Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman

by Neal Thompson

  The manufacturers at Douglas Aircraft were furious. But in subsequent discussions, Shepard held his ground. Only five F5Ds had been built when the Navy canceled production of the plane and instead chose to buy the F8U Crusader. (Two of the five F5Ds would later be donated to the new space agency, NASA). The unsatisfactory report Shepard gave to the Tiger after his harrowing experience prompted the Navy to cancel future orders of that plane as well, after purchasing 199 of them. That plane’s maker, Grumman, was also furious. (Ironically, the otherwise agile jet was adopted by the Blue Angels, which flew F11F Tigers for the next decade.)

  Shepard’s work at Pax River was so highly respected that in 1957 he was asked to become an instructor. It was another indication that, despite his occasional rule breaking, people had begun listening more and more closely to Alan Shepard’s opinions. If he said a plane was a bad investment, the Navy believed him, even if millions of dollars were lost in the process. Admirals at the Pentagon had decided that Shepard had become more than a jet jockey. He was now a leader, a mentor, an administrator. He was admiral material.

  Soon after Alan and Louise had returned to Pax River in 1956, Louise’s sister died. The apparent cause of death was a flu-like illness, but there was always something a little mysterious and unexplained about her death, and those closest to the Shepards were never sure what really happened, or where, or why. The Shepards never spoke of it.

  In any case, Louise’s sister had three children at the time, two boys and a girl. Their father, unable to care for three kids alone, took them to Longwood Gardens to live with their grand-parents. When Louise learned that Adele had died, she and her two daughters, Laura and Julie, drove from Patuxent River to Longwood to help her parents. After a few months it became clear that Louise’s aging parents couldn’t care for Adele’s three young children, and the children’s father seemed unable or unwilling to try. So the two boys were sent away to boarding school, leaving Louise to care for her niece, Judith.

  While Louise tended to this situation, Alan flew up to Longwood on weekends, dropping his jet low and loud over the estate to let the family know he’d arrived (and in the process terrifying some of Longwood’s employees). Over the course of long discussions in those days, while walking through Longwood, Alan and Louise decided to bring their orphaned niece into their home.

  At first the poor girl was in shock. She didn’t know what was happening to her. She was only five years old and was unhappy and confused. Then, to add to the confusion, she received a new name. In order to eliminate the awkwardness of having two girls of the same age with similar names (Julie and Judith) in the same family, the Shepards changed her name from Judith to Alice. “It was a difficult time,” said a neighbor, Denni Seibert, whose husband helped manage the Longwood estate and lived in the big stone house beside the Brewers. “People just didn’t talk about it,” Seibert said. Many years later, they still didn’t.

  Alice recalled only that Louise “did the best she could with me.”

  Alan and Alice took a while to find comfortable ground on which to be father and daughter. They were both cautious at first. Except for a few family gatherings at holiday time, they hadn’t really known each other. Alice found Alan to be loose and relaxed around the family and surprisingly warm and loving. But he also had a lot of rules and sometimes blew up. Worse was the silent stare. “He’d give that famous stare, and you knew you were in trouble,” Alice recalled.

  But such moments were infrequent, largely because when Alice first moved in with the Shepards, Alan was often traveling and wasn’t around much. Louise and the girls stayed at Longwood nearly a year, and toward the end of that year, Louise finally began to feel like she was making some progress at welcoming Alice into the family. One day Alice and Julie—who were both six—got into an argument over something. Alice burst into tears and ran crying into the kitchen, where she threw her arms around Louise’s legs, yelling, “Mommy! Mommy!” At that moment, Louise told a friend, she knew she had done something right, something good for her motherless niece. The Shepards would never officially adopt Alice, but they would continue to raise her as their own.

  When his tour as Pax River instructor ended in mid-1957, Shepard received word that the Navy wanted him to spend a year at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Initially he hated the idea of going back to school and dismissed the stint as merely a chance to “brush up on some academic subjects.” But he also knew it was a significant step toward a higher rank. Some of the Navy’s elite had attended the college, which was considered an apprenticeship toward an admiral’s uniform.

  An assignment to the War College meant a chance to study the most sophisticated strata of warfare: philosophies of war, strategies of war, technology, politics, and policy. The college had been created in the late 1800s to prepare midcareer officers to be the next generation of naval leaders. Lectures were given not just by military people but intelligence experts, state department officials, foreign diplomats, politicians, and academics. Though he wasn’t thrilled with the assignment, Shepard knew it boded well for his career. “I thought I had a very good chance of becoming the skipper of a carrier squadron in another year or so and going back to sea,” he said years later. “And running an aircraft squadron is the big objective of any career pilot in the Navy.”

  Louise knew the college was just a brief stop before Alan returned to flying. After Rhode Island there would be another move to another city, where Alan would leave them on shore again as he returned to the fleet, to sea—and back to foreign ports of call. But until then they could relish being a family, whole and intact. Alan came home most nights for dinner, getting to know his girls again and getting to know Alice. He played piano some nights after dinner and even bought a pair of bongos to thump on. And on Sundays the family went to church. The liberty hound was nowhere to be seen.

