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

by Neal Thompson

  The following week, Life dedicated another fifteen pages, this time to the spouses: “Seven Brave Women Behind the Astronauts.” Louise, beside a picture of her and the girls playing four-way solitaire on the shag-carpeted living room floor, wrote about Alan’s love of a challenge. She mentioned how Alan got his private pilot’s license during flight training at Corpus Christi, how he had invited her to his letterman’s ball before he had a varsity letter, and how he learned to water ski on two skis, then one, and then barefoot. “But he is not a daredevil about those things,” Louise wrote, and Alan’s aviator colleagues, leafing through their copy of Life, had to wonder whom she was talking about.

  10

  Eyeballs in, eyeballs out

  NASA knew that Washington, D.C., would be a terrible place for the astronauts’ base of operations, so it established a new headquarters for the seven men, far from the distractions of politics and politicians. Along with the engineers and supervisors of the newly created Space Task Force, the astronauts were headquartered inside a block-walled World War I–era building at Langley Research Center, a sprawling complex of laboratories, wind tunnels, and airplane hangars near the city of Hampton in eastern Virginia.

  Life as an astronaut in training began there, in a large, musty office crammed with seven cockeyed metal desks and one seventeen-year-old secretary among them. To prepare their bodies and minds for the “epochal mission” to come, the astronauts would soon dive into a makeshift and ever-evolving training regimen that NASA had created for them, a sometimes sadistic and punishing routine unlike anything they could have imagined. Once that began, Langley would become simply a place to stop for a quick respite from the many cross-country trips to training facilities.

  But at first, the seven spent a few weeks meeting with the engineers at Langley, learning like wide-eyed kids what the rocket boys had been working toward over the past few years. Sitting in classrooms while the engineers scribbled diagrams and equations on blackboards, the astronauts learned some of the basics.

  NASA was overseeing a number of rocket-development programs. These programs were being conducted by the military services (Army, Navy, and Air Force), and NASA planned to soon choose one of these programs to provide the booster rocket that would blast the first American into space. Only a year earlier NASA had chosen the type of delivery system to be used: a small cone-shaped capsule bolted atop a booster rocket. The capsule would separate from the rocket as it catapulted from the earth’s atmosphere into space. Bolted to the tip of the capsule would be an escape tower, a contraption that looked like a miniature Eiffel Tower and contained small rockets. In the case of an emergency—if the booster rocket was veering off course, for example—the escape tower’s rockets would fire and pull the capsule away from the booster rocket. The capsule was designed to reenter the earth’s atmosphere backward, and the broad, blunt rear end of the capsule would be covered with a heat shield that could withstand the intense temperatures expected to build up during that reentry. The tip of the capsule would conceal a parachute that would deploy as the capsule fell toward a landing at sea. At first the plan was for the astronaut to simply ride along— according to one early engineer, “he wouldn’t have much control over things and he wouldn’t even have a window”—but the astronauts learned nothing about that aspect of the plan during their early classroom sessions with the engineers.

  The brief lull at Langley afforded the astronauts the opportunity to test and measure one another: Who was funnier? Who was smarter? Who could drink a lot? Who could drive faster? Outlines of their personalities quickly emerged.

  Cooper was the quietest and most accommodating; sometimes the others wouldn’t even know he was in the room until he let slip some sly commentary that reminded them how witty and bright he could be. Slayton and Grissom were serious and a bit reserved, both men of few words and both shrewdly knowledgeable about the minutiae of flying airplanes. Carpenter and Glenn were thoughtful, more sensitive than the others, and more inclined to acknowledge the enormousness of what they’d been chosen to accomplish. Schirra was the gregarious class clown, always on the lookout for a practical joke—he called them “gotchas”—that would break the rapidly rising tension.

  Carpenter and Glenn quickly became friends; so did Slayton, Grissom, and Cooper. Schirra was pals with everyone, always scheming to concoct another “gotcha.” Shepard, meanwhile, kind of hovered above them all. He never got so close as to be considered a pal, and the others weren’t exactly sure what to think of him at first. Cooper called him “the most complex of the original astronauts.”

