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

by Neal Thompson

  And yet it was exactly the kind of competition Shepard thrived on. Just as he had taunted other teams while rowing at the Naval Academy, just as he had taunted the “blue suit boys” at Edwards Air Force Base, he knew how to intimidate his competition while outperforming them. One day, at a NASA research center in Cleveland, Shepard strapped himself for the first time into the cockpit of NASA’s weirdest carnival ride, the most challenging exercise in the astronauts’ training regimen, a contraption called MASTIF. His attitude was: If I can land a jet on a carrier, I can whip this thing. And he was sure he could do it better than the rest.

  Trouble was, guys like John Glenn were thinking exactly the same thing.

  At first, the astronauts had assumed their training program would consist of many hours in the cockpit of a jet-powered airplane. “We didn’t know what else to train on,” Gordon Cooper once said. “Nobody had trained astronauts before.” Instead, training for space flight evolved into an experience unlike anything the astronauts, or any human, had ever been through or, in their wildest dreams, could have imagined. NASA’s engineers developed a number of high-tech new machines, scattered at military bases across the nation, that would simulate aspects of what the astronauts would likely confront during space flight. And that became the driving theory behind the astronauts’ training regimen: to build machines that re-created the excruciating tremors and pressures of sitting on the nose of a rocket traveling faster than any human had ever traveled; to mimic the weightlessness the astronauts would experience in outer space; to simulate the sensation of tumbling through space in a disabled and out-of-control capsule.

  The training program sprang from all the what-ifs that the engineers and scientists had posited. Because, in truth, the experts weren’t too sure what would happen to a man in space; opinions ranged from “nothing” to “disgusting, painful death.” So, to cover all their bases, the engineers decided to explore each what-if and then see if the astronauts could survive an approximate duplication of that scenario. When they weren’t in classrooms learning about astrophysics, geophysics, and astronomy, the astronauts were flying from city to city, allowing themselves to be subjected to heat chambers, pressure chambers, a “rotating room,” and other of NASA’s noisy, dangerous, gut-sloshing experimental training contraptions.

  “There was always another what-if,” Glenn once remarked, referring to the nervous Nellies in NASA’s medical corps who dreamed up many ghastly scenarios. What if the astronauts experienced “separation anxiety” and inexplicably refused to return to earth? What if the astronauts’ eyeballs oozed and became misshapen in the zero gravity of space? What if the fluids of the inner ear, which control balance, floated out of the astronauts’ heads, leaving them permanently dizzy and vertiginous?

  And what if the astronauts’ orbiting space capsule spun out of control? To prepare for the off chance of such a scenario, the brilliant minds of NASA created MASTIF—the multiple axis space training inertial facility. Similar to a gyroscope, MASTIF was an enormous set of three concentric cages, called gimbals, one inside the other. Each cage was a misshapen, geometric skeletal box that looked as though it’d been assembled from the leftover parts of a set of playground monkey bars. The outer cage was red, and inside that was a smaller green cage, both of them vaguely circular. At the center was a yellow cage, roughly cone-shaped, to represent the astronauts’ space capsule. And at the center of the yellow cage was a cockpit where the astronaut sat, strapped in tight. Each gimbal was hinged to the next, but they all rotated independently from each other and in different directions, so that the cockpit could be programmed to spin—just like the Mercury capsule might in space— on three axes: pitch (from front to back), roll (from side to side), and yaw (from left to right, in a twisting motion).

  The engineers could program the machine to rotate just one of the cages, which would cause the astronaut’s capsule to simulate a side-to-side pitching motion. Then the programmers could rotate two of the cages, causing the astronaut’s cockpit to pitch and spin simultaneously. Finally, they could rotate all three cages, simulating a completely out-of-control capsule, tumbling and spinning and yawing through space. The astronauts had to learn to use a hand control—similar to the control stick in a jet—that released spurts of gas that acted as a brake against the rotating motion of the gimbals. The goal was to stop the cockpit from tumbling and bring it to a complete stop.

