Live From Cape Canaveral : Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today

by Jay Barbree

  Gemini 9’s Gene Cernan was picked to be the second American to take a stroll in space. Once he and commander Tom Stafford were in orbit, Cernan stepped outside, attached to a twenty-five-foot tether, looking forward to the frolicking good time Ed White had had. He charged off to do the things he’d been told to do—to spend two hours outside having a ball. But he couldn’t make any headway. He wasn’t trying to move in broad steps; he was just trying to move his body a few feet to the rear of the Gemini, to the equipment storage unit where he would strap on an astronaut’s maneuvering pack and attached himself to a 125-foot tether. But he couldn’t float, he couldn’t pull himself, he couldn’t walk, and he told me after the flight he sure as hell wasn’t having a ball. Without handholds and footpads, it was a fight for every inch he moved.

  A snail could have made better time, but finally he was there. “Whew!” he radioed Stafford with a breath of relief. “It’s a strange world out here!”

  “Take a rest,” Stafford ordered him.

  Gene was grateful for the order, and as he rested, he wondered. Could Ed White’s steering jet have made the difference?

  He caught his breath and tackled getting the astronaut-maneuvering unit on his back. He couldn’t. He had failed at everything he’d tried, and Cernan quickly came to the conclusion he was useless. Nothing really worked, and when it was over, the second American to walk, or whatever, in space had been outside two hours and nine minutes. All of it had been a terrible nightmare.

  Mike Collins on Gemini 10, and Dick Gordon on Gemini 11, wrestled with the same problems as Gene Cernan and Ed White did. Collins, who used a steering jet to move from point to point, reported: “I found that the lack of a handhold is a big impediment. I could hang onto the Agena, but I could not get around to the other side where I wanted to go. That is indeed a problem.” Gordon, like Cernan, sweated and his visor fogged. “I’m pooped,” he said simply after cutting his walk short.

  Deke Slayton wasn’t pleased. “What the hell is the matter with these spacewalk planners?” he demanded. “We’ve racked up rendezvous, docking, changing orbit, stopping and restarting rocket engines—all the things you need to do to get to the moon, but no one can function outside. What the hell is their problem? Can’t they figure this spacewalk thing out?”

  There was one Gemini mission left and Deke Slayton, the director of flight crew operations, demanded a solution.

  Veteran Jim Lovell would command Gemini 12. His spacewalking pilot would be Buzz Aldrin, an MIT graduate, and Aldrin had been listening. He was not only smart; Buzz was a tinkerer.

  For his mission Aldrin fashioned special devices like a wrist tether, the same type of tether that window washers use to keep from falling, and he made portable handrails and handholds he could mount onto the Gemini or the Agena rocket. These would keep his body under control, but he needed shoes. He crafted himself a pair of “golden slippers,” foot restraints resembling wooden Dutch shoes he could bolt to a workstation in the Gemini 12’s equipment bay, and he was bringing along tools—a whole bunch of them that he could grip with his thick space gloves. But more important, they were tools that would function in weightlessness, in the extreme temperatures of space.

  On November 11, 1966, the last Gemini thundered from its pad and hunted down its Agena target. Docking went perfectly, and then Buzz Aldrin went outside and banished the woes of spacewalking. He proved a master. He took his time, stopping here and there to do some work as he moved down the nose of the Gemini and then to the Agena, making his way without effort along a six-foot rail he had locked into place.

  Aldrin hooked different equipment to the ship, removed other equipment, and reattached it. He used a unique “space wrench” to loosen and tighten bolts. He snipped wires, reconnected cables, and set in place a series of tubes.

  Mission Control was stunned. John Young said, “You’d think he graduated from Georgia Tech instead of MIT,” and CapCom could only ask, “How’s them slippers, Buzz?”

  “They’re great. Great!” Buzz sang: “I was walking through space one day…”

  It was a great engineering achievement right out of Buzz Aldrin’s book, “Tinkering for Astronauts,” to end the Gemini program.

  Deke smiled, and when the Gemini 12 crew returned to their quarters on the Cape, they were slack-jaw surprised.