  What lurked behind those big and buggy eyes? the others wondered. Maybe, a couple surmised, a bit of classist elitism. Whereas the other six had folksy manners and speech, Shepard, with his almost haughty New England accent, often spoke down to people. Was it possible he thought he was better than the rest? Was he a coddled rich kid in the company of self-made men? Or was there something else, some deeper darkness or unease beneath his cool, aloof veneer?

  One thing they all learned early on was that when Shepard wanted something, he usually got it. Most of the astronauts played handball, and Gus Grissom, who was short and fast, quickly established himself as the best. The only man to beat him was Shepard, although a Life reporter said at the time that the rumor, however “unlikely,” was that Grissom might have blown the game on purpose because Shepard was so “anxious to win.”

  For his part, Shepard decided early on that he liked and trusted Schirra, who was a Navy guy but also a “serious clown.” Slayton also seemed like Shepard’s kind of guy—“a great test pilot,” he called him. He respected Grissom’s scrappy persona, too. Shepard thought less of Cooper, whose laid-back personality struck Shepard as a sign of weakness, and Carpenter, who had the least impressive flying credentials of the group.

  “There’s no doubt about it, we are seven different individuals, seven different personalities,” Shepard told a friend one day soon after their selection. “But I think we balance each other out pretty well. . . . Some have stronger personalities. Some have a moderating influence. Nobody pulls any punches when we get together.”

  And then there was John Glenn. Always smiling and optimistic. Eager to please. Friendly. Chatty. A great pilot, Shepard thought. He spoke his mind, and Shepard liked that. Shepard also decided to take up Glenn’s habit of jogging a couple of miles every morning. But there was something between them that didn’t exactly click.

  They had known each other briefly at Patuxent River, where Glenn worked in the armament division, testing jets and their ability to fire guns and rockets. Glenn had heard Shepard speak at a few meetings about the F8U Crusader—“comments he had made revealed a sharp, analytical mind,” Glenn recalled. Shepard, meanwhile, had been impressed by Glenn’s record-breaking cross-country flight in a Crusader two years earlier.

  But they were tense and awkward around each other at first. How, each must have wondered, could two men at the very top of the same profession be so different?

  Shepard liked to smoke and drink; Glenn did neither. Shepard drove a sports car because he felt “it gave me the right image as a Navy test pilot”; Glenn drove a Studebaker “because,” he said, “it was cheap and got good gas mileage.” Shepard had dated many women before Louise—and after; Glenn married his high school sweetheart, Annie, whom he had known and apparently remained faithful to since childhood.

  And yet despite their differences Shepard and Glenn were the most experienced flyers of the Mercury Seven. Each had fifty-five hundred hours of accumulated military and civilian flying time, the equivalent of nearly eight months in the air, and more than any of the others (Deke Slayton had fifty-two hundred hours; Wally Schirra and Gordo Cooper had five thousand; Scott Carpenter had thirty-five hundred).

  Glenn’s credentials were amazing. He had flown dozens of missions—in Shepard’s beloved Corsair, no less—in World War II, and once met Lindbergh in the South Pacific. He was an instructor at Corpus Christi and among the first aviator
s at Patuxent River. He had flown scores of missions in jets over Korea, where he’d had bits of his planes blown off by antiaircraft fire, where baseball great Ted Williams had flown as his wingman, and where he’d shot down three Korean MiGs during the final days of war.

  But, his stunning airborne accomplishments aside, John Glenn was an absolute mystery, unlike any aviator Shepard had known. He was priggish. He could be funny, but in a corny way, not in a foul-mouthed, jet jockey, ready-room kind of way. Glenn wrote poetry, loved music, and was unashamed of his religious beliefs or the Sunday school classes he taught. In Glenn, Shepard likely saw reflections of the other mystery man of his life— his father.

  Shepard confused Glenn, too. “Al was more of an enigma,” he would later write. “One side of him was cool, competent, and utterly dedicated, the other ready to cut up, joke, and have fun. He could defuse a tense situation in an instant with a wisecrack, and he had a way of being able to relax everyone around him and make them perform better. There was a part of him, however, that didn’t like the restrictions that came with being a public figure.”

