The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

  Hmmmm … with all the world wondering about the state of her soul at this moment … what kind of face should she have on?

  Over his headset Shepard heard Deke Slayton, from inside the Mercury Control Center, as it was called, saying, “We have lift-off!” And as he had done hundreds of times on the centrifuge and on the procedures trainer, he reached up and turned on the onboard clock—which would tell him when to do this and that on his flight schedule—and he said over his microphone: “Roger, lift-off, and the clock is started” … as he had said hundreds of times on the centrifuge and the procedures trainer. And then, with the automatic anticipation of someone who has heard the same phonograph record over and over again and is now hearing it yet once again and senses every chord and phrase before it sounds, he waited for the gradual buildup of the g-forces and for the beating noise as the rocket lifted off … which he had felt and which he had heard hundreds of times on the centrifuge—

  Hundreds of times! Even if he had been ordered at that point to broadcast to the American people a detailed description of precisely what it felt like to be the first American riding a rocket into space, and even if he had had the leisure to do it, he could not possibly have expressed what he was feeling. For he was introducing the era of precreated experience. His launching was an utterly novel event in American history, and yet he could feel none of its novelty. He could not feel “the awesome power” of the rocket beneath him, as the broadcasters kept referring to it. He could only compare it to the hundreds of rides he had taken on the centrifuge at Johnsville. The memory of all those rides was imbedded in his nervous system. Scores of times he had sat in the gondola on the wheel, as he sat here now, in his pressure suit, with the Mercury instrument panel in front of him and the noise of a Redstone launch piped into his headset. And compared to that—what was happening at this moment was not awesome. Quite the opposite. He was braced for it, but … It didn’t throw you around like the centrifuge … The centrifugal force of the centrifuge threw you around inside the capsule as well as increasing the speed and the g-forces … The rocket was smoother and easier … It wasn’t as noisy as the centrifuge … On the wheel the recorded sound of the Redstone rocket was piped directly into the capsule. But now, since he was the figurine in the packing box, it came from outside, through layer after layer. By the time it penetrated the escape-tower cover and the capsule wall and the contoured seat behind his head and the helmet and his headset, it was no louder than the engine noises a commercial airline pilot hears on takeoff. In fact, he was far more conscious of the noises inside the capsule … The camera … There was a camera set up to record his facial expressions and eye and hand movements, and he could hear that whirring about a foot from his head … There was a tape recorder set up to record all the sounds inside the capsule, and he could hear its little motor running … And the fans and the gyros and inverters … it was like an extremely compact modern kitchen in here … with all the gadgets running at once … And of course the radio … He thought he would have to turn the volume up to maximum, as he had on the centrifuge, but he didn’t have to touch it. All he had to do was talk into his voice mike and say the exact same things he had said a thousand times on the procedures trainer … “Altitude one thousand … one-point-nine g’s …” and so on … and they would answer back, “Roger, we copy, you’re looking good …” and it even sounded the same way over the headset.

  He could still see nothing. The periscope was still retracted. He had no way to judge his speed except by the needle on the instrument panel that showed his rising altitude and the buildup of the g-forces on his body. But this was gradual. It was a very familiar feeling. He had felt it hundreds of times on the centrifuge. It was much easier than pulling four g’s in a supersonic aircraft, because he didn’t have to struggle to push his hands forward against the weight of the g-forces to control the trajectory of the aircraft. He didn’t have to lift a finger if he didn’t want to. The computers guided the rocket automatically by swiveling the nozzles. He had very little feeling of motion, just the g-forces driving him deeper and deeper into the seat he was lying on.