  James Lovell and Buzz Aldrin, are met in the astronauts’ Cape Canaveral quarters with the sign “WELCOME BACK RECORD BREAKING COSMONAUTS.” Their den mother, Lola Morrow, gave them the traditional Russian cosmonauts’ welcome of vodka, roses, and cosmonaut caps. From left to right: the astronauts’ nurse Dee O’Hara, Morrow, Aldrin, and Lovell. (Morrow Collection).

  My good buddy Martin Caidin had the undisputed best sources within the Russian space program. His ancestors were Russian, and from the time Yuri Gagarin made the planet’s first flight into space, Martin was in and out of Russia; as previously mentioned, he coauthored cosmonaut Gherman Titov’s book, I Am Eagle. Marty never told me how and why he was over there so often, and I never asked. But when he returned a few days before Gemini 12’s flight, he brought back much memorabilia from the cosmonauts.

  Our friend Lola Morrow was the astronauts’ den mother. Because James Lovell and Buzz Aldrin had such a record-breaking success to end Gemini, Lola had an idea. She plastered a huge sign on the wall: “WELCOME HOME RECORD BREAKING COSMONAUTS.”

  When Lovell and Aldrin walked through the door, they were quickly adorned in cosmonauts’ fur caps and given the traditional red roses and vodka. The Gemini 12 astronauts loved it. Washington wasn’t pleased.

  NINE

  “I’ve got a fire in the cockpit!”

  Gus Grissom stepped out of his door, stopping long enough to study the lemon tree in his backyard. “Ah, there’s a nice one,” he smiled, reaching for the fat citrus hanging about eye level. He wiped the large lemon across his shirt. “I have a new home for you, baby,” he laughed as he turned, walked around the house to his ’Vette. He slid into the seat and backed the sports car out of the driveway. His hand fit comfortably around the shift grip, as he moved smoothly through the gears. His ’Vette purred down the asphalt. His speed was about ten miles over the limit, just where he liked it. Just enough for an early-morning piss-off of the traffic cops trying to down their fourth doughnut.

  Gus reminded himself this was most likely the only fun he would have all day—behind the wheel of his ’Vette, with his thoughts taking him back to the good times he and Alan and Gordo had had in the drags at the Cape.

  He smiled. They were the good times for sure, but none were better than that one particular late night. That time he’d headed back to the motel in the wee hours when he was backing up Shepard before the first flight.

  He had his ’Vette on a deserted U.S. 1, where his speed of 100-plus was sweet. He was dodging an armadillo when he picked up a Florida highway patrol. There was only one thing to do: put the pedal to the metal. He made a high-speed turn onto the 520 Causeway and raced for Cocoa Beach. A sheriff’s deputy felt he should join the highway patrol in the chase. The two were doing their best to wake up the entire spacecoast with their screaming sirens when Gus sped through his turn onto A1A. The hot pursuit was joined by a third man—a Cocoa Beach cop. Grissom stomped his accelerator to the floor and his Jim Rathmann–prepared ’Vette left the long arm of the law hopelessly behind.

  Gus made a wide seventy-mile-per-hour turn into the Holiday Inn, where he found his luck holding. The parking slot in front of Alan Shepard’s room was open, and Gus slid his ’Vette between the lines. He ran quickly into his own room two doors away, shedding his clothes in the dark as flashing lights and howling sirens pulled up outside. He slipped into his pajamas and peeked around the curtains to see the sheriff’s deputy and the highway patrolman arguing. They were putting their hands on the hood of Gus’s ’Vette, feeling the heat coming through the fiberglass. “This is the room,” they announced, and began pounding on a sleeping Alan Shepard’s door.

  When She
pard opened it, all three grabbed him and threw him to the concrete, with handcuffs locking in place around his wrists. A sleepy Alan Shepard found himself trying to explain to “never-listen traffic cops” when the pajama-clad Grissom opened his door and yelled, “Hey guys, can’t you keep it down out there? Some of us have to go to work in a couple of hours!”

  Gus laughed, remembering that Alan’s forgiveness was slow coming with the promise he’d get even. He was still expecting payback from the chief astronaut.

