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

by Neal Thompson

  As his Apollo 14 crewmates, Shepard had chosen Ed Mitchell, known as “the Brain,” a studious, serious Navy commander with a Ph.D., and Stu Roosa, an Air Force major and former smoke jumper from Oklahoma with a sweep of red hair and a sly humor that Shepard liked. Neither had yet reached space, and their peers—and then the press—began calling the three-man crew “the rookies.” Cernan loved to tease Shepard about that.

  Mitchell, the studious one, and Roosa, the beer drinker, were shocked at how Shepard—now the oldest of NASA’s sixty-plus astronauts—trained for Apollo 14 like a kid. He jogged a few miles each day (“although it’s rather distasteful to me,” he once admitted) and lifted weights (“not anything really heavy,” he said) at the astronaut gym.

  Part of the crew’s training scheme took them to a remote part of the Bavarian region of Germany, where they sifted through ancient rocks and silt as part of an exercise to acquaint them with the rocks they’d have to identify and collect on the moon. Shepard’s crew and their three-man backup collected rocks and practiced “moonwalking” across the rocky terrain in their space suits. Each night they went out to throw back foot-tall steins of beer. They once climbed to the top of an old bell tower outside Munich, beer bottles in tow, and late that night had to bang on the door of their dormitory, which the proprietor locked at 10 P.M. Another time, during geology training in an Arizona canyon, at the end of a long day of hiking, Shepard nudged a public affairs guy along for the trip. “Let’s race,” he said, then sprinted the last quarter mile.

  Shepard practiced for many hours on an ugly, ingenious contraption called the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV), which NASA designed to simulate the up-and-down flying that astronauts would do in the lunar module. Nicknamed the “flying bedstead,” the LLTV was a set of rocket thrusters bolted beneath a structure that looked like it belonged on a kid’s playground. Balancing the LLTV atop the downward thrust of its rockets and taking it up to five hundred feet or so was a delicate and dangerous endeavor. Neil Armstrong had almost killed himself a year earlier when a prototype of the LLTV began rocking out of control, forcing Armstrong to bail out in his rocket-propelled ejection seat; Armstrong parachuted to safety as his flying bedstead spun, flipped, and exploded.

  Colleagues were amazed at how many times Shepard took the dangerous LLTV up for a spin. Then, after a lifetime of airplanes and jets, Shepard learned to fly helicopters, too—also to help him prepare for flying his LEM down to the moon’s surface. Mitchell, Roosa, Cernan, and the others all found themselves asking, “This is the Icy Commander?” The ice man, it turns out, was having the time of his life.

  During another trip to southern Arizona, for more geology training, a friend of Cernan’s invited him, Shepard, Mitchell, and Joe Engle (part of Cernan’s backup crew) to cross into Mexico and dine at his restaurant. The four astronauts were supposed to meet Cernan’s friend at a car dealership just across the border, but instead of Cernan’s friend, two chauffeur-driven cars picked up the astronauts. The cars stopped in front of a large, brightly lit complex with a motel, restaurant, and dance hall.

  They were led into a motel room. On the dresser sat four square glass bottles of Ballantine scotch, with a room key sitting next to each one. The four astronauts tried to ask the chauffeurs what was happening, but they left without a word. A man wearing a huge sombrero finally showed up, wearing an impressive six-shooter on his hip. He spoke broken English, and none of the four astronauts spoke Spanish, but with some gesticulating they were finally able to discern that he was the local sheriff. “I thought we were going to dinner,” Shepard told Cernan. “What happens now?”

  Just then, as the sheriff stood by the door smiling, four young women entered the room and sat on the bed, side by side, across the room from the four astronauts. They weren’t the most attractive of Mexico’s women; one had a wide gap between her front teeth, another was hefty. They all started giggling and fluttering their eyelashes. “Okay, Cernan, I think I know what’s supposed to happen,” Shepard finally said.

  For the next forty-five minutes, in a mélange of tortured Spanish and charades, the spacemen tried to explain why they couldn’t stay. They each tried what little Spanish they knew: el presidente . . . no es possible . . . we can’t stay out late . . . we can’t drink . . . have to train for mission in the morning . . . going to moon . . . la luna . . . Finally the women realized they were not going to sleep with an American astronaut that night. The sheriff beckoned to the chauffeurs. During the ride back, the astronauts joked that they didn’t even get dinner, nor did they think to grab the bottles of scotch.