  The rocket rose so gradually it took forty-five seconds to reach Mach 1. An F–104 fighter plane could have done it faster. When the rocket reached transonic speed, .8 Mach, a vibration started building up—just as it had for the X series of rocket planes at Edwards years before. Shepard was quite prepared for it … He had been through it on the centrifuge … so many times … But it was a different vibration. It didn’t shake his head about as violently, but the amplitudes were more rapid. His vision began to blur. He couldn’t read the instrument panel any longer. He started to report the phenomenon over his headset but thought better of it. Some bastard would panic and abort the mission. Christ, the vibrations, no matter how bad, were preferable to an abort. Within another thirty seconds all the vibrations were gone, and he knew he was going supersonic. With the vibration gone, he once again had no sensation of motion. He was still blind to the world outside. He was still lying on his back, looking at the instrument panel, no more than eighteen inches from his eyes, in the greenish light of the capsule. The g-forces reached six times the force of gravity, then began to tail off as the rocket and the capsule approached the weightless phase of the arc of flight. It was different from the centrifuge—It was easier! On the centrifuge the only way to reduce the g-load as you simulated the approach to the weightless phase was to reduce the speed of the centrifuge arm, and this always threw you forward against your straps. When the simulated moment of zero-g arrived, you were thrown against the straps quite hard. On a rocket ride, however—as all the rocket pilots at Edwards knew—your speed did not abruptly decrease as the rocket ran out of fuel. It kept sailing. Shepard was eased into weightlessness so smoothly it was as if the weight of the g-forces had simply slid off his body. Now he could feel his heart pounding. The most critical part of the flight, next to the launch itself, was only a moment away … the separation of the capsule from the rocket … He heard a muffled explosion from above … just the way it sounded in the simulations … and the escape rocket blew off and the capsule was now free of the rocket. The force of the rocket pulling away accelerated his speed, and he felt as if he had had a kick from below. A three-inch-long rectangular light lit up green on the instrument panel. On it were the letters JETT TOWER, for Jettison Tower. With the tower gone, the periscope would start operating, and he could look out, but he had his eyes pinned on the green light. It was beautiful. It meant everything was going perfectly. He could forget about the abort handle now. The launch phase was over. The most treacherous part of the entire ride was now behind him. All that endless training in the procedures trainer … “Abort! … Abort! … Abort!” … he could put that behind him and forget about it. Small portholes were on either side, above his head, and he could see only the sky through them. He was now slightly more than a hundred miles up. The sky was almost navy blue. It was not the much-talked-of “blackness of space.” It was the same dark-blue sky that pilots begin to see at 40,000 feet. It looked no different. The capsule was now automatically turning so that its blunt end, the end beneath his back, which had a heat shield for the re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere, was aimed toward the target area. He was facing back toward Florida, toward the Cape. He could not see the earth out of the high portholes at all, however. He wasn’t even particularly interested in looking. He kept his eyes pinned on the instrument panel. The gauges told him he was weightless. After reaching this point so many times on the procedures trainer, he knew he must be weightless. But he felt nothing. He was so tightly strapped and stuffed into this little human holster there was no way he could float as he had in the cargo bays of the big C—131s. He didn’t even experience the tumbling sensation he felt when riding backseat in the F—100s at Edwards. It was all milder!—easier! No doubt he should say something to the ground about the sensation of weightlessness. It was the great unknown in space flight. But he didn’t feel anything at all! He noticed a washer float
ing in front of his eye. The washer must have been left in there by a workman. It was just floating there in front of his left eye. That was the only evidence his five senses had to show that he was weightless. He tried to grab the washer with his left hand, with his glove, but he missed it. It floated away, and he couldn’t move his hand far enough to get it. He had no sensation of speed at all, even though he knew he was going Mach 7, or about 5,180 miles an hour. There was nothing to judge speed by. There were no vibrations at all in the capsule. Since he was now completely beyond the earth’s atmosphere and was no longer attached to the rocket, there was no rushing sound whatsoever. It was as if he were standing still, parked in the sky. The sounds of the interior of the capsule, the rising and falling and whirring and moaning of the inverters and the gyros … the cameras, the fans … the busy little kitchen—they were exactly the same sounds he had heard over and over in the simulations inside the capsule on the ground at the Cape … The same busy little kitchen in operation, whirring and buzzing and humming along … There was nothing new going on! … He knew he was in space, but there was no way to tell it! … He looked out the periscope, the only way he had of looking at the earth. The goddamned gray filter! He couldn’t see any colors at all! He had never changed the filter! The first American to ever fly this high above the earth—and it was a black-and-white movie. Nevertheless, they’ll want to know about it—

  “What a beautiful view!” he said.

  He could hear Slayton say: “I bet it is.”