  Gus loved his buddy, but Alan’s appetite for fun had evaporated since Deke put him in the chief’s job. He was no longer the easygoing test pilot since his grounding from his inner-ear problem. Flying a desk here in Houston, he seemed to be “hot wired on pissed off,” with the incredible ability to switch moods at will. Alan could be hell on wheels in the morning and his old charming self in the afternoon.

  Gus and the others were baffled as how to deal with him until Alan’s secretary, Gaye Alford, hit on a unique idea.

  Each morning she would determine Alan’s mood and select one of two pictures she had mounted back to back in a single frame. She had hung the picture on the wall outside Alan’s office door. An astronaut being called before the chief would either see a photo of a scowling Alan Shepard or Gaye would flip it over to the one of him with a beaming smile.

  Gus laughed. Those who walked past the scowl did so at their own risk.

  It was good to laugh and to remember, even if it was for only a few minutes on the road. Gus was headed to the Apollo flight-simulator building. As he had for Gemini, Deke had given him the commander’s seat for the first Apollo, and he wasn’t at all pleased with the mission’s progress. Nothing seem to be working, and his wrath this day was focused on the flight simulator and on the operator charged with making sure the machine would fly as if it were Apollo 1 itself. The man on the hot seat was Riley McCafferty. He braced himself as Gus walked through the door.

  “Let’s see if this thing will fly, Riley,” Gus said as he climbed inside with his crew, astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee.

  Only a few minutes of the simulation had passed when the Apollo 1 commander began fuming. The simulator differed in so many significant ways from the actual spacecraft that Gus felt the machine was a waste of time.

  “Damn it, Riley,” Grissom shouted, “this simulator is worthless! Why isn’t it up to speed?”

  The defensive simulator operator explained that engineers had made hundreds of changes to the actual spacecraft and it took time…

  “Bullshit,” Grissom interrupted. “It’s a piece of crap, Riley. Get it right and we’ll be back.”

  Before leaving, Gus Grissom reached in his briefcase and brought out the fat lemon from his yard. He hung it tightly on the simulator’s hatch. “Leave it there,” he ordered, walking away from the sounds of polite laughter.

  Despite Gus and his crewmates’ problems, Apollo was coming. So were the big network stars. Huntley, Brinkley, and Cronkite wanted to be part of man’s first landing on the moon, and so did their New York handlers. The lunar landings were being sold to such big advertisers as Gulf Oil, and these corporate giants wanted to see Chet Huntley and David Brinkley sitting on camera in front of their logo.

  Many have asked me if it didn’t piss me off to spoon-feed information to the New York stars. My answer was simple. Hell, no! That was my job. A person from my background had a slim-to-none chance of getting on national television, and I was damn happy to be the exception to the rule.

  I was grateful, and more important, I knew my limitations. How could I not be pleased living and working in paradise? I had long ago recognized a solid fact: I did not have the background to be a Chet Huntley or a Walter Cronkite, and I simply did not want to be. NBC was very fair. I not only had been blessed with a wonderful wife and children, I had a job that was one of the most exciting in the country, and I had cultivated solid sources. They were filling me in on all the bits and pieces of Apollo, including the growing tension between Gus Grissom and the Apollo managers. And I was aware of another fact: No outside reporter could compete with me on my turf.

  The Apollo astronauts were in their jets commuting almost daily between their homes in Houston and the Cape, and that evening Gus was at Wolfie’s Nightclub in Cocoa Beach. The club featured a popular folk singer named Trish, and Gus loved to hear her sing. When I walked in he invited me to pull up a chair. “We need to talk,” he said quietly.

  I nodded and sat down. I could see he was troubled.

  Over Trish’s mellow vocals he slowly began. “Jay, we need your help.”

  “You got it, Gus.”

  “Apollo is a piece of crap,” he said flatly. “It may never fly. We have problems and they’re not getting solved. It’s nothing like Mercury and Gemini and working with the Mac folks in St. Louis.” He shifted in his chair. “Hell, these California guys in Downey haven’t a clue. They’ve got their big fat contract and no know-how.” He paused again, leaning closer. “You guys in the press, well, shit Jay, you guys have to help us. Apollo is not ready.”

