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

by Neal Thompson

  Grissom had intended to tell Shepard to “go blow up”—a gruff old test pilot’s line that he hoped would relax his friend. But for some reason, at that moment it didn’t feel right. Grissom kept it to himself, and Shepard stepped out of the van.

  A waning half moon glowed above, sliding in and out of some clouds. Batteries of searchlights bathed the Redstone rocket in a bluish haze as liquid oxygen spewed from vents and turned to wisps of steam that rolled down the sides of the rocket. Shepard thought his rocket—“the bird”—looked beautiful.

  But the more beautiful sight was Shepard himself, standing at the base of his bird looking dramatically up toward his capsule. Reporters and photographers, technicians and engineers, physicians and psychiatrists . . . everyone who was nearby that morning would recall how profoundly moved they were as they watched America’s first spaceman standing self-assuredly beside his spaceship and realized: We’re really going to do it.

  At that moment Shepard had planned to say a few words to the rocket crew and to the reporters standing behind a barrier. But he was unexpectedly overcome with emotion; his throat closed in on itself, and he found himself unable to speak. So he just waved.

  Then he rode the elevator seventy feet up to the green-walled room atop the gantry that surrounded the opening to the capsule. Glenn, wearing white coveralls and a white cap like a butcher’s, greeted Shepard as he exited the elevator and then helped him squeeze through the two-foot-square opening of the capsule’s hatch. Months earlier he had named the capsule Freedom 7. The press would give him credit for honoring the Mercury Seven, but it was actually named 7 because it was the seventh capsule produced by the McDonnell Douglas assembly team in St. Louis.

  As he settled into the couch, Shepard noticed a sign taped to the instrument panel: No Handball Playing in This Area. Taped beside it was a centerfold ripped from a girlie magazine. Shepard laughed and looked out the hatch into Glenn’s grinning face. I’ll be damned, he thought. He’s becoming a damn prankster.

  Shepard planned to leave the centerfold taped up, but Glenn reached in and grabbed it and the handball sign. Shepard guessed Glenn didn’t want the cameras inside the capsule— which would soon begin rolling—to film his joke.

  For the next hour or so, various heads and hands reached into the capsule, attaching sensors, adjusting straps, shaking his hand. Shepard watched some of the commotion through the screen of the periscope that would be his primary window on the brief journey ahead. Every subsequent capsule would contain windows, but Shepard’s had only two small portholes and the fish-eye view transmitted through the lens of the periscope onto a circular screen in front of his face.

  Just before they closed the hatch, Glenn reached in and shook Shepard’s gloved hand. Shepard thanked him again, then jerked a thumbs-up.

  “Happy landings, commander,” Glenn said as the crew standing behind him shouted good luck and goodbye. Then they closed and bolted the hatch shortly past 6 A.M., and Shepard was alone. He would learn later that his heartbeat quickened as they shut him inside. The last human face he saw was Glenn’s, wide and grinning in the distorted fish-eye image of the periscope’s screen.

  Finally, after Glenn and the others had descended in the elevator, the gantry rolled back and the Redstone stood alone on the launch pad. Suddenly, without the skeletal framework hugging it, the rocket looked thin and delicate. Scores of NASA engineers would later call it the moment they truly realized there was a man up there.

  “José?” came a voice over the radio into Shepard’s headset. “Do you read me, José?”

  “I read you loud and clear, Deke,” Shepard replied.

  Slayton, the capsule communicator or “cap com,” would be Shepard’s primary contact during the short flight. “Don’t cry too much, José,” Slayton said.

  Shepard had been curled inside the capsule for more than an hour, and already they were well past the scheduled 7 A.M. launch time. He began to get itchy.

  “I tried to pace myself,” Shepard reported later, “which is difficult for me to do.”

  As he communicated by radio to technicians during the first of the delays, Shepard complained about the static in his ear. “I can’t hear you on this goddamn phone,” he said, and Shorty Powers got on the line to warn, “Watch your language. We’re being recorded everyplace.”

