The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

  —some poor Air Force lieutenant, thinking this was the same Smilin’ Al he had been joking and carrying on with last night, would sing out, “Hey, Al! Somebody wants you on the phone!”—and all at once there would be Al, seething with an icy white fury, hissing out: “If you have something to tell me, Lieutenant … you will call me ‘Sir’!” And the poor devil wouldn’t know what hit him. Where the hell did that freaking arctic avalanche come from? And then he would realize that … all at once the Icy Commander was back in town.

  Of course those few who knew he was the man who was going up first were in a mood to forgive him all … well, save for an astronaut or two … As for the NASA technicians and the military personnel assigned to the mission, they were in a mood of utter adoration of the single-combat warriors, all three of them, for one of them would be placing his hide on top of the rocket. (And our rockets always blow up.) Toward the end the three of them would enter a room for some sort of test … and the technicians and workmen would stop what they were doing and break into applause and beam at them that warm moist smile of sympathy. Without knowing it, they were bestowing homage and applause in the classic manner: before the fact. These little scenes pressed Glenn’s powers as charade master to the limit. More of these warm beams would be aimed at him than at either of the other two. He was the one mentioned in the press as the most likely choice. Not only that, he was the warmest of the three, the most consistently friendly toward one and all when he ran into them. It was just about too much. He had to keep smiling and aw-shucking and playing Mr. Modest, just as if it might, in fact, be he who was going up on top of the rocket on May 2 as the first man in the world to risk the mighty shot into space.

  And then the omnipotent Integral intervened … a practical joker to the end! Early on the morning of April 12, the fabulous but anonymous Builder of the Integral, Chief Designer of the Sputniks, struck another of his cruel but dramatic blows. Just twenty days before the first scheduled Mercury flight he sent a five-ton Sputnik called Vostok I into orbit around the earth with a man aboard, the first cosmonaut, a twenty-seven-year-old test pilot named Yuri Gagarin. Vostok I completed one orbit, then brought Gagarin down safely, on land, near the Soviet village of Smelovka.

  The omnipotent Integral! NASA had really believed—and the astronauts had really believed—that somehow, in the religious surge of the mission, Shepard’s flight would be the first. But there was no putting one over on the Integral, was there! It was as if the Soviets’ Chief Designer, that invisible genius, was toying with them. Back in October 1957, just four months before the United States was supposed to launch the world’s first artificial earth satellite, the Chief Designer had launched Sputnik I. In January 1959, just two months before NASA was scheduled to put the first artificial satellite into orbit around the sun, the Chief Designer launched Mechta I and did just that. But this one, Vostok I, in April 1961, had been his pièce de resistance. Given the huge booster rockets at his disposal, he seemed to be able to play these little games with his adversaries at will. There was the eerie feeling that he would continue to let NASA struggle furiously to catch up—and then launch some startling new demonstration of just how far ahead he really was.

  The Soviets persisted in offering no information as to the Chief Designer’s identity. For that matter, they identified no one involved in Gagarin’s flight other than Gagarin himself. Nor did they offer any pictures of the rocket or even such elementary data as its length and its rocket thrust. Far from casting any doubt as to the capabilities of the Soviet program, this policy seemed only to inflame the imagination. The Integral! Secrecy was by now accepted as “the Russian way.” Whatever the

  CIA might have been able to do in other parts of the world, in the Soviet Union they drew a blank. Intelligence about the Soviet space program remained very sketchy. Only two things were known: the Soviets were capable of launching a vehicle of tremendous weight, five tons; and whatever goal NASA set for itself, the Soviet Union reached it first. Using those two pieces of information, everyone in the government, from President Kennedy to Bob Gilruth, seemed to experience an involuntary leap of the imagination similar to that of the ancients … who used to look into the sky and see a clump of stars, sparks in the night, and deduce therefrom the contours of … an enormous bear! … the constellation Ursa Major! … On the evening of Gagarin’s flight, April 12, 1961, President Kennedy summoned James E. Webb and Hugh Dryden, Webb’s deputy administrator and NASA’s highest-ranking engineer, to the White House; they met in the Cabinet room and they all stared into the polished walnut surface of the great conference table and saw … the mighty Integral! … and the Builder!—the Chief Designer! … who was laughing at them … and it was awesome!

