Gordo Cooper, seated at a Mission Control console, pushed back in his chair and buried his head in his hands. Walter Cronkite, reporting for CBS, also began to choke up. Unsuccessfully fighting back his own tears, he told his audience, “We . . . may have . . . lost an astronaut.” Rene Carpenter, watching Cronkite in the company of a Life magazine reporter and photographer, smiled bravely, giving away nothing as they snapped her picture. The TV-watching public assumed Scott Carpenter was gone.
It would take forty minutes for a Marine helicopter to finally track down Carpenter’s capsule. They found him floating happily in a life raft beside Aurora, 250 miles from where he was supposed to have landed. It took another hour for word to reach the Cape—and then Carpenter’s wife, and then the nation—that Carpenter had not perished after all.
If he was aware of the many mistakes he’d made and how close he’d come to oblivion, Carpenter never showed it publicly. Some NASA officials were infuriated that he never seemed repentant about his lapses. But for him, flying around the earth had been “a religious experience . . . the chance to see the inner workings of the grand order of things.” Years later Carpenter said, “It felt as though I were watching myself, with fascination and curiosity, to see how my great adventure might turn out.”
Others had a different take. Cooper said bluntly: “Scott knew he had screwed up.” And flight director Kraft was livid. Astronauts weren’t supposed to have religious experiences. They were supposed to follow rules and perform with exactitude. Kraft vowed that day that the “son of a bitch” would never fly for him again.
And Carpenter never would.
Kraft had other thoughts about Shepard, whom he credited with saving Scott Carpenter’s life. “Anyplace you put Alan Shepard he was going to do a perfect job,” Kraft said years later. “He was calm under stressful conditions. . . . If he hadn’t been there, I’m not sure Scott would have gotten down.”
In his unpublished memoirs, operations director Walt Williams wrote that Shepard “was worth his weight in gold on this flight,” adding, “that was typical of Al—to be the father of the situation.”
But as well respected as Shepard had become, he was about to be eclipsed by a new generation of astronauts, a younger breed that would fly higher, farther, and faster.
16
“I’m sick . . . should I just hang it up?”
As NASA continued developing its massive new headquar-ters in Houston, the space agency was on its way to becoming one of the world’s biggest corporations and among the largest government-funded programs in history. Following Wally Schirra’s flight, scheduled for the fall of 1962, and Gordo Cooper’s flight, scheduled for the following year, Project Mercury was over, and most of NASA’s energies and money had already turned toward developing the men, the rockets, and the capsules for Project Gemini and Project Apollo. NASA now employed tens of thousands of people, either directly (at one of half a dozen satellite operations) or through its many subcontractors, with nearly five thousand workers based in Houston alone.
The next step in the space race was Project Gemini. In a series of launches with two-man capsules, astronauts would test feats that would be crucial for a trip to the moon, such as space walks and orbital docking (linking together two orbiting spacecraft).
The candidates for Project Gemini were told to enter the stately Rice Hotel in downtown Houston, passing beneath its ugly, menacing gargoyles, and check in under a false name. In fact, all the candidates were told to use the same fake name, and in late 1962 dozens of nervous men named Max Peck arrived at the Rice Hotel for one of the toughest interviews of their life.
Shepard sat on the interviewing board and quickly let the younger upstarts know he was their superior, that he owned them. His eyes drilled into each man. If they tried a joke, he refused to crack a smile. His questions were terse and, at times, combative.
At the end of an otherwise genial interview, Shepard would be the one to pull out a sheet of paper and ask, “In July of 1961 you were reported driving an unregistered car in Massachusetts—can you explain this?” He might have a drink with an astronaut candidate at the hotel barroom, the Old Capital Club. But in the interview room he’d act like a cold, hard stranger. And when he later called to tell a candidate he’d been selected, he wanted a black-and-white response. One of those selected told Shepard he was “99 percent sure” he’d say yes, which Shepard said was an unacceptable answer.