  Shepard intended to be the first to master MASTIF. But in a flashback to his downcheck during flight training at Corpus Christi and the two near-fatal jet crash dives at Edwards Air Force Base, he was immediately, frighteningly humbled.

  The practice sessions began slowly, with just one or two of the cages spinning at modest speeds, and Shepard was able to quickly stop the cockpit from tumbling. But when he first gave the thumbs-up for the technicians to spin all three cages, and also to increase the speed—each gimbal was capable of up to thirty revolutions per minute—things got ugly. As the cages spun faster and faster, their breezelike whooshing sound rose into a piercing scream. After just a minute or two, with Shepard’s body being tossed front to back and side to side, he reached out and slammed the red “chicken switch” button, which set off a loud klaxon that told the technicians to shut down the machine.

  The cages stopped tumbling, and engineers helped a dizzy and nauseated Shepard from the cockpit and led him to the cot they kept nearby—with a mop and bucket beside it, just in case. But Shepard was determined to master the thing. He got back in it that afternoon and performed a little better, but still had to punch the chicken switch, and so he decided to quit for the day. A few of the doctors on hand that first day were surprised at how long it took Shepard to recover from his dizziness and nausea.

  The next morning he strapped himself in again. And the next. Within a few days he was able to withstand the full thirty revolutions per minute in each axis. He learned how to quickly and accurately twist and turn the control stick until he stopped one gimbal, then the next and then the next, bringing the cockpit to a standstill. In one of the 35 mm films NASA took of the training sessions, Shepard emerged from a session in MASTIF, then stopped and stared back at the machine, the disgust plain on his face. Then he lifted his head as if to say, I beat you, you mechanicalfreak, turned, and walked out, chin in the air, chest out.

  Shepard became the first of the seven to tame the MASTIF, but some of the others had less luck and considered any day with MASTIF a bad day. Schirra, for example, who had been inside his share of tumbling jets, likened a MASTIF session to “a bulldog tearing away at you . . . we’d never felt anything like it.”

  Another machine—the one Shepard despised most, even more than MASTIF—was the centrifuge outside Philadelphia. It was a small flying-saucer-shaped capsule at the end of a fifty-foot arm that spun in a tight circle, like a tree-sized croquet mallet being swung by a giant. The sadistic purpose of the machine was to expose the astronauts to the type of excessive gravity, or G forces, that they’d experience riding atop a launching rocket. They would be traveling faster than any human had flown, and the doctors had to determine whether their bodies could take the strain.

  One G is the equivalent of the earth’s gravitational pull. Two Gs is essentially gravity times two. So under two Gs of gravitational pressure, a 175-pound man would feel as if he weighed 350. As the centrifuge rotated faster and faster, the astronauts would be pushed into their couches beneath hundreds of pounds of pressure, pummeled by G loads more excruciating than any fighter pilot had ever felt.

  NASA engineers had calculated that during their explosive launch from earth, the astronauts would experience at least five or six Gs—the equivalent of about half a ton of pressure for a 175-pound man. But there were unanswered questions about how many Gs they’d experience during their capsule’s plunge from the emptiness of space into the thick, friction-inducing air of the earth’s atmosphere. Ten? Fifteen? No one knew for sure, so the doctors decided to give the astronauts a taste of the worst.

 
At five or six Gs in the centrifuge, it was still possible—but just barely—for the astronauts to lift their arms and flip a few switches on the mock dashboard in front of them. At seven Gs they were slammed into the couch and incapable of movement, as if bags of cement had been stacked on their chest, legs, and arms. They had to tense their muscles to keep the blood from draining out of their head and causing them to black out. With some practice, they reached inhumane G loads of sixteen; the record, achieved (on a dare) by an unassuming Navy lieutenant, was an astonishing 20 Gs. Such spins would smoosh back the skin on their face like Play-Doh. After such sessions, they’d find their backs splotched and red from broken blood vessels.