  Glenn also struggled to find ways to cope with the public recognition and the constant demands of the press. “We were the objects of an insatiable curiosity,” Glenn recalled. Still, Glenn figured the public relations stuff came with the job. He accepted it, even embraced it, and tried to use it to his advantage.

  Shepard at first shunned the press, focusing solely on becoming the best of the seven, because they all knew that the best would fly first. Despite their different approaches and vastly different personalities, it quickly became clear—to NASA officials, to the reporters, and to the astronauts themselves—that the two to beat were Shepard and Glenn.

  In truth, they were more alike than either one may have realized at the time. Despite Glenn’s apple pie qualities, he was a fierce competitor who knew how to promote himself to get ahead. That’s what he had done in 1957 when he shrewdly devised plans for a nonstop transcontinental flight that would be good PR for the Navy, which he then generously offered to fly himself—right into the record books. Glenn, like Shepard, had also loved flying the tricky Corsair. “Nothing gave me more pleasure,” he once said. And just as Shepard had essentially defied his father to become an astronaut, Glenn had turned down his own father’s offer to join his plumbing business.

  No, Glenn and Shepard weren’t opposites. They both aspired to be exemplary men, to perform exemplary feats. They both loved the thrills and glory of flying, the orgasmic self-satisfaction of reaching the extremes of speed, altitude, and distance. They were not opposites. They were more like twins—the bad son and the good son, yin and yang.

  And just weeks into their training, each set for himself the ultimate goal of his life: Each wanted nothing more, nothing less, than to be the first man in space.

  But first NASA had to learn how to build rockets that actually flew.

  When NASA engineers began meeting in 1958 to design the rocket-and-capsule system that would carry a man into—and, ideally, back from—space, one official told his crew that their task was simple: “It would be good if you kept him alive.” But by 1959 just getting off the ground was a troubling enough task, and the Mercury Seven sometimes had to wonder whether they’d signed on for a suicide mission.

  NASA was yet to choose which military branch would provide the booster rocket system. Wernher von Braun, working for the Army, had improved steadily on his Redstone rocket (the progeny of the Nazis’ V-2 rocket, a version of which had sent the first U.S. satellite, Explorer, into space in 1958). The Navy, meanwhile, was committed to its unreliable Vanguard rocket (which had exploded during its attempt to launch the Explorer in late 1957). Finally, the Air Force was developing its powerful and promising Atlas rocket. The three services were locked in a contentious and politically charged battle for the job, but each was suffering awful and vexing setbacks. Those failures were especially embarrassing compared to the successes of the Soviets.

  By the summer of 1959 the Soviets had already sent a dog into orbit. In a few months’ time they would land an unmanned rocket on the surface of the moon. (And during his historic visit to the United States Khrushchev would comment, while downing his first hot dog at a Des Moines factory: “We have beaten you to the moon. But you have beaten us in sausage making.”)

  In the face of this technological inferiority, on May 18, 1959, after just a few weeks together, the astronauts flew to Cape Canaveral on the eastern coast of Florida to watch their first missile launch. With a dozen other VIPs—congressmen and NASA officials—Shepard and the others donned hard hats and gathered at a viewing stand a quarter mile away. Shepard admired the silver Atlas prototype as it refracted slices of bright orange Florida sunshine. Then the ground shook and white fire screamed out from beneath the beast, which rose slowly above the Atlantic. Shepard cupped his hands around his hard hat’s visor as the rocket levitated on its tail of fire. Ice, caused by the insanely cold rocket fuel, rained down from the projectile’s nose. Then, just a few hundred yards into its slow ascent, the rocket began to waver. It tipped sideways, its thin skin buckled, and then the Atlas spectacularly exploded. The seven astronauts were so close to the launch pad they all instinctively ducked. Shepard turned to Glenn, who was standing beside him, and broke the stunned silence that followed.