  The change of routine was not, however, an easy one. As in many Navy families, Alan’s role so far had been that of the oft-absent patriarch. Louise had raised the family according to her own rules, and now Alan would sometimes criticize her methods and try to impose some military-style order on the family. Louise was never much of a disciplinarian nor a housekeeper. She let the girls stay up late and let the dishes pile up. When Alan began laying down new rules, the girls sometimes rebelled. There were times when Louise was relieved that Alan had to leave town again for a meeting or assignment.

  Then, in the fall of 1957, just a month into Alan’s classes, a startling, disturbing feat of technological mastery would rocket through their world and shock the entire country. Everything would change—for Alan and Louise, for America and the world.

  Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, while men like Alan Shepard, Chuck Yeager, and John Glenn helped push the Wright brothers’ creation to astonishing extremes, another group of men had pursued a parallel obsession. They were the rocket boys.

  Instead of model airplane clubs, these boys had belonged to rocket clubs (especially prevalent in Germany through the 1930s), where they learned to build and launch explosive-stuffed tubes and various other self-propelled bullets. During World War II the most significant advances in rocket development had been made by engineers and scientists in Nazi Germany, who created the deadly V-2 liquid-propelled rocket with a bomb attached to the tip that was used to bombard the city of London night after night.

  When the war ended, the United States and Russia greedily snatched up the Nazi scientists, with the United States seeming to have won the biggest prize. Wernher von Braun, a brilliant but wildly egotistical engineer who had directed the V-2 program, came to the United States as a technical adviser in 1945; five years later, he was named head of a team of scientists in Huntsville, Alabama, developing a so-called Redstone rocket.

  Through the early 1950s, the rocket boys—in the United States and in the Soviet Union, both groups working with modified V-2 rockets—aimed toward a long-term goal of creating rockets that could travel thousands of miles, across entire oceans—so-called intercontin
ental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. The Soviets succeeded first, in 1957.

  At the same time, some of the rocket boys began to ask: Instead of using such missiles as weapons—essentially delivery systems for bombs—couldn’t the ICBM be used to reach space? In the United States, physicist Robert Goddard had explored such theories in the 1920s, and his ideas were used as the platform for discussions in the early 1950s about how to use a rocket to send a satellite into space, where it would circle the earth—a second moon of sorts. America would later learn that Goddard’s theories were very similar to those of Russia’s rocket pioneer, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who had published an article in 1903 called “A Rocket into Cosmic Space,” which contained plans for a liquid-propelled spaceship.

  Wernher von Braun, who became a U.S. citizen in 1955, began urging his superiors the following year to let him launch a satellite into space atop one of his Redstone rockets. But the cold war that had developed between the United States and the USSR led President Eisenhower to exercise caution. The president was wary of rocket development (thinking it might precipitate nuclear war) and even ordered that no U.S. rockets be allowed to reach space and that no satellites be put into orbit. That edict opened the door for the Russians to strike first, which they did on October 4, 1957, thanks to von Braun’s former Nazi colleagues.

  The 184-pound, basketball-sized aluminum sphere called Sputnik—Russian for “fellow traveler”—should have come as no surprise. American officials, all the way up to Eisenhower, knew Soviet scientists had been working feverishly to perfect a satellite as well as the powerful rocket needed to boost it into space. Still, as Sputnik arced across the sky that October night, the first man-made object to leave the earth’s atmosphere, the effect of its audible beep-beep picked up on U.S. shortwave radios below was profound.

  Sputnik was the first aircraft to violate U.S. airspace. Not even in World War II had an enemy breached the boundaries of the continental United States. And so, except for the occasional World War II concerns about German submarines lurking offshore, Americans for the first time in their lives imagined being harmed on their own soil. Fears that the Russians were taking overhead pictures and maybe developing plans to drop bombs down from outer space rippled through the country. And every ninety-six minutes that Sputnik soared above, an eighteen-thousand-mile-an-hour reminder of this new age of vulnerability. Beep-beep, beep-beep—it was like a message from God, or Satan. And the Soviet Union’s mischievous and arrogant leader, Nikita Khrushchev—whom one journalist called “the embodiment of the sheer animal force of the Soviet Union”—celebrated U.S. fears: “People of the whole world are pointing to the satellite saying the U.S. has been beaten.”

  A month later, Sputnik II reached orbit, carrying a dog named Laika. The space race had begun and all the world knew this: if the Soviets could put a dog into orbit, couldn’t they put a nuclear bomb up there? Or maybe a man?

  Sputnik was an alarming wake-up call. While the baby boom had boomed and families bought televisions, new cars, and new homes, the threat of communism had stealthily grown, and now here it was, beeping overhead. To make matters worse, the first U.S. response—a Navy-built Vanguard rocket, launched in December of 1957—exploded, and the four-pound grapefruit-sized satellite it had meant to boost into space plopped down amid the wreckage, strewn among the Florida palmettos surrounding the launch pad, intact and still beeping. A newspaper columnist wished aloud that someone would “go out there, find it, and kill it.” Foreign newspapers called the United States’ failed satellite effort “Kaputnik” and “Flopnik” and “Stayputnik.”