  The technicians called the machine the “County Fair Killer.” Shepard called it an “oversize cream separator” that either “whips you or you whip it.” And Glenn, after one sixteen-G run, said, “It’s something I never want to do again.”

  Another NASA film shows Shepard in late 1960 riding inside the centrifuge, flipping switches and talking into a microphone to a technician. While watching this film footage, it’s easy to tell when the capsule and its occupant have begun spinning faster and the Gs have begun building, because the flesh on Shepard’s face smears back from his cheekbones and his already buggy eyes get buggier and buggier.

  As if such spinning wasn’t bad enough, NASA engineers then devised an even more gruesome exercise with the centrifuge. They had asked themselves: What if the astronaut’s capsule lands on its nose, instead of its behind? To test their assumptions, the engineers decided to measure the astronauts’ capacity for “reverse Gs.”

  While the centrifuge arm was spinning and the astronaut was being shoved back into his contour couch, the engineers would rotate the capsule 180 degrees so that the man inside was abruptly thrown into his shoulder straps. They called it the EI/EO test, for “eyeballs in, eyeballs out,” which is exactly what happened. Shepard once told a reporter that it was a “real pleasure” to go from spinning forward to backward. But Glenn wasn’t the only one who found the test “sadistic.” One of NASA’s doctors tried the EI/EO and emerged hacking uncontrollably, unable to catch his breath; through some testing the other doctors determined that his heart had slammed into one of his lungs and deflated it.

  Much more enjoyable were the exercises that offered a few thrilling moments of weightlessness. The engineers knew at least this much about outer space: A capsule in orbit around earth is in constant “freefall,” and its occupants would also be “falling” in such a way that they’d be capable of swimming in air; if an airplane could simulate that free fall, the astronauts would experience weightlessness. The astronauts, wearing crash helmets, would sit in the padded cargo bay of a wide-body C-135 transport plane. The plane would fly in a steep ascent and then arc over into a steep descent. These “parabolic” flights would give the astronauts about fifteen seconds of weightlessness, and they often goofed in front of the on-board cameras like school kids, wrestling with each other and doing back flips.

  The weightlessness could sometimes come to an abrupt halt, however, and the men would slam into the padded floors and walls of the airplane.

  As a group or in pairs, the astronauts also regularly visited the various plants where pieces of their spaceships were being built. Development of the capsules and rockets was proceeding more or less in tandem with the results of the astronauts’ training exercises, so that the findings of those exercises could be incorporated into design modifications. For example, the EI/EO test led to the development of stronger shoulder harnesses. Shepard and the others treasured their small role in the design of their capsules. The sense of empowerment was similar to what they all had felt as test pilots, informing manufacturers about how to correct defects in their airplanes.

  But the astronauts soon discovered that their role in the capsule design was smaller than they had realized. One particularly distressing discovery was made when they all visited the McDonnell Aircraft plant in St. Louis in charge of manufacturing the capsules. The astronauts hadn’t realized until that day that there would be no window in the little metal teepee. They were training to go on the greatest journey humans could have imagined, but except for a periscope that offered a blurry view of the outside of the capsule, they wouldn’t be able to see a goddamn thing.

  Glenn called the oversight “unthinkable,” and all of them had to quietly wonder if Chuck Yeager had been right after all; they would just be guinea pigs in a windowless can. Such feelings inspired Shepard and the others to fight harder for design changes that they felt were crucial. Except for the first three capsules, which were too far along, all future capsules would have a window. And, in a battle that the astronauts considered their most important victory, all the capsules would be rigged with a guidance system (including the hand control) that allowed them to manually “fly” the capsule. That victory was the result of their own what-if: What if all this fancy, automated equipment failed while they were in space and they had to bring the capsule back down themselves?

  Some days the astronauts called “gee whiz days” because everything was new. They were learning things (about stars, constellations, and planets) and doing things (such as scuba diving in the Gulf of Mexico) that were exciting and challenging.

