the afternoon traffic jam, when all the civil servants got off work and sped toward the air conditioners that awaited them in their tract homes. Walker and his wife and two children lived in Lancaster, a desert town about a half hour’s drive west of Edwards. Walker had built a house in a tract that some inspired developer—inspiration was the choicest item in the real-estate boom of the period—had named White Fence Farms. You had to build a white fence around your house in order to live there. That he did. As for the Farm part—here you had yourself a problem, unless you farmed Joshua trees. The developer’s idea, in his sales pitch, was that you could build chicken coops at the rear end of your lot and have a second income.

  At that, Walker’s place looked like a little bit of heaven compared to Bob White’s. But then, on the surface, Walker and White were different in every respect. White, who was a major, was the Air Force’s prime pilot for the X–15 project. He was the eternally correct and reserved Air Force blue-suiter. He didn’t drink. He exercised like a college athlete in training. He was religious. He was an usher in the Roman Catholic chapel of the base and never, but never, missed Mass. He was slender, black-haired, handsome, intelligent—even cultivated, if the truth were known. And he was terribly serious. He was not a beer-call fighter jock. Not many people picked out Bob White to just shoot the breeze with. White and his family lived on the base itself at 116 Thirteenth Street in a miserable grid of military housing plots known as the Wherry housing section. Or it had been known as Wherry at the outset. By 1960 it was usually referred to as Weary housing. Children grew up there thinking that Weary housing was the real name. Parked out front of White’s place was an unpainted Model A Ford. The Air Force, being the newest branch of the service, was strong on instant tradition. This old junker, the Ford, was bestowed, as an ironic sculpture of the Right Stuff, upon whomever was the number-one Air Force test pilot at Edwards. Scott Crossfield, the prime pilot for the manufacturer, North American, had completed the first phase of testing the X–15, checking out the power system and basic aerodynamics. White and Walker had been chosen to push the rocket plane to its outer limits, which were envisioned as speeds in excess of Mach 6, or about 4,000 miles per hour, and, more important, an altitude of 280,000 feet. Just where “space” began was a matter of definition that had never been fully resolved. But fifty miles up was generally accepted as the boundary line. There was very little atmosphere left at that altitude; in fact, once a ship reached 100,000 feet, there was not enough air remaining to provide aerodynamics. The X–15’s target of 280,000 feet was 53 miles up.

  White and Walker had begun to fly the X–15 with the so-called Little Engine. This was, in fact, two X–1 engines built into a single fuselage. They provided 16,000 pounds of thrust. The X–15 was the most evillooking beast ever put into the air. It was a 7.5-ton black chimney with little fins on it and an enormous blocky tail. The black paint had been created to withstand the heat generated by friction when the ship went up above 100,000 feet and re-entered the denser atmosphere below. Everyone was waiting for the delivery of the Big Engine, the XLR-99. This was a rocket with 57,000 pounds of thrust, or four times the base weight of the ship. Once the XLR–99 was installed … well, Walker just might become the first man to cross the boundary into space. The engine’s 57,000 pounds of thrust were only 21,000 pounds less than that of the Redstone rocket, which—eventually—was supposed to take the astronauts on their first flights. As a matter of fact, it was the development of the Redstone as a missile that had first given NASA engineers like Walt Williams the idea for the X–15, back in the early 1950’s.

  How, then, could there be so much excitement over Project Mercury and so little over the X–15? Here was the thing that got to the boys after a while, no matter how nonchalant they tried to appear: the Mercury astronauts were national heroes without ever having left the ground—all because they had volunteered to ride on top of rockets. Well … Walker and White and Crossfield, like Yeager before them, had already ridden rockets, from the X–1 to the X–15. And they had ridden them as pilots. Your own brain was the guidance system for the X–15, and your own hand maneuvered the ship. In the Mercury-Redstone system, a bank of computers was the pilot, and the astronaut was a passenger. Why couldn’t everyone comprehend such a simple fact? Was it because the astronauts were seen as America’s front runners in the race with the Russians? Well, if so, that was pretty ironic. By now, mid-1960, the astronauts were supposed to have gone up in their first ballistic flights. That was the whole point of choosing the Mercury system. It was dirty—but it was quick; supposedly. But the Mercury capsule wasn’t even ready yet. There had been one delay after another. It was beginning to look unlikely that there would be a manned launch before 1961. The X–15 project was now actually ahead of Project Mercury in the attempt to reach space.