  More failures followed, usually at a top-secret military base on the Florida coast called Cape Canaveral, where experimental rockets named Thor, Hound Dog, and Matador were launched. Associated Press reporter Howard Benedict, who was sent there to cover missile launches after Sputnik, recalled that at the time they were launching eight or nine rockets a week. “And most blew up,” he said.

  One rocket—an IRBM, or intermediate-range ballistic missile—veered inexplicably off course one night and splashed into the Banana River, where it exploded and shot a geyser of water into the night sky. Benedict and the few other reporters dubbed it an IBRM—an Into-the-Banana-River Missile. The reporters began running out of ways to describe exploding rockets, and the successes were so infrequent that the engineers would get wildly drunk on the rare night one of their rockets actually flew. It would be another few months before the United States finally launched its own satellite, Explorer I, atop one of Wernher von Braun’s rockets, on January 31, 1958.

  President Eisenhower, who in his second term had refused to issue a blank check for his nation’s increasingly costly satellite program, was by then a crotchety, cynical, and sickly old man. He seemed unable to combat the virulent taunting of Khrushchev, making it clear to the American public that the time had come for young men to replace old, a time for leaders who were born during and shaped by the twentieth century.

  Sputnik was not the opening shot of the cold war, but it was a turning point, a catalyst for a new direction for the country. It would lead to the creation the following year of a new space agency and would inspire the post–World War II generation of military men and politicians to direct their talents, the country’s money, its defense systems, its best brains, and its deepest emotions to reclaiming the sky.

  That night in 1957, as Sputnik arched across the sky and as Louise and the girls slept inside, Alan stood in the backyard of his cottage at the Naval War College, smoking a cigarette and looking to the southwest. Earlier in the day he had read in the newspaper that the Russian satellite could be seen on a clear night, so he stayed up late to see it for himself. And for a brief moment, standing there in the backyard, he was the family man he sometimes yearned to be, in the pose of millions of other suburban dads. He could never have guessed what an impact the Soviet satellite would soon have on his life.

  Finally he saw the small glow of Sputnik crawl slowly across the night sky. “That little rascal,” he said to himself—not amused, but angry.

  Alan considered the Soviets to be “technologically inferior” to the United States. He couldn’t believe a communist nation that had trouble building washing machines and refrigerators could create this. That fact “gnawed at his insides.” Years later, when asked to reflect back on that night, “little rascal” was the term he’d use. But in truth, he had saltier nicknames for the world’s first satellite. He wanted to swat the little fucker out of the air—his air.

  But it was more than just anger that Alan felt that night. Almost as if it seduced him, Sputnik would lure Alan off his admiral-bound career path. Though he had missed his chance to be a combat pilot in World War II or Korea, maybe he could at least fight on the front lines of this strange, high-tech new war. Maybe everything he had accomplished so far had led him perfectly to this moment in history.

  Part II

  INTO SPACE

  9

  “We made them heroes, the first day they were picked”

  One day in January 1959 Shepard was reading the New York Times and came across an article about a new space agency that had been created a month earlier.

  The political hysteria that had followed Sputnik resulted in the creation of an umbrella organization for the nation’s best scientists and engineers: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a government-funded civilian agency whose primary goals would be to regain ground lost in the cold war, prove to the world that Sputnik was a fluke, and beat the Russians into outer space. NASA absorbed a number of scientific agencies, including the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which had been a driving force behind many of the rocket-powered Mach 2 and Mach 3 jet flights of the 1950s. Rocket scientists and their visions of launching missiles into space had been commandeered as soldiers in the cold war, and instead of sending satellites aloft, their new mission would be to send an American man. NASA was unveiled on December 17, 1958—the anniversary of the Wright brothers’ firs
t flight.

  In the New York Times, Shepard read that NASA planned to invite 110 of the military’s top test pilots to volunteer for a special mission—to become what NASA chose to call an “astronaut,” which is Greek for “space sailor.” Shepard read how, after ruling out daredevils and acrobats, race car drivers and mountaineers, NASA had decided it wanted steely, technology-savvy test pilots—who were also optimal choices because they happened to be on the government payroll. The candidates had to be shorter than five foot eleven (so they could fit into the tiny space capsule NASA was designing) and between twenty-five and forty years old—NASA wanted mature pilots who’d been around, been tested, and stuck it out. “Not,” said an Air Force doctor who would help choose the astronauts, “those who would be enamored of the project at the outset then lose interest when the luster became worn by very hard work.”

  Following his year at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, Shepard had been transferred to the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, where the family had relocated and where he now served as aircraft readiness officer, working with the commander of the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet. Though he was not currently a test pilot, Shepard figured his name would be near the top of NASA’s list. But by Friday of that week, he’d heard through the grapevine and in the halls of his Norfolk office that many of his test pilot colleagues had received invitations to come to the Pentagon for a secret briefing. Where the hell was his invitation? If they were looking for test pilots, he thought, shouldn’t they be asking the Navy’s best test pilot? He left work that night angry and a little chagrined, the start of what he’d later call a “miserable weekend.” He’d joke years later that he went home and “kicked the dog, spanked the children. It was a terrible weekend. It really was.”