  But the “gee whiz” days were balanced out by plenty of “oh shit” days when they realized, to their shock, how little NASA knew about its task. Sometimes it seemed that NASA and its contractors were making things up as they went along. That wasn’t far from the truth. “We were inundated with the newness of everything,” Christopher Kraft, NASA’s flight director, would later write.

  In addition to the rocket boys—men like von Braun, who’d been building rockets their entire life—many of NASA’s first engineers came from the same world as Shepard, the aviation world. They were the men who had built and designed the planes and jets that Shepard once flew. But now, as partners with the rocket boys, many of the aviation engineers had to learn the basic theories of rocket propulsion; some engineers learned such lessons sitting in a high school classroom near Langley. “We were airplane people,” Kraft recalled. “I wasn’t the only engineer who was stunned at how much I didn’t know and how much I had to learn.”

  Trickiest of all was turning ballistic rockets, which had been designed as bomb-carrying man-killers, into man-carriers. But as the hoped-for late 1960 or early 1961 manned launch drew closer, NASA’s engineers continued to frighten the astronauts with how much more they apparently still had to learn. Shepard and the others assembled at the Cape one night to watch the test launch of another one of Von Braun’s Redstones. As the countdown reached zero, fire and smoke erupted from the rocket’s base and quickly engulfed the entire Redstone. A projectile then shot straight up from the smoke and seemed to zip out of view and into the night sky quicker than the eye could follow. “Look at the acceleration on that son of a bitch,” Kraft yelled.

  But when the smoke cleared, they all saw that it wasn’t the booster rocket that had shot from the smoke—the Redstone was still standing on the launch pad. All that had zipped toward space was the rocket-propelled escape tower attached to the top of the capsule. A malfunction had caused it to ignite, but instead of pulling the capsule with it and away from the rocket—its sole purpose—the escape tower blasted away all alone.

  A few seconds later, a huge orange parachute popped out of the top of the capsule, which remained bolted atop the failed Redstone. Seconds later, as the huge orange parachute billowed in the breeze, a poof of green stuff spewed out from the capsule’s tip—the dye that was supposed to mark the capsule’s spot and assist recovery crews when it landed in the ocean. The rocket stood mocking them, and the steady ocean breezes threatened to catch hold of the parachute, fill it with wind, and pull down the entire missile, which was still swollen, tick like, with highly explosive liquid fuel.

  Kraft overheard some other engineers discussing how to release the pressurized fuel. Someone suggested getting a rifle-man to shoot a couple of holes in
the side of the rocket to bleed off the pressure. Kraft couldn’t believe his ears. The slightest spark from a bullet could ignite the volatile mix of liquid oxygen and kerosene. Finally a brave McDonnell Aircraft employee crawled to the base of the rocket and shut down the ignition systems. “That was a hell of a mess,” Kraft said afterward.

  Later they learned how a few millimeters could mean the difference between life and death for an astronaut. A cord ran from the base of the Redstone, which fed the rocket a steady supply of electricity right up to the moment of launch. When the rocket began to ascend, it would snap the cord and begin supplying its own electricity. But one prong on this rocket’s cord had been manufactured a fraction of an inch too short. The rocket lifted four inches off the ground but then the imperfect electrical cord disconnected a few milliseconds too soon, which automatically shut down the engines.

  Such failed launches weren’t uncommon at a time when the success rate of certain American rockets hovered around an appalling 50 percent. Shepard’s response to such failures: What do you expect from rockets built by the lowest bidder?

  By mid-1960, as the astronauts passed their first anniversary as a team and the training and traveling routine reached full speed, the seven were on the road constantly, hundreds of days a year— so much traveling that Gordo Cooper’s accountant told him he could pick any state he wanted as his residence for tax purposes.

  When the pressure cooker weirdness, the interviews, and instant fame weighed too heavily, or when the ceaseless internal competition became too intense, the men sought out some form of escape. Sometimes that meant playing a crafty practical joke. Sometimes it meant purely physical distraction: water-skiing, handball, fishing, hunting. Or hauling ass in a sports car. Or a few drinks with a female fan. “We were always looking for ways to let off steam,” Slayton once said.