  “I think they just wanted to show us Mexican hospitality,” Cernan recalled.

  Apollo 11 was followed by a near-perfect Apollo 12 mission, during which Pete Conrad and Alan Bean bounced, danced, and sang on the moon like awestruck schoolboys. Suddenly America was making lunar travel look easy, and Apollo 13—the mission that had briefly been Shepard’s—was up next, scheduled to explore the exotic and hilly lowlands of the moon, a rugged and geologically intriguing region called Fra Mauro.

  Apollo 13 began uneventfully, but two days and two hundred thousand miles from earth—on April 13, 1970—one of the ship’s two oxygen tanks was ignited by a damaged wire and exploded, smashing a hole in the side of the service module (attached beneath the command module) and wrecking everything nearby. The blast violently rocked the spacecraft, and Jack Swigert’s message to Mission Control—“Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here”—was followed by a more urgent confirmation from Jim Lovell: “Ah, Houston, we have a problem.”

  Lovell peered out the window and saw fumes spewing from the jagged hole in the side of his ship: the second oxygen tank, damaged by the unexplained blast, was rapidly venting the crew’s precious oxygen into space. The news kept getting worse: The oxygen supplied power to fuel cells that energized the electrical system, which was now dying; without electricity, there would be no lights and no access to the water supply. Nor would the crew be able to ignite the engines that would slow the ship and bring it into orbit around the moon. Apollo 13 seemed headed for oblivion.

  The crew quickly powered down the command module, called Odyssey, to preserve what little electricity remained. Then Houston confirmed what the crew already knew: The three couldn’t survive in Odyssey, which would run out of oxygen in an hour. They’d have to use the lunar module as a “lifeboat.” The LEM, named Aquarius, which Fred Haise had already docked to the nose of Odyssey, carried only enough oxygen to sustain two men for two days. Now it would have to keep three men alive for four days—that is, if the crew could figure a way to whip around the moon and fly back to earth.

  Lovell and Haise crawled through a hatch into the cramped space of the LEM while Swigert stayed in Odyssey, using a flashlight to shut down Odyssey’s systems; Lovell and Haise ran a hose from Haise’s now obsolete moonwalking suit through to the command module, to give Swigert enough oxygen to breathe. The next four days were among the most terrifying and ingenious in NASA’s history. Shepard, at Mission Control, assigned astronauts to climb into simulators to test theories on how to get the ship home.

  Instead of turning Apollo 13 around and using the last bits of Odyssey’s fuel to propel the ship back to earth, Mission Control decided to let Apollo 13 continue coasting to the moon, to use small boosts from the LEM’s fuel supply to adjust its course, and then whip around the moon, using the momentum from that U-turn to swing it back to earth.

  Other engineers, meanwhile, devised a makeshift canister that would filter carbon dioxide from the air inside Aquarius, and the crew used hoses, batteries, tape, plastic, and cardboard to rig a purifying system. Then they settled back to live in Aquarius, shivering at near-freezing temperatures, sharing little more than a pint of water among them per day. Deke Slayton tried to encourage the men: “Just wanted to let you know we’re gonna get you back. Everything’s looking good. Why don’t you quit worrying and get some sleep.” Finally, with a billion people around the world glued to r
adios and televisions, Apollo 13’s haggard crew crawled back into the cold, clammy command module, which Lovell felt looked “forlorn and pitiful,” and separated from Aquarius. “She was a good ship,” Lovell reported with a catch in his voice. Sixty tension-filled minutes later, Apollo 13 was bobbing safely in the Pacific. Incredibly, they had landed within three miles of the recovery ship, USS Iwo Jima, the most accurate landing of the entire space program.

  Weeks later Shepard met with Jim Lovell back in Houston, and Lovell asked Shepard how he felt now about losing Apollo 13. It would become a persistent joke between Shepard and Lovell. Every time the two astronauts bumped into each other, Lovell would joke, “Anytime you want Apollo 13 back, Al, you can have it.”