  When clouds rolled across the Florida coast, the countdown stopped—at 7:14 A.M.—to await the expected clearing. During that thirty-minute hold, an electrical inverter failed and had to be replaced. Following that fifty-two-minute delay, the count resumed for another twenty-one minutes, but then engineers discovered an error in the IBM computer in Maryland that would process much of the flight’s data. Again the countdown was put on hold.

  As the delays mounted, so did Shepard’s anxiety. While engineers raced to fix the computer glitch, Shepard had been scrunched inside his capsule for three hours. The flight should have been completed already, but here he still was—adrenaline building, heart palpitating. Shepard told himself, You’re building up too fast. Slow down. Relax. When he ran out of settings and dials to check, the tension would creep back in, and he’d force himself to look out the periscope at the mass of people and waves on the beach.

  “The thought of the consequences of an unsuccessful flight were getting to me too much,” he’d admit later.

  In East Derry, Shepard’s mother, Renza, and sister, Polly, had risen early and poked the American flag into the front lawn. Bart slept a little later and finally came downstairs to find his wife and daughter praying at the kitchen table.

  In St. Louis, Principia’s principal took Shepard’s eldest daughter, Laura, into a separate room, where she sat on a wooden chair before a black-and-white television “without any display of emotion.”

  In Virginia Beach, Louise had been up since 5 A.M., listening to the radio and looking over a copy of the countdown schedule Shepard had given her. It was Alice’s tenth birthday, but the family had agreed to wait until the next day to celebrate that.

  Louise’s parents were staying with her. The family spoke little of Alan in the days before the launch, except for one night at dinner, when Julie—apropos of nothing—announced that her father loved to put salt on radishes and pop them into his mouth.

  Alan had called Thursday night, then again at 2 A.M. Friday, sounding confident and relaxed. Louise barely slept after that. She kept hearing footsteps on the front porch, followed by a pause, and then more footsteps. She assumed the steps belonged to newsmen approaching, then leaving the front door, where she’d hung a note: There are no reporters inside. I will have a statement for the press after the flight.

  After breakfast, the family moved into the living room and gathered around the television, which reported the delays in the flight. Louise sat knitting a sweater when, a little past eight, the phone suddenly rang and she jumped.

  It was Shorty Powers. Shepard had radioed from the capsule and asked Shorty to call Louise and tell her that everything was okay and not to worry. “I want her to hear from us,” he told Shorty, “that I’m fine and explain that I’m going nowhere fast.”

  She hadn’t seen him for two weeks, not since the day he dropped her off at the airport in Orlando. She had spent a week at the Cape, staying at the Holiday Inn, but saw little of him except early breakfasts and late dinners. On the drive to the airport, they both knew it could be the last time they saw each other, but neither of them had much to say. Shepard tried hard to stay casual, to avoid “any display of emotion.”

  Louise tried to do the same. She knew it’d be easier for him if she stayed cool, so she said goodbye as if it were “a normal family parting.” But as her plane lifted off she began to weep.

  Now, as the countdown resumed, Louise sat close to the TV, with a transistor radio in her hand. She felt “the power of good and of God” fill the room.

  After more than three hours in the capsule, he felt it, and hoped it would go away.

  But it didn’t, that nagging pressure in his
groin. His bladder had filled with the early morning’s orange juice and coffee. Finally he had to confront it: He had to urinate. Bad.

  He radioed to Gordon Cooper, who was stationed in the nearby blockhouse and serving as Shepard’s contact until Slayton took over as cap com. “Man, I got to pee,” Shepard said. “Check and see if I can get out quickly and relieve myself.” Cooper couldn’t believe his ears. No one had prepared for anything like this. The flight was supposed to last just fifteen minutes, so no one thought Shepard would be in the capsule long enough to feel the urge.

  Shepard said he’d been in there “forever” and if he didn’t go to the bathroom, his bladder would burst. He suggested bringing the gantry back and letting him get out. Cooper relayed the message, but Wernher von Braun said no. Shepard had to stay put. Or, as von Braun put it: “Zee astronaut shall stay in zee nose cone.”

