This New Ocean, page 50
The father of the space suit, the Calvin Klein of astronautics, was undoubtedly Russell Colley, a B. F. Goodrich engineer and frustrated women’s fashion designer who played a key role in creating the Mercury astronauts’ and their successors’ ensembles.37
Colley invented a rubber pressure suit and an aluminum helmet for Wiley Post, the one-eyed daredevil who flew his Lockheed Vega, Winnie Mae, to a record 55,000 feet in 1934. Colley stitched the suit together on his wife’s sewing machine while Post passed the time teaching their ten-year-old daughter, Barbara, to shoot craps. The metallic cloth and tin can–shaped helmet, complete with an off-center viewing window to accommodate Post’s good eye, made him look like he belonged on the set of a Saturday morning sci-fi movie serial. In fact the celebrated aviator reported that a bystander, seeing him in the eerie getup as he walked away from an emergency landing, took him for a Martian and nearly fainted from fright.
Colley’s pressure suit designs for Navy pilots in World War II evolved into the suit that Shepard wore on that fateful May morning. The outfit, a modified Navy Mark IV pressure suit, was a marvel of understated complexity. Temperature was precisely regulated, for example, while body odor was drawn off and sent through activated charcoal. Oxygen entered through the torso and left through the helmet. It was the combination of artistic imagination and technical expertise, to take only one example, that gave Colley the idea of adapting the movement of a tomato worm to solve a flexibility problem in a space suit.
Yet even Russell Colley and his colleagues had one notorious lapse. Like the architects of the Yale Bowl who were so taken with the gladiatorial splendor of their design that it did not occur to them to include restrooms until seventy thousand people showed up for the first game, the space suit designers forgot to provide Shepard and the other astronauts with a waste relief system.
Shepard Wets His Diaper
And so it was that, inevitably, nature began to call to Alan Shepard as the glitches and cautious “holds” stretched the time until liftoff. “I soon discovered that the bladder was getting relatively full,” Shepard later recalled. So he asked von Braun to be let out of the capsule to go to the men’s room. The answer was an emphatic no. “So, I told the folks that I was going to relieve myself. And they said, ‘no, you can’t do that; you’ll short-circuit everything.’ ” Shepard suggested that the power be turned off, and after a few minutes’ deliberation, it was done. He then turned Colley’s insulated space suit into the world’s most expensive diaper. But as Shepard began to dry out, his impatience and anger flared again, so he told Mission Control that he was willing to risk a shock and that the power therefore ought to be turned back on. Ham, he did not need reminding, had beaten him to space while managing to endure his own shocks. But there was hesitation in the blockhouse. “I’m getting tired of this,” Shepard finally snapped. “Why don’t you light the damned candle, ’cause I’m ready to go.” Von Braun ordered the candle lit.
Shepard Goes Ballistic
As the black-and-white cylinder gained velocity, with the launch complex and the adjacent ribbon of golden sand slowly falling away to the rocket’s rumble, Alan Shepard performed the first of the space liturgies that would soon become more familiar to his countrymen than those they heard in church:
“Ahhh … Roger.39 Lift-off and the clock is started.… Yes, sir, reading you loud and clear. This is Freedom 7. The fuel is go. Cabin at fourteen psi. Oxygen is go …. Freedom 7 is still go.”
And “go” it did. The first forty-five seconds went so smoothly that it surprised Shepard. Then everything began to shake as the Redstone hit the transonic speed zone where air turbulence builds up. Freedom 7, still plugged into its flaming lifter, hit the point of maximum aerodynamic pressure—the equivalent of the sound barrier—at about eighty-eight seconds, causing Shepard to bounce so hard he could not read the dials. Then the noise and buffeting abruptly stopped. As the Redstone accelerated to more than 5,100 miles an hour, the man riding it was pressed into his seat by a force more than six times his body weight, making him feel as if he had turned to stone. The engine shut off 141 seconds after liftoff, right on schedule. Thirty-eight seconds later, with the Redstone separated and starting its own long plunge into the Atlantic, Freedom 7’s retro-rockets fired, turning it around so that it was flying heat shield–first.
As the spacecraft approached its maximum altitude of 116.5 miles, Shepard began the most important of the tasks he had been assigned: seeing whether he could control Freedom 7’s attitude manually. He did, causing slight changes in all three of the spacecraft’s axes. It was a perfect time to test the procedure, as it turned out, because the thrusters had misaligned the spacecraft’s pitch—its up-and-down position—in the automatic mode. Peering through a periscope, he could see the west coast of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Okee-chobee in central Florida, and the Bahamas. The periscope automatically retracted when Freedom 7 began its almost-12-g plunge back into the atmosphere. At 10,000 feet, the antenna canister blew off, pulling out the main parachute, which popped open with a reassuring jolt. Shepard would later report that Freedom 7 hit the water with about the same force as a plane landing on the deck of a carrier. It immediately listed about sixty degrees, then quickly righted itself like the large black cork it had now become. He climbed through the hatch, hopped into the water, and slipped into the “horse collar” hoisting sling that had in the meantime been lowered by a Marine Corps helicopter hovering overhead. Shepard was winched on board and Freedom 7, scorched but bone-dry inside, was also pulled out of the water. The man and his can were quickly delivered to the deck of the carrier Lake Champlain, which waited nearby.