Once they were chosen—men like Neil Armstrong, Pete Conrad, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman—the next astronauts would come to understand Shepard’s attitude. NASA could only build so many rockets and schedule so many flights. Any new-comer was seen as a threat, a competitor. As the number of astronauts grew in subsequent years, so did the intrigue: rooting for your friends to fail, scheming to get ahead, always on guard against some form of political sabotage. Shepard was considered a master of the nasty game called “astro-politics.” Many, however, wouldn’t realize for years—not until they had finally retired from NASA— how driven they were by the competition with their peers. Shepard, though, never seemed to tire of the competition. He was shrewd, intuitive. Even those who disliked him respected his “sophistication.” “His technique was flawless,” one astronaut said.
Shepard eased up a fair bit when the first interviews for the Gemini program were completed and the group of candidates had been whittled down to nine potential new astronauts. One day he ushered them into their final physical and psychological tests—similar but less intense versions of the ghoulish testing he had withstood in 1959—and gave them all a piece of advice. “Now, for Pete’s sake, don’t show any feminine attributes,” he said as they gathered outside the doctors’ offices. “You’ve got to be masculine.” Some of them heeded the advice and on their inkblot tests told doctors the splashes of ink resembled “a woman’s breast” or “a pair of legs.”
Shepard couldn’t have imagined it at the time, but seven of the “Next Nine” (as they’d call themselves) would soon cumulatively spend hundreds of hours in space. Each of those seven would easily dwarf Shepard’s fifteen minutes of space time, and the only two in the group who wouldn’t surpass Shepard would instead die a fiery death.
To Shepard, these new guys were now the enemy. At a press conference to introduce the Next Nine, Shorty Powers—in one of his final acts as the astro-spokesman—began by first introducing the Mercury Seven, in reverse chronological order, with a brief description of each of their flights. “And finally,” he said, “this is Alan Shepard, the man who’s been saying for years, ‘But I was first.’ ” Everyone in the room laughed. Except Shepard, who aimed his hard blue eyes right at Shorty without cracking even a grin.
That same fall of 1962, Kennedy—having recently managed the tense head game of the Cuban missile crisis—turned his attention back to the space race and visited NASA’s new Houston digs. Shepard and Slayton gave him a tour of the Manned Spacecraft Center, which was still under construction, letting him sit in the cockpit of a spacecraft simulator and play with the controls. Then, before fifty thousand people at Rice University’s football stadium, Kennedy summed up how far he felt the country had traveled in the year and a half since Shepard’s Freedom 7, delivering one of his more famous speeches. “This country was conquered by those who moved forward—and so will space,” he said. Then he quoted one of Shepard’s ancestors, William Bradford, who helped found and later governed the Plymouth Bay Colony. Bradford had said that “all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties.” Kennedy put his own stamp on that thought.
“But why, some say, the moon?” he said. “Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic? We choose to go to the moon. . . . We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Finally, he highlighted the challenge ahead, cautioning that to make a 240,000-mile trip to the moon in a rocket as lo
ng as a football field, traveling at speeds above twenty-five thousand miles an hour, reaching temperatures half that of the sun— “almost as hot as it is here today”—and do it before 1970, “then we must be bold.”
The plans were bold indeed. Already in the works was another program that would succeed Gemini, a series of trips to the moon called Project Apollo.
NASA planned to conduct at least ten Gemini flights, which meant that Shepard and his Mercury Seven peers would get the chance to fly again, competing with the Next Nine. Shepard had already begun lobbying for the first Gemini flight, and by the end of 1962 his chances looked strong. But the first Gemini flight was at least two years away, and he started to feel that he couldn’t wait that long. The only earlier flight was the final Project Mercury mission, Gordon Cooper’s orbital flight, scheduled for mid-1963. That was the flight Shepard decided he wanted. And if he couldn’t get that flight, he’d try to convince NASA— hell, he’d try to convince Kennedy himself—that America needed one more Mercury flight.