  Finally Shepard began shouting. In a conversation that would be stricken from the transcript NASA would later share with reporters, Shepard said that if they didn’t let him get out, he’d have to “go in my suit.” Technicians in Mission Control began twittering that the urine would short-circuit the medical wires attached to Shepard’s body, including the electrical thermometer inserted in his rectum. So Shepard suggested simply turning off the power until he’d had time to go. After some frantic discussions, they finally agreed, and Shepard let loose, with a long “ahhhh,” as the warm liquid pooled at the small of his back.

  “Weyl,” he reported over the radio in his lousy José dialect, “I’m a wetback now.”

  Shepard then braced himself for an electrical shock when they turned the power back on. But the urine was absorbed by his long cotton underwear and then evaporated in the 100 percent oxygen filling the suit. NASA was spared the embarrassing task of reporting that America’s first spaceman had been electrocuted by his own piss.

  The PR people did, however, have on hand a scripted response to any potential disaster. The public affairs office had prepared a carefully worded “announcement in certain contingency situations” that would inform the world of Alan Shepard’s death. There were different announcements for different disasters, such as death during launch, death in space, death during reentry. If, for example, Shepard died during the launch itself, Shorty Powers would use the following words: “Rescue units on the scene report that Astronaut Shepard has perished today in the service of his country.”

  Death was not something Shepard liked to discuss or even think about. A week earlier a reporter had asked him if he ever considered his own demise, and Shepard reluctantly admitted that he’d made certain “financial arrangements” for Louise. But competing to fly into space, despite the dangers, had nothing to do with facing and/or cheating death. Shepard tried to explain to the press that he considered what he was doing “just a faction of maturity,” just taking his flying skills to the next level. “If you don’t use your experience, your past is wasted,” he said. “You are betraying yourself.”

  The death of an astronaut, however, was very much on John Kennedy’s mind. The last thing his administration needed was the publicly televised explosive destruction of Alan Shepard. And in the days before launch, Kennedy became more and more anxious about the decision to televise the launch live. At one point he called NASA’s administrator, James Webb, to ask him to “play down the publicity on this venture.”

  “He is afraid of the reaction of the public in case there is a mishap in the firing,” Kennedy’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, wrote in her diary early that week.

  NASA tried to assure Kennedy that the escape tower atop Shepard’s capsule was designed to whisk him away from an exploding rocket. But Kennedy’s fears continued right up to the launch. Just minutes before TV stations picked up the countdown, Lincoln called NASA and asked who was in charge. Paul Haney, one of the public affairs officers working with Shorty, picked up the phone and, after looking around and seeing no one who outranked him, said, “I guess I am.” “Please hold for the president,” Lincoln said, explaining that Kennedy wanted to discuss the details of the live television coverage.

  Kennedy’s intense interest in Shepard’s launch had surprised many. Time magazine reporter Hugh Sidey once described the meeting Kennedy held two days after Gagarin’s flight, at which he saw a man “awed by the romance of the high frontier” lean back in his chair and scold his staff to offer ideas on catching up with the Russians. “Let’s find somebody—anybody,” Kennedy said, while picking at the sole of his orthopedic shoe. “I don’t care if it’s the janitor over there, if he knows how.”

  After five anxious minutes of holding, Lincoln came back on the line and explained to Haney that Kennedy had had to take a call from an obscure African president, and that Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary, would speak to Haney instead. Haney told Salinger about the escape tower designed to protect Shepard from any problems with the rocket. Shepard could pull hard on his abort handle if things got ugly, and the rocket-powered escape tower bolted atop the capsule would pull the capsule up and away from the Redstone rocket. Salinger said he’d relay the information to Kennedy.

  Other modest protections against accidental death included the parachute Shepard wore strapped to his chest and a small survival kit beside him, carrying items to sustain him in case he landed far off course. He had a knife capable of cutting through metal, a fishing line and hook, a rig that could desalinate a pint of water, a few bites of dehydrated food, and a raft.

  But for now, the bigger problem was just getting off the ground.