  In Washington, at Langley, and at the Cape, NASA was deluged with telephone calls from newspapers, wire services, magazines, radio stations—and most callers wanted to know what the astronauts’ reaction was to Gagarin’s flight. So the First Three, Glenn, Grissom, and Shepard, all prepared statements. Shepard cranked out something that said next to nothing at all; standard government issue. Privately he was put out with Gilruth and von Braun and everyone else for not sending him up in March, as it now appeared they could have.

  As usual, it was Glenn whom the press quoted most. He as much as said: “Well, they just beat the pants off us, that’s all, and there’s no use kidding ourselves about that. But now that the space age has begun, there’s going to be plenty of work for everybody.” Glenn was considered especially forthright, gracious, and magnanimous. He was big about the thing, as the saying goes—and that seemed especially commendable, since he was still considered the American front runner for the flight that would have made him “the first man in space.” He had swallowed his own disappointment like a man.

  X.

  Righteous Prayer

  Alan Shepard finally got his turn on May 5. He was inserted in the capsule, on top of a Redstone rocket, about an hour before dawn, with an eye toward a launch shortly after daybreak. But as in the case of the ape, there was a four-hour hold in the countdown, caused mainly by an overheating inverter. Now the sun was up, and all across the eastern half of the country people were doing the usual, turning on their radios and television sets, rolling the knobs in search of something to give the nerve endings a little tingle—and what suspense awaited them! An astronaut sat on the tip of a rocket, preparing to get himself blown to pieces.

  Even in California, where it was very early, highway patrolmen reported a strange and troubling sight. For no apparent reason drivers, hordes of them, were pulling off the highways and stopping on the shoulders, as if controlled by Mars. The patrolmen were slow in figuring it out, because they did not have AM radios. But the citizenry did, and they had become so excited as the countdown progressed at Cape Canaveral, so ravenously curious as to what would happen to the mortal hide of Alan Shepard when they fired the rocket, it was too much. Even the simple act of driving overloaded the nervous system. They stopped; they turned up the volume; they were transfixed by the prospect of the lonely volunteer about to be exploded into hash.

  This tiny lad, up on the tip of that enormous white bullet, appeared to have about one chance in ten of living through it. Over the three weeks since the great Soviet triumph of Gagarin’s flight, one terrible event had followed another. The United States had sent in a puppet army of Cuban exiles to conquer the Soviets’ puppet regime in Cuba, and instead suffered the humiliation that became known as the Bay of Pigs. This had nothing directly to do with the space flight, of course, but it heightened the feeling that this was not the time to be trying brave and desperate deeds in the contest with the Soviets. The sad truth was, our boys always botch it. Eight days after that, on April 25, NASA had another big test of an Atlas rocket. It was supposed to carry a dummy astronaut into orbit, but it went off course and had to be blown up by remote control after forty seconds. The explosion nearly wiped out Gus Grissom, who was following the rocket’s ascent as chase pilot in an F–106. Three days af
ter that, April 28, a so-called Little Joe rocket with a Mercury capsule on top of it went off on another crazy trajectory and had to be aborted after thirty-three seconds. Both of these were tests of the Mercury-Atlas system, which would be used for orbital flights, and they had nothing to do with the Mercury-Redstone system, which Shepard would be riding—but it was far too late to make fine points. Our rockets always blow up and our boys always botch it.

  And so now, on the morning of May 5, thousands, millions, stopped by the side of the road, paralyzed by the drama. This was the greatest death-defying hell-driver stunt ever broadcast, a patriotic stunt, a hashmad stunt bound up with the fate of the country. People were beside themselves.

  What must be going through the man’s mind? Him and his poor wife … Then the radio announcer would tell how Shepard’s wife, Louise, was following the countdown over television inside their home in Virginia Beach, Virginia. What a state the poor woman must be in! And so forth and so on. Brave lad! He hasn’t resigned yet!