If only he could ignore the terrible ringing in his ears that had started up lately, accompanied by dizziness and nausea. Some mornings he awoke to find himself disoriented, the room spinning like a jet fighter in a tail spin. He’d reach for the wall, but it would roll out of reach and he’d land on the floor in a heap.
The first episode of this strange affliction had actually struck years earlier, just a few months after his selection for the Mercury Seven. Shepard and his father and one of his Navy buddies, Bill Chaires, who had been his roommate on the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt back in 1949, were playing golf at a Virginia Beach course. As the threesome warmed up at the first tee, Shepard complained about feeling light-headed. Each time he tried to swing the club, he felt as if he was going to topple over—he was dizzy, and his equilibrium seemed off. They decided to play anyway, but Shepard was shanking and slicing his shots all over the course. After two holes Shepard decided he couldn’t play anymore. He told Chaires to keep quiet about the whole thing, which he did—for more than forty years. “I’m sure if NASA had found out, he would not have become an astronaut,” said Chaires.
Shepard didn’t experience another dizzy spell for a few years after that (or if he did, he kept very quiet about it). But in 1963 the episodes started up again. They usually struck in the morning, when he rose from bed. Perhaps these episodes of intense, debilitating dizziness—which felt as if the earth’s gravity had abandoned him, as if he were tumbling through space— spurred Shepard’s determination to take over Gordo Cooper’s flight. Right up to the final hours, Shepard, who was Cooper’s backup pilot, was snapping at Cooper’s heels, barking for a chance to ride in his friend’s stead. Cooper later said he was reminded then that there were two sides to Alan Shepard: a smiling José Jiménez one day and the next a man “so competitive as to be ruthless.”
If the list of requisite astronaut traits included braggadocio, excessive competitiveness, hardheadedness, and masculinity with a capital M, Gordon Cooper—like Scott Carpenter, in some ways—worked off a different list. Thin, soft-spoken, and gentle, Cooper hailed from Shawnee, Oklahoma—the smallest of the small towns that produced the Mercury Seven. He could be funny and sly and was successful with his share of female astro-groupies. But Cooper was far more laid back than his peers. He trusted NASA to do the right thing and didn’t lobby or politick like the others. His trust was such that he named his capsule Faith 7, symbolizing, he explained, his faith in NASA, in his rocket, in himself, and in God. NASA cringed at the moniker, envisioning some embarrassing headlines—“NASA Loses Faith.”
As the days ticked down to the May 1963 launch, Shepard lobbied furiously to take Cooper’s place. The story was covered up at the time, and in subsequent decades only a few would know how close Cooper came to losing his flight.
NASA knew Cooper was an excellent pilot, but he had never seemed to train as hard as the others. And despite his love of fast cars and fast planes, his laid-back attitude and laconic Oklahoma twang struck some NASA officials as lazy. As the launch approached, some of them began wondering if Cooper was up to the task. They didn’t want another sloppy flight like Scott Carpenter’s.
Operations director Walt Williams, NASA’s number three guy, a stern and hardworking man, had always considered Cooper “a funny little guy”—meaning he didn’t quite understand him. A few months before the flight Williams told Shepard that his faith in Cooper was shaky and there was a strong chance he might ask Shepard to fly instead. Shepard immediately latched on to the idea and began selling himself for the job. Deke Slayton joined the discussions, arguing that it was Cooper’s flight. Others piped up, claiming that it would look bad if NASA replaced Cooper so close to the flight.
Finally, on a flight from Houston to Los Angeles, Williams broke the news to Shepard: They’d decided to stick with Cooper. Shepard’s eyes bored in on Williams with that intense, unflinching stare of his, but then Shepard broke the tense silence. “Well, you know I could do a better job,” was all he said. Williams acknowledged that was “probably the case” but said the decision had been made. And he was counting on Shepard, as Cooper’s backup, to work with him and make sure Cooper would be absolutely prepared. “Bring him up to where he would do as good a job as you,” Williams said.