  On May 7 Walker had cut loose the X–15 on its first real speed run with the Little Engine and reached Mach 3.19 or 2,111 miles an hour, just a shade faster than Mel Apt’s world record of 2,094 miles an hour in the X–2. On May 19 Bob White took the X–15 on its first bid for maximum altitude with the Little Engine and reached 109,000 feet, which was 17,000 feet under Iven Kincheloe’s record in the X–2. And that was another point that everybody should have known about … and didn’t. Kinch and Mel were now dead. Mel Apt died just a few minutes after he set his world speed record, the victim of a demon that was waiting especially for rocket ships reaching speeds of Mach 2 or more in the thin air up around 70,000 feet: instability in the yaw or roll axis … followed by an uncontrollable tumble. Sometimes it took the form of “inertia coupling,” which usually occurred when a pilot tried to bank a rocket ship and it snapped into a full roll and then began pitching and yawing—and rolling violently. This would throw it end over end. Some pilots felt that the formal term “inertia coupling” added damned little to your understanding of the phenomenon. The ship simply “uncorked” (as Crossfield liked to put it) and lost all semblance of aerodynamics and fell out of the sky like a bottle or a length of pipe. There was no way to maneuver out of a rocket-plane tumble. The pilot took a furious beating from the g-forces and from being thrown about the cockpit. The more he experimented with the controls, the worse fix he was in. Yeager had been the first rocket pilot to go through this particular hole in the supersonic envelope, and it was during the flight in the X–IA in which he set a speed record of Mach 2.42. He was battered unconscious and fell seven miles before hitting the denser atmosphere at 25,000 feet and coming to and managing to put the ship into a spin. That was good; a mere spin he knew how to get out of, and he survived. Kinch went into a tumble during his record flight and came out of it at low altitude, as Yeager had done. That was just twenty days before Mel Apt augered in. Mel went into the wild tumble and tried to eject, but wasn’t able to c
omplete the sequence in the X–2. Yeager had always figured it was useless to try to punch out of a rocket plane. Crossfield called it “committing suicide to keep from getting killed.” Inertia coupling nearly killed Kit Murray in 1954, when he set an altitude record of 94,000 feet in the X–IA, and it had hit Joe Walker twice, once in the XF–102 and again in the X–3.

  When he talked about it, Joe Walker would say he got out of it each time through “the J.C. maneuver.” He’d say: “In the J.C. maneuver you take your hands off the controls and put the mother in the lap of a super-na-tu-ral power.” And, in fact, that was the only choice you had.

  The way Walker talked about it, with his big mountain-boy grin on, it was … just like talking about sports … But every prospective X–15 pilot had seen the on-board film from Mel Apt’s flight, and it was not a droll experience to watch that film. The camera had been mounted just behind Apt in the cockpit. It was a stop-frame camera that took one picture per second. In one frame Apt and his white helmet would be upright in the cockpit. In the next you would see his head, body, and helmet keeled over, crashing into the wall of the cockpit. In the first you saw a mountain ridge framed in the cockpit window, as if he were headed down in a dive, and in the next you saw empty sky: he was going end over end like an extra-point kick. The film seemed to go on forever. It was eerie looking at it, because you knew that at the end that little figure bouncing around in the white helmet would be dead.

  Life magazine was writing about how Deke Slayton had once been in an inverted spin in an F–105. No picnic, to be sure, and yet the rocket pilots looked at inverted spins as their friends on the way out of supersonic instability. People were impressed because the seven Mercury astronauts were willing to risk having Redstone rockets blow up under them. Christ! Rockets had already blown up under good men! Skip Ziegler’s X–2 exploded while still attached to the mother ship, a B–29, killing Skip and a B–29 crewman. The same thing had very nearly happened to Pete Everest in the X–1D—and to Walker himself in the X–IA. Walker was strapped into the X–IA, under the bomb bay of a B–29, at 35,000 feet, seventy seconds from launch, when a fuel tank exploded in the rear of the rocket plane. Walker got out, climbed back up into the B–29, passed out from lack of oxygen, was revived by a “walkaround” oxygen bottle, went back down into the burning X–IA, and tried to jettison the rest of the fuel so as to prevent both ships, the X–IA and the B–29, from burning up. The rocket plane was finally dropped, like a bomb, over the desert. Walker received the Distinguished Service Medal for his trip back into the burning ship.