  As for Shepard, what was going through his mind at that moment, and through much of his body, from his brain to his pelvic saddle, was a steadily increasing desire to urinate. It was no joke. He had been through 120 complete simulations of his flight, simulations that included the smallest details anyone could imagine: the early morning wakeup by the official astronaut physician, Dr. William Douglas, the physical exam, the attaching of all the biosensors, the slipping of the thermometer tube up the rectum, the putting on of the suit, the hooking up of the oxygen tube and the communications lead, the ride out to the launch pad, the insertion, as it was known, into the capsule, the closing of the hatch, the works. They even went through the process of sucking the air out of the capsule with a hose and pressurizing the interior with pure oxygen. Then Shepard would go through yet more simulated rides and aborts, using the capsule itself as if it was a procedures trainer.

  Three days ago, it turned out, even the mental atmosphere of the real thing was simulated. It was three days ago, May 2, that Shepard was originally scheduled to be launched. The weather made it a doubtful proposition, but they went ahead with the countdown, and Shepard had dinner in crew quarters the night before the flight, with much comradely banter, and Dr. Douglas tiptoed into his room the next morning and woke him up, and then he had the pre-launch breakfast, steak wrapped in bacon, plus eggs—in fact, Shepard went through everything, right up to the point where he would have climbed into the van and ridden out to the rocket, in the belief that this just might be it. Then the launch was postponed because of bad weather. Only at this point did NASA finally reveal that it was Shepard who had been assigned to the flight and was suited up and waiting behind the door in Hangar S. So Shepard had even been through the actual feeling of … this is the day. But no one had ever seriously envisioned the problem he now faced.

  There was no easy way out when one’s bladder kept getting larger and the capsule kept getting smaller. The dimensions of this little pod had been kept as tight as possible in order to hold down the weight. Once the various tanks, tubes, electrical circuits, instrument panels, radio hookups, and so on, were crammed in, along with the astronaut’s emergency parachute, the space left over was not much more than a holster you could slip two legs and a torso into, with a tiny bit of room remaining for arms. The word they used, insertion, was not far off. The seat was literally a mold of Shepard’s back and legs. They had packed the plaster right onto his body up at Langley Field. He was now in his seat, but resting on his back. It was as if a man were sitting in a very small sports car that had been upended so that it pointed straight up at the sky. In the rehearsals Shepard had reached the point where he could slip into his slot with one continuous series of moves. But this time, for the real thing, he had on a new pair of white boots, and the boot slipped on the armrest of the couch when he was snaking his right leg up into the capsule. That threw him off, and he wound up with everything inside except his left arm. The capsule was so small that getting his left arm inside became a terrific operation, with him wrenching this way and that and crewmen out on the gantry offering advice. Now he was so jammed in that the cuff on his right wrist, where his glove joined the sleeve of the pressure suit, kept catching on the parachute. He looked at the parachute and all of a sudden wondered what good it was. Technicians were craning in and fastening him to the couch with knee straps and a lap belt and a chest strap and screwing hoses to his pressure suit to maintain the pressure and control the temperature and wiring up leads for the biomedical sensors and the radio hookup and attaching and sealing a hose to the faceplate of his helmet, for oxygen. In all likelihood, if he ever needed the parachute, he’d be a hole in the ground before he could get all these rigs undone. Then they closed the hatch, and he could feel his heartbeat quicken. But it soon subsided, and he was stuffed into this little thimble, lying on his back, practically immobile, with his legs jackknifed.