Williams tried to temper the situation with a half promise. NASA was fighting to add one last Mercury flight after Cooper’s— a test of endurance that might last three or four days. There was “no question” it’d be Shepard’s flight if he wanted it, Williams said. “Okay, if that’s the answer, I’ll do it,” Shepard told him. That wasn’t the end of it, though. Shepard would get one last chance to snag Cooper’s flight for himself. But first Shepard would exact a small slice of revenge on Williams.
One day during a simulation for Cooper’s flight, Williams was called away from the Cape to a luncheon and press conference at Cocoa Beach. Williams had gotten a ride to work that morning and didn’t have any way to reach the press conference. Shepard tossed him the keys to his Corvette and told him to keep it for the day and return it that night. As Williams sped off the base, Shepard picked up the phone and called security. “This is astronaut Alan Shepard,” he said. “Some son of a bitch just stole my Corvette and is heading for the south gate.”
According to Williams’ unpublished memoirs, the police never stopped him, and he went fishing after lunch and brought the Corvette back late that afternoon. But when he learned that Shepard had tried to have him arrested, he decided to return the gotcha by having an engineer rig a small explosive to the Corvette’s ignition. The explosive didn’t detonate, but smoke from the fuse damaged two of the car’s eight spark plugs.
“Did the car seem to run rough?” Shepard asked Williams the next day.
“Oh, no,” Williams said. “It seemed to be running all right to me.”
“Well, it’s sure running rough,” Shepard said, his eyes spotlighting into Williams’. Shepard later opened the hood and found Williams’ failed pyrotechnics.
The morning before his launch Cooper learned that a small adjustment had been made to his pressure suit. Technicians had cut into it to insert a new medical probe. He felt that the last-minute alteration had violated an unwritten rule against modifying suits that had been custom-made for each astronaut. “What if the new fitting leaked?” Cooper said later. He was angry that no one had consulted with him and in a very uncharacteristic display of frustration hopped into an F-106 jet and began looping and rolling above the Cape. Then, to be sure NASA really knew what he thought of their suit adjustment, he took the supersonic jet down for an unauthorized and very low flyover.
Roaring past Faith 7 and down atop Hangar S and the NASA complex, Cooper scared the juice out of a number of NASA officials—Walt Williams among them. He flew so low that Williams, from his second-floor office in the NASA administration building, looked down on the passing jet. Williams dropped a stack of papers and grabbed his throat, presumably to keep his heart from leaping out of it. The Cape was
restricted airspace, and the switchboard immediately lit up with frantic calls. Cooper had hoped to get away with the stunt, but it didn’t take long for NASA to track down who’d recently checked out one of its F-106 jets.
With all the reservations he already had about Cooper, Walt Williams was the wrong guy to scare. When he learned the flat-hatter was Cooper, he screamed that he wanted his “ass on a plate” and immediately called Shepard.
“Is your suit ready?”
“Of course my suit’s ready,” Shepard said.
Williams said he was pulling Cooper off the flight and that Shepard would replace him the next morning. It would be a daylong mission—the longest to date. Shepard, who was somewhat familiar with low flyovers, told Williams it was the right decision. He felt that Cooper “showed unusually bad judgment” flying so low. (Actually, it wasn’t the height Shepard thought was dumb; it was buzzing the administration building.)
A flurry of phone calls followed, with Slayton taking the lead in Cooper’s camp. The other five astronauts backed Cooper, too. But Williams spent the entire day refusing to give in. Finally, at 10 P.M.—less than twelve hours before blastoff—he relented and gave Cooper back his flight. Four hours later, after a preflight breakfast with Cooper, Shepard—in response to the emotional turbulence of the countdown to Cooper’s flight—indulged in some mischief.
Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman Page 35