  “Well, I’m glad they got that one out of the way,” he said. “I sure hope they fix that.”

  Each of them had to wonder about the parachute that NASA suggested be strapped to the first rocket rider. What the hell good is a parachute amid such carnage? Ten days later, however, one of Wernher von Braun’s rockets—a modified Redstone, called a Jupiter— successfully launched a capsule containing two monkeys.

  In the coming months, NASA would decide not to risk incinerating one of its astronauts on a temperamental Atlas rocket. Instead, the first American space launch would be with one of Von Braun’s more reliable Redstones. But because the Redstone lacked the power to send a capsule high enough and fast enough to reach orbit, NASA decided that that first launch would be suborbital, in which the capsule would be sent on an arcing, hump-shaped route into space and then right back to earth.

  Toward the end of 1959 NASA began making plans for that launch to occur within a year—which left little time for the Mercury Seven to learn to be astronauts.

  In one of his ghost-written articles for Life magazine, Shepard described the astronauts’ training regimen—which they were more fully introduced to throughout the latter half of 1959—as a mix of academics, meetings with engineers to discuss the mechanics of the rockets and capsules, and rigorous physical and stamina exercises designed to tone and prepare their bodies for the expected labors of a space flight.

  “Some of this was fairly exotic stuff. For we were preparing to penetrate an environment that no one had ever dealt with before,” Shepard wrote. “Some of it, however, was just plain down-to-earth hard work.” Haunting all the hard work was a constant reminder of why the space race had been launched in the first place: to counter the terrifying power and surge of communism.

  Guerillas had overrun Cuba the previous year, allowing Fidel Castro to begin establishing his new socialist, and harshly anti-U.S., government. And Khrushchev, following Sputnik’s success, continued to verbally badger America. With a strong foot-hold in Eastern Europe and Asia, communism seemed poised to take over the world. And the Soviet Union’s obvious lead in the space race taunted the United States as apparent proof that communism might actually be a more powerful system. “Communism was on the march,” John Glenn recalled. “It was no joke.”

  The astronauts’ training regimen, therefore, was fueled by an almost combat like mentality and a belief that gaining control of space might just save the world. The men threw themselves into their training exercises, spending extremely long and stressful days at various facilities around the country, strapped inside machines designed to punish their bodies and prove the cynics wrong. And in classrooms they absorbed Ph.D.-level l
essons on astrophysics, rocket propulsion, and mechanical engineering.

  On top of all that, the astronauts, so recently far removed from the everyday culture of America, so hidden from public view in their cloistered military fraternities, were learning other hard lessons about being famous. The headiness of their newfound fame fueled their competitiveness. In just a few months they had become new symbols of manhood and celebrity. And, as happens in any group of headstrong men, the competitive juices flowed, with each man searching for a way to stand out from the others. Amid such tensions, any tangle of two or more astronauts—from training sessions to card games—could instantly take on the heated energy of a boxing match.

  Handball games often escalated into raucous, profanity-laced sessions. Even with the astronauts’ vices, the competitive mood dictated that no one let the other guy get a half step ahead. Shepard, who had been smoking cigarettes on and off for many years, decided to quit. Then so did Slayton, Schirra, and Carpenter. (A reporter at the press conference had asked how they’d find a smoke “when they get up there.”) The smokers helped each other—somewhat aggressively—by putting gasoline in the office ashtrays.

  During a trip to Dallas, Shepard and Glenn stayed up late one night with an old academy classmate of Shepard’s, drinking frozen martinis, called “lead pipes,” and playing a confusing card game, similar to bridge, called Huckley Buck. When the other players ganged up on Glenn, who was on the verge of losing the game, he became furious and quit, stomping off to walk around the block.

  Each man wanted to be the best at any given exercise, no matter how small. “Jockeying for position became a constant activity,” one astronaut said. “The game was to move ahead or—just as effective—move the other guy back.”

  As they dove into their hectic training schedule, which took them to factories and rural military bases in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Missouri, Florida, and California, it was all about me. “It was a competition guaranteed to bring out the worst in a guy,” one astronaut said.