  It was like being a china Cossack packed in a box full of Styrofoam. His face was pointed straight up toward the sky, but he couldn’t see it because he had no window. All he had were two little portholes, one on either side, above his head. The true pilot’s window and hatch wouldn’t be ready until the second Mercury flight. He might as well have been inside a box. A greenish fluorescent light filled the capsule. He could see outside only through the periscope window on the panel in front of him. The window was round, about a foot in diameter, in the middle of the panel. Outside, in the dark, the launch crewmen on the gantry could see the lens of the periscope if he pointed it their way. They kept walking in front of it and giving him big grins. Their faces filled the window. There was a wide-angle distortion, so that their noses protruded about eight feet out in front of their ears. When they grinned, they seemed to have more teeth than a perch. Once the dawn broke he could look out of the periscope and turn it this way and that, and see the Atlantic over here … and some people down on the ground … although the perspectives were a bit strange, because he was lying on his back and the periscope window was not terribly big and the angles were unusual. But then the sun grew brighter and brighter and he kept getting bursts of sunlight in the periscope window, lying on his back like this and looking up, and so he reached up with his left hand and clicked a gray filter into place. That helped a great deal, even though it neutralized most colors. Now that the hatch had been bolted shut, Shepard could hear practically nothing from the outside world except the voices that came over the headset inside his helmet. He spent part of the time, as before any test flight, going over the checklist. Over the headset came the voice of the leader of the launch pad team, saying:

  “Auto retro jettison switch. Arm?”

  And Shepard would say, “Roger. Auto retro jettison switch. Arm.”

  “Retro heater switch. Off?”

  And Shepard would say, “Retro heater switch. Off.”

  “Landing bag switch. Auto?”

  “Landing bag switch. Auto.”

  And on down the line. After a while, however, as the holds dragged on, people were coming on the circuit to keep him company and find out how he was bearing up. He could hear Gordon Cooper, who was serving as the “capcom,” the capsule communicator, in the blockhouse near the launch pad, and Deke Slayton, who would be the capcom in the flight control center during the launch itself. Cooper had a telephone hookup with the capsule, and every now and then Bill Douglas or another of the doctors would come on the line, apparently as much to assess his spirits as anything else. Wernher von Braun talked to him at one point. The countdown progressed very slowly. Shepard asked Slayton to have someone call his wife to make sure she understood the reasons for the delay. And then he was back in the tight little world of the capsule. There was an irritating tone, very high up in the audible range, coming over the headset the whole time, some sort of feedback sound, apparently. He could hear the hum of the cabin fans and the pressure-suit fans, both used for cooling, and he could hear the inverters moaning up and down. So here he was, stuffed into this little blind thimble, splice
d into the loop by every conceivable sort of wire and hose, leading from his body, his helmet, and his suit, listening to the hums, moans, overtones … and the minutes and the hours began to go by … and he’d swivel his knee and ankle joints a few centimeters this way and that to keep his circulation up … and two annoying little pressure points began to build up where his shoulders pressed back into the couch … and then the tide began to build up in his bladder.

  The problem was, there was nothing to urinate into. Since the flight would last only fifteen minutes, it had never occurred to anybody to include a urine receptacle. Some of the simulations had dragged on for so long the astronauts had ended up urinating in their pressure suits. It had been the only thing to do, short of spending hours removing the man from all his hookups and the capsule and the suit itself. The chief danger in introducing liquid into a pure-oxygen environment, such as that of the capsule and the pressure suit, was of causing an electrical short circuit that might start a fire. Luckily, the only wires that urine was likely to come in contact with inside the pressure suit were the low-voltage leads to the biomedical sensors, and the procedure had seemed safe enough. There was even a sponge mechanism inside the suit for removing excess moisture, which ordinarily would come in the form of perspiration. Nevertheless, no one had seriously studied the possibility that on the day itself, the day of the first American manned space flight, the astronaut might end up on top of the rocket and stuffed into the capsule with his legs practically immobile for more than four hours … with his bladder to answer to. There was no way the astronaut could simply urinate into the lining of the pressure suit and have it go unnoticed. The suit had its own cooling system, and the temperature was monitored by interior thermometers, which led to consoles, and in front of these consoles were some by now highly keyed-up technicians whose sole mission was to stare at the dials and account for every fluctuation. If a nice steaming subdermal river of 98.6 degrees was introduced into the system with no warning, the Freon flow would suddenly increase—Freon was the gas used to cool the suit—and, well, God knew what would result. Would they hold up the whole production? Terrific. Then the No. 1 astronaut could explain, over a radio transmitter, while the nation waited, while the Russians girded themselves for round 2 of the battle of the heavens, that he had just peed in his pressure suit.