  In fact, there was a cloud cover over most of the East Coast and much of the ocean. He was able to see the Cape. He could see the west coast of Florida … Lake Okeechobee … He was up so high he seemed to be moving away from Florida ever so slowly … And the inverters moaned up and the gyros moaned down and the fans whirred and the cameras hummed … He tried to find Cuba. Was that Cuba or wasn’t that Cuba? Over there, through the clouds … Everything was black and white and there were clouds all over … There’s Bimini Island and the shoals around Bimini. He could see that. But everything looked so small! It had all been bigger and clearer in the ALFA trainer, when they flashed the still photos on the screen … The real thing didn’t measure up. It was not realistic. He couldn’t see anything but a medium-gray ocean and light-gray beaches and dark-gray vegetation … There were the Bahamas, Grand Bahama Island, Abaco Island … or were they? The pale-gray cloud cover and the medium-gray water and the pale-gray beaches and the medium-gray … the grays ran together like goulash … He didn’t have time to fool with it. He had a long checklist. He was supposed to try out the roll, yaw, and pitch controls. They were all operating automatically up to now. He switched over to manual one at a time and tried using the hand controller.

  “Okay,” he said into his microphone, “switching to manual pitch.”

  And the capsule nosed up and then down.

  “Pitch is okay,” he said. “Switching to manual yaw.”

  All this he seemed to have said a hundred, a thousand times before, in the procedures trainer. And the capsule yawed from side to side, and he had felt it a thousand times before—on the ALFA trainer. Only the sound was different. Every time he turned the manual control handles, hydrogen-peroxide jets discharged outside the capsule. He knew it was happening, because the capsule would pitch, roll, yaw, just as it was supposed to, but he couldn’t hear the jets. On the ALFA trainer he had always been able to hear the jets. The real thing was not nearly so realistic as that. The capsule pitched and yawed just like the ALFA … no difference … but he couldn’t hear the jets at all because of the humming, moaning, and whining of the inverters and gyros and fans … the busy little kitchen.

  Whuh?—before he knew it the ride was practically over. It was time to prepare himself for re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. He was descending the arc … just like a mortar shell on the way down … The ground was starting the countdown for the firing of the retro-rockets that would slow the capsule down for re-entry through the atmosphere. There was no need for them on this flight, because the capsule was going to come back down in any event like a cannonball, but they would be essential in orbital flights, and this flight was supposed to test the system. The retro-rockets fired automatically. He didn’t have to move a finger. There was another muffled rocket firing, not a loud noise at all … The little kitchen kept humming and whining away … He was riding backward, still facing Florida. The rocket firing drove him backward into his seat with a force of about five g’s. It was much more sudden than the transition from six g’s to zero-g on the way up. Man, that wasn’t like the centrifuge. The centrifuge jerked you around at this point. In the next instant he was weightless again, as he knew he would be. The retrofire was like pumping the brakes once. But it had slowed down the capsule, and soon the g-forces would start building up. They would build up gradually, however. He knew the interval exactly … At this point an explosive device was supposed to go off and jettison the rigs that held the retro-rockets. He heard the little dull explosions outside the capsule and then he saw one of the straps of the rig go by his window. He could feel the twist from the torque of the retro-rocket nozzles, but it corrected itself automatically. Now he was supposed to practice controlling the attitude of the capsule while it was slowing down. So he swung it this way and that way … like a Ferris-wheel seat … Oh, shit! The dial showed the g-forces were building up slightly … One-half g … This meant he had about forty-five seconds to check out the stars … He was supposed to look at the stars and the horizon and see if he could get a fix on particular constellations. Eventually this would have some bearing on space navigation. But mainly there would be millions down there wanting to know that the first American in space had been up there in the neighborhood of the stars … Oh, they would all want to know how the stars looked from outside the earth’s atmosphere. They weren’t supposed to twinkle when you looked at them from up here. They would just be little shining balls in the blackness of space … Except that it wasn’t black, it was blue … The stars, man! … He kept staring out the windows trying to make out the stars … He couldn’t see a damned thing, not one goddamned star. If the capsule were pitched up this way or rolled over that way, he would get zaps of sunlight in his face. If he pitched it or rolled it this way—he still couldn’t see a damned thing. The light in the interior of the capsule was too bright. All he could make out was the navy-blue sky. He couldn’t even see the horizon. There were supposed to be spectacular color bands at the horizon when viewed from above the atmosphere. But he couldn’t see them out the portholes. He could see them through the periscope—but the periscope was a black-and-white movie.