  Shortly after nine, with two minutes before liftoff, the countdown was halted once more. The pressure of the liquid oxygen inside the Redstone was too high. They’d have to either reset the pressure valve—which would require the flight to be canceled—or try to bleed off some of the pressure by remote control. After three hours of sitting (an hour of it in his own urine), Shepard had had enough. They were all acting like spinster aunts, fussing and clucking over a newborn. He was ready to go, his rocket was ready to go—hell, had been ready for months—and he was getting tired of all the fiddling and delays.

  “I’m cooler than you are,” he finally barked into his microphone. “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle.”

  When it seemed as if the last of the glitches was corrected, the countdown resumed—four hours after he’d first climbed into the capsule. But the numbers from ten to one sounded like gibberish to Shepard, whose pulse rose during those last seconds from a rate of 80 beats per minute to 126. In the final seconds, he muttered a prayer to himself, asking “the man upstairs” to watch over him and telling himself, Don’t screw up, Shepard.

  As the count reached zero, Shepard tightened his grip on the abort handle and pushed his feet hard against the floor, bracing himself for a jolt that never came. Despite all the centrifuge training and preparations for an inhuman rush skyward, the ascent felt “extremely smooth—a subtle, gentle, gradual rise off the ground.”

  “Roger,” he said, his first word during the flight, which coincided with his finger punching a button to start the onboard timer. “Liftoff, and the clock is started.” Shepard was grateful for Slayton’s attempt to ease his tensions: “You’re on your way, José.”

  In Newark, New Jersey, Mary Lombardo—one the many ordinary citizens whose reactions were recorded by the nation’s journalists—touched a small cross around her neck. “God bless him,” she said. In the nation’s classrooms, youngsters counted down in time with Cape Canaveral: “Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one.” New York City cabdrivers stopped picking up passengers so that they could listen to radio reports. Loudspeakers outside City Hall in lower Manhattan crackled with the live radio broadcast as throngs crowded the park outside. A Philadelphia appeals court judge interrupted a hearing when a clerk handed him a note. Free champagne flowed at a Fort Wayne, Indiana, tavern, and traffic slowed or stopped on southern California freeways as drivers—including two future astronauts—listened on the radio to the bla
stoff. People danced in the streets at Times Square, hugging each other, thrusting their fists in the air. “He made it!” a woman in Chicago gasped, then burst into tears. “He made it!”

  President Kennedy broke up a National Security Council meeting, walked into his secretary’s office, and stood before the television. Joined by his wife, brother, and vice president, Kennedy stood silently, hands jammed deep into his pants pockets.

  Bart, Renza, and Polly Shepard watched their television, holding hands and silently praying. None of them spoke, each afraid to break the taut silence.

  Louise, meanwhile, sat nearest the TV, at one point reaching out to touch the screen. As their father’s rocket rose slowly heavenward, the girls shrieked and cheered. But Louise just whispered, “Go, Alan. Go, sweetheart.”

  Shepard had discussed with the operations director, Walt Williams, his plan to talk as much as possible during liftoff, to keep everyone on the ground informed about even the slightest bits of information. So, as the rocket built speed, he began reeling off bits of data: “This is Freedom Seven. The fuel is go. One-point-two Gs. Cabin at fourteen PSI. Oxygen is go. . . . The main bus is twenty-five and the isolated battery is twenty-nine.”

  Then, two minutes after liftoff, his easy ride turned bumpy. Though the liftoff itself was smoother than Shepard had expected (he experienced only about six Gs during liftoff—less than half what he had trained for in the centrifuge), the turbulent transition from the earth’s atmosphere into space was a surprise. The capsule began shuddering violently, with Shepard’s head jack hammering so hard against the headrest that he could no longer see the dials and gauges clearly enough to read the data. He decided, instead of alarming those jittery technicians with his garbled voice, to wait to say anything else until the violence passed. Finally his spacecraft rocketed through the riotous and dangerous segment of the launch known as max Q—the point at which the capsule is accelerating beyond the speed of sound and into the thinner air of the upper atmosphere, which exerts enormous dynamic pressure on the spacecraft. The astronauts would come to call this “passing through the gate,” and once the rocket reached supersonic speeds, the tremendous buffeting stopped. Only then did Shepard feel comfortable enough to report in to Deke Slayton.