  Apollo 14 was delayed for four months to allow crews to modify Shepard’s spacecraft and, they hoped, prevent a similar disaster. Those delays only prolonged the anxious agony Louise began to experience during the long countdown to her husband’s launch. If Shepard was a fair-weather Christian Scientist, Louise was a perfect specimen, everything a Christian Scientist was raised to be: self-reliant but not arrogant, confident but not confrontational, friendly but wary, uncomplicated and unopinionated but unyieldingly true to her beliefs. It was not always an easy balancing act.

  At Principia she had been quiet, shy, and sometimes sickly. She avoided public speaking and crowds, and she rarely spoke her mind. Even with her children, she was a halfhearted disciplinarian, preferring not to get tangled in battles of will with her girls. Across their years of marriage, however, friends watched Louise blossom as Alan’s partner. Despite his infidelities and the long absences, he complemented her somehow. He gave her confidence, and she sometimes felt he had enough for the two of them. She learned to handle herself in the most demanding social situations: cocktails with Jack Kennedy and Cary Grant, dinner with kings and queens.

  But as the launch of Apollo 14 neared, Louise was a wreck. She couldn’t sleep at night, and she couldn’t keep her food down. It wasn’t just that she feared his death. That fear had long since been accepted as just another one of the accommodations in a Navy wife’s life. What seemed to be bothering Louise was a culmination of all those years of waiting, of dealing with the brutal mornings of Alan’s illness, of watching him teeter on the edge of quitting NASA, only to rise and go to the office each frustrating day.

  Louise thrived on evenness, and the ups and downs of Alan’s life took a toll on her delicate physiology. The first weeks of 1971 were a repeat of 1961, with reporters calling at all hours, showing up at the door, talking to neighbors, asking her all those questions about death and fear. Contributing to Louise’s unease in the days before Apollo 14 was the resurfacing of the occasional questions about Alan’s rumored infidelities. As newspaper stories about Alan proliferated, a bold young reporter from a Houston newspaper asked Louise how she handled those rumors. She gave the reporter a taut smile and said, “What do you expect from a sailor?”

  Some of the other NASA wives considered Louise “our Jackie O” (who also, for the sake of history, put up with her husband’s wanderings). “People wondered, ‘How did an asshole like that get a queen like her?’ ” Gene Cernan said of Alan and Louise. “But no one had the balls to question him publicly.” Alan complicated the matter by forever refusing to deny anything. “It’s almost like he didn’t feel he had to,” Cernan recalled.

  It’s possible Louise simply didn’t know the truth because she didn’t want to know. She had a “don’t confuse me with the facts” attitude toward such rumors, recalled Louise’s lifelong friend and former Principia classmate Dorel Abbot. “Some things you want to know, some things you don’t need to know,” Abbot said. Whatever combination of factors were nagging at her, the effects became more profound as the days counted down to Alan’s blastoff. He had been away from home many weeks at a time during his preflight training. And in the final two weeks before liftoff, he and his crew were held in quarantine—a new NASA prelaunch precaution.

  Louise had seen very little of him. He still called at 5 P.M. on most nights he wasn’t home for dinner. But now he was headed someplace where he couldn’t call. She was tossing and turning at night, throwing up during the day. The launch date—January 31, 1971—couldn’t come and go soon enough.

  To prevent Shepard and his crewmates from catching a bug or virus in the weeks before their mission, which might seriously sicken them in space, NASA created a strict preflight quarantine procedure that limited the astronauts’ exposure to other humans.

  For three weeks the men were limited to the astronaut crew quarters in Hangar S or a nearby beach house on the Cape. They were occasionally allowed to climb into a T-38 to let loose with some spins and rolls, which NASA figured would help acclimate their bodies to the tumblings and gyrations of their upcoming mission. But whenever they were with other people, they had to wear protective surgical masks over their face.

  During the final week the restrictions grew even tighter, and the crew of Apollo 14 was required to begin sleeping inside an aluminum-sided recreational vehicle that NASA had converted into a quarantine room. The crew would also live in that room for two weeks after their return; NASA was afraid that some alien lunar microbe—a fungus, a spore, or a bacterium— might hitch a ride back to earth on an astronaut.