  What inna namea—the g-forces were building up too fast! This wasn’t the way it happened on the centrifuge! The g-forces were coming up so fast, driving him back so deep into his seat, he knew he couldn’t complete the maneuvers he was supposed to make on the fly-by-wire system. Whether he did them or not on this flight would make no difference as far as his own safety was concerned. This was practice for orbital flights. In orbital flights the one thing the astronaut would be able to do would be to hold the capsule at the proper attitude, the proper angles, if the automatic system malfunctioned. Nevertheless—he was behind on the checklist! Falling behind put you on the threshold of fucking up … Soon he wouldn’t be able to control the capsule’s attitude with the manual controls or the fly-by-wire. The g-forces would be too severe for him to use his arms. So he switched back to automatic, forgetting to shut off one of the manual buttons when he did so … He was behind on the checklist! The simulation had crossed him up! He was supposed to have more time than this! He was in no danger whatsoever—but how could real life vary this much from the simulation! Looking for those motherless stars and color bands had thrown him off!—eaten up time! But even so, the buildup of the g-forces came smoothly. The capsule began to swing from side to side as it came through the denser and denser layers of atmosphere, but it was not nearly as rough a ride as the same interval in the centrifuge. He was lying o
n his back again. If he looked up, he looked straight toward the sky. He tensed his calves and the muscles of his abdomen to counteract the g-forces … just as he had a thousand times on the centrifuge … He forced his breath out in grunts as the g’s pressed down on his chest … He grunted out the g readings as they rose on the dial … “Uhhsix … uh seven … uhh eight … uhh nine …” Then he kept repeating, kept grunting out the word “Ohhkay … Ohhkay … Ohhkay … Ohhkay … Ohhkay … Ohhkay … Ohhkay” … to let the ground know that the g-forces were on top of him but that he was all right. He could see nothing except indigo out the portholes. He didn’t even bother looking. He kept staring at the instrument panel at the big lights that would show the parachutes were coming out. They would come out automatically. The first green light came on. The drogue chute, the parachute that pulled the main chute out, had deployed. Now Shepard could see it through the periscope. He could see the needle pass 20,000 on his altimeter. Why doesn’t it— At 10,000 feet the main chute came out, as he could see through the periscope. Then it filled and the jolt slammed him back into his seat once more. A kick in the butt! For reassurance! He knew he had it made. The capsule swayed from side to side under the parachute, but there was nothing to it. He was lying on his back. The landing bag was right underneath his back. He started undoing his knee straps. Get out of all these goddamned straps, hoses, and wires. That was the main thing. He took his face seal hose and oxygen exhaust hoses off his helmet. Through the periscope he could see he was coming closer and closer to the water. It was sunny out there. He was near Bermuda. The ships were all nearby. He could hear them clearly on the radio. Then the blunt end of the capsule hit the water. It was right under his back. The impact drove him back into his seat yet again. It was just like they said it would be! It was about the same jolt you get when you land on the deck of an aircraft carrier. No more than that. The capsule keeled over to the right. The right-hand window was underwater. But he could look out the other one and see his yellow dye marker on the surface of the water. It was released automatically. It made a big yellow stain, so that the rescue helicopters could spot the capsule better. Shepard was busy trying to get himself out of the rest of the rig. Get free! He broke the neck ring seal off his helmet so that he could get the helmet off. He kept looking at the window that was underwater. The capsule was supposed to right itself. The goddamned window stayed underwater. Gurgling! He kept looking all around it for signs of water seeping in. He couldn’t see any but he could hear it. It had finally started seeping in on the ape’s flight. The goddamned capsule was not made for the water. What a way to blow the whole thing this would be. Bobbing around in the goddamned water in a bucket. The capsule slowly came up vertical. The helicopter was already overhead radioing for instructions. He had it made as long as he didn’t fuck it up getting out of the capsule. He opened the door at the top of the capsule, the neck, with a cable device and pulled himself up. A tremendous burst of sunlight hit him, sunlight on the open sea. It was barely quarter of ten in the morning. He was forty miles from Bermuda on a sunny day out in the Atlantic. The noise of the helicopter overhead obliterated every other sound. The crewmen were lowering a rescue sling, which looked like an old-fashioned horse collar, the kind they used to put on dray horses. It was a big helicopter, an industrial type. It had already hooked onto the capsule and pulled it up out of the water. There were some Marine Corps crewmen inside the helicopter. The noise was overwhelming. They kept staring at him and smiling. It was that glistening look.