  I nodded, knowing I was listening to the most engineering-savvy astronaut in NASA. “I’ll do what I can, Gus,” I smiled promisingly. “What do you think is behind it?”

  “The White House,” he said soberly. “The White House is pushing.”

  “Pushing?”

  “Damn right,” Gus nodded. “It’s all about the reelection. LBJ would like to see us on the moon before the polls open in ’68.”

  “He needs the help because of Vietnam?”

  “You got it,” Gus said, pulling his chair even closer. “Johnson gave Apollo to his buddies instead of the guys with the experience and now he’s damn well wanting miracles that ain’t there. They’re rushing production and we need time, Jay, we need time.”

  “I’ll get on it, Gus,” I promised. “I’ll get on it.”

  He nodded a thank-you and moved his chair back, still troubled. Trish finished her set and joined us, and we ended the conversation with a handshake.

  Gus enjoyed Trish’s company and her singing, but despite what some thought, there was nothing going on between the two except friendship. Trish and I were good friends, as we still are today, and I knew she was involved with an astronaut, but he wasn’t Gus Grissom. There were lots of stories in those days about the astronauts and women, but for the most part they were just that: stories.

  In one case, a sleazy private investigator had offered NBC an audiotape for a price. It supposedly was a recording of an astronaut in bed with a woman other than his wife. I asked him to leave the tape with me, telling him I needed to play it for my boss in New York. No sooner than he’d left the NBC bureau, I erased it, and called him with a “We’ll pass.”

  Later, I learned he didn’t have a copy and my bosses, Russ Tornabene and Jim Holten, joined me for a good laugh.

  In the coming days, I questioned Apollo managers often and regularly. I wanted to know why they weren’t addressing problems that had been brought to my attention. I wanted to know why they were in such an all-fired hurry to launch in late 1967 or early 1968. John Kennedy had set the launch for before the decade was out. Why didn’t they take their time? Was beating the Russians more important than astronauts’ lives? But the news media then weren’t as aggressive as they are today. This was six years before Watergate, and no matter how many times I raised Gus’s complaints with colleagues, most reporters gave his concerns short shrift.

  One exception was my friend Howard Benedict of the Associated Press. I briefed Howard and we both stayed on top of Gus’s worries, nipping at the heels of Apollo’s movers and shakers.

  Howard had come to the Cape a year after I did—only a few years out of Tokyo, where he’d worked with my boss Russ Tornabene on the army’s newspaper, the Stars and Stripes. This sort of made us family, and he and I became tight. We spent three decades leading the pack and watching each other’s backs. Damn, I miss him! Howard was the kind of close friend you hated to see leave this world
ahead of you.

  I kept trying to get NBC to do more stories on the problems with the Apollo. The Today Show passed on a story, and Huntley-Brinkley turned it over to one of their favorites. He kissed off Gus’s concerns while I did what I could on the NBC Radio Network. The press and public ignored the whole damn thing, and the first Apollo labeled “flight worthy” was stacked atop its Saturn 1B rocket. The launch team prepared for the one launch-pad test considered essential. Called a “plugs out” test, it was a complete shakedown of the spacecraft’s ability to fly safely—a countdown simulation with 100 percent oxygen and fully suited astronauts sealed inside. The space agency posted Friday, January 27, for this “full dress rehearsal.”

  Neither Howard Benedict nor myself felt easy. NASA refused us permission to cover the test, and just before Gus slipped feet first into Apollo 1, his backup, Wally Schirra, stopped him. Wally hated that damn hatch. He had been arguing all along that it should have been built with a quick-opening explosive mechanism that operated instantly, like those in Mercury. To Wally, Apollo 1’s hatch was fashioned from overtime stupidity. It was double-hulled. It had to be opened manually, and to escape in an emergency it was necessary to open both hulls and then release a third hatch protecting Apollo during liftoff. Engineers had designed it that way to avoid an accidental loss of the hatch en route to the moon or during the punishing reentry, when Apollo would come blazing back to Earth at more than 24,000 miles per hour.