  Not that Shepard exactly abided by all the restrictions. He felt cooped up inside the small quarantine room and had a hard time sleeping—he was too geared up. His crewmates would settle down at night and watch TV, but Shepard got dressed, left his surgical mask behind, and sneaked out for a few hours of who knew what. One night, with just eighteen hours before the launch, Shepard grabbed his backup commander, Cernan, and took him along for a drive out to the launchpad, where his skyscraper-tall rocket awaited.

  Cernan had kept his promise to train as hard as Shepard, calling him “the old man” and threatening to steal Apollo 14 from him. A week before the launch, though, Cernan had dumped a helicopter into the Indian River and was lucky to escape the flaming wreckage alive. When he returned to the crew quarters that morning, burned and bleeding, he saw Shepard at breakfast and said, “Okay, Al, you win. It’s your flight.”

  In the aftermath of Apollo 13, NASA canceled three of its future lunar missions—Apollo 18, 19, and 20. They even discussed canceling Apollo 15, 16, and 17, which would have put Shepard in line to become the last man to walk on the moon (a title Cernan would later earn on Apollo 17). That night, standing beneath his rocket with Cernan by his side, Shepard was destined to soon become the fifth human to step onto the gritty lunar ground—the oldest, and the only one of the Mercury Seven astronauts to do so.

  A decade had passed since Bob Gilruth had picked Shepard to be the first American spaceman. Public interest in space had waned some in the months after Neil Armstrong touched the moon’s surface, but the near-fatal flight of Apollo 13 reminded the nation once more of the dangers and drama of space exploration. NASA was now hoping that Apollo 14 would prove to the world that Apollo 13 had been a fluke, that America’s space program could execute a perfect lunar mission.

  Launchpad 39-A was alive with engineers twittering around the rocket, pumping it full of fuel. The rocket’s thin walls groaned as the pressurized liquid surged inside. A symphony of hisses and spurts, hums and clacks filled the Florida air. Shepard and Cernan drove through a security checkpoint and walked out to the launchpad. Wordlessly the two men approached the enormous Saturn 5 booster rocket, then stood beneath holes that would soon expel enough pressurized fire to shake the earth.

  Shepard had to realize, at some point, how lucky he was to have come so far. If not for the Ménière’s disease, he might have been sitting in Gus Grissom’s seat four Januaries earlier and been consumed by flames. Or, if not for NASA’s caution, he might have flown the ill-fated Apollo 13. It was about 9 P.M. He and Cernan looked like ants beneath the rocket engines’ gaping maw. The capsule Shepard would soon ride sat four hundred feet above them, atop a rocket nearly five times taller than the old Redston
e that had given Shepard his first space ride. They spoke very little, but Cernan felt he was standing beside a man who had “redefined the meaning of the word commitment.”

  He was even afraid to look at Shepard, for fear of seeing his hero in tears. “It may have been the first and only time I’d seen Alan humble,” he said. Finally Shepard put his arm around Cernan’s shoulder and said, “Okay, let’s go.”

  19

  “What’s wrong with this ship?”

  In the VIP launch viewing area, as menacing clouds tumbled overhead and a light drizzle began soaking the crowds on the beach, Louise stood beside a white Chevy convertible with the women closest to her in life. There was her mother; her two daughters and her niece Alice; her friend and embroidering partner, Loraine Meyer; her best friend, Dorel Abbot; and two other astronauts’ wives, Marge Slayton and Jo Schirra.

  As the Sunday afternoon launch neared, the drizzle became a downpour, and the launch was put on hold for forty minutes. The delay was almost too much for Louise to take, so Dorel led her away from the others to a quieter spot. Huddled beneath Dorel’s umbrella, they stood beside a hurricane fence, and Louise confessed that she was a lot more nervous than she’d been pretending. She looked beautiful, as always, in a navy blue pantsuit, a white blouse, and blue boots. But her stomach was doing acrobatics.

  The day before, she’d visited Alan for the last time. She and Ed Mitchell’s and Stu Roosa’s wives, but no other family members, were briefly allowed into the quarantine room for a quiet dinner. After dinner Louise left the quarantine room and turned for one last goodbye. Standing on opposite sides of a thick window, Louise and Alan pressed their lips to the glass. Then Alan told her he wouldn’t be making his customary 5 P.M. phone call the next evening. “I’m going to be leaving town,” he said.