Kennedy, who had watched the flight on television, called Shepard to congratulate him. While still on the ship, the first American to sail through space was given a careful physical examination. He reported that he felt fine and had even found his five minutes of weightlessness pleasant. “It was painless,” he told the two physicians and the psychologist who examined him. “Just a pleasant ride.” He was in fact in excellent condition, both physically and mentally. This was good news because it was far from certain in the spring of 1961 that humans could survive weightlessness and high g loads without being physically or mentally impaired. There was a theory, for instance, that high gravitational forces might pop eyeballs out of their sockets.
The flight of Freedom 7 was far more important, politically and technologically, than its quarter-hour suborbital foray indicated. Not only had a man successfully controlled his ship under the rigors of weightlessness and high g force and emerged with no adverse physical or mental problems, but both the spacecraft and its launcher had performed as designed. An American and his spacecraft had now proven that they could function together in space.
And unlike Gagarin and his Vostok, they had done so in full view of the world from liftoff to splashdown. That in itself had taken a degree of courage that clearly surpassed what the Soviets had brought to their effort. Reporters from the Istanbul newspaper Millyet who saw both the Gagarin and Shepard films, for example, told the Soviet consul general that “in the Shepard film we followed all phases of his flight, but in yours we followed only Khrushchev.42 Why don’t you show us your space flight, too?” That kind of reaction, and accolades that came into NASA from around the world, reportedly infuriated Khrushchev, who insisted that Shepard’s flight had been far inferior to Gagarin’s.
Freedom 7’s journey played very well at home, too, turning Alan Shepard from only a celebrity to a genuine hero. Crowds lined Pennsylvania Avenue on May 8 when the young Navy test pilot–astronaut, his six colleagues, and their wives arrived for a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden in which Kennedy pinned the NASA Distinguished Service Medal on Shepard. They also were greeted on Capitol Hill and were NASA’s guests at a special dinner that night. The adulation was wasted neither on the man who occupied the Oval Office nor on those who watched from the Hill. Freedom 7 itself was sent to be displayed at the Paris Air Show. Typewriters at Canaveral and in Washington gushed wonder, pride, and excitement at Shepard’s deed. The reporters even took to saying “A-OK,”44 an old telegraph expression that had been adopted by NASA and used by John A. “Shorty” Powers, the voice of NASA, to tell them that the flight was progressing satisfactorily. Soon the whole country was using it as insider lingo that everything was all right; for what hopelessly unimaginative engineering jargon called “nominal.” Shepard himself did not use that term on his flight. But he knew it was true.
A “Fluid Front” Is Extended
If Lyndon Johnson harbored any doubts about going to the Moon, the flight of Freedom 7 ended them. With the president’s mandate to study the matter in hand (not to mention Kennedy’s promise to build a space center in Texas), Johnson brought McNamara, Webb, and other powerful insiders together on the weekend after Shepard’s mission to consummate an unholy alliance between the Department of Defense and the upstart agency that had moved into what the Pentagon saw as its rightful domain. The vice president told them to compose a persuasive rationale for going to the Moon and then in effect stood over them as they wrote it. Barely two months earlier, Kennedy had rejected a $182,521,000 request for additional funds by NASA, some of which would have gone into the manned program. The ex-skipper of PT-109 turned sail-boater had executed a dramatic change in course.
McNamara’s and Webb’s tract, which both of them signed, was classified top secret, and for good reason. It opened with an obligatory reference to the importance of weather forecasting, communication, and other benefits that could be derived from going to space. But then, in starkly straightforward terms, it went on to assert that the balance of world power rested on the Moon:
It is man, not merely machines, in space that captures the imagination of the world. All large-scale projects require the mobilization of resources on a national scale. They require the development and successful application of the most advanced technologies. Dramatic achievements in space therefore symbolize the technological power and organizing capacity of a nation. It is for reasons such as these that major achievements in space contribute to national prestige.…
Major successes, such as orbiting a man as the Soviets have just done, lend national prestige even though the scientific, commercial or military value of the undertaking may by ordinary standards be marginal or even economically unjustified.
Then McNamara and Webb spelled out the real point of sending men to the Moon:
Our attainments are a major element in the international competition between the Soviet system and our own. The non-military, non-commercial, non-scientific but “civilian” projects such as lunar and planetary exploration are, in this sense, part of the battle along the fluid front of the cold war.
So there it was. Where international politics and the balance of power were concerned, the military and civilian space programs were not only interchangeable, they were fundamentally inseparable. As sailors with cannons had transported missionaries to bring God to heathens, and as soldiers and bureaucrats had followed the churchmen to guarantee order and bestow civilization on their converts, so did the military and civilian rocket men come together as one entity to protect their country and extend its imperial ambitions. There was really only one space program, its core was indivisible, and it was a political weapon with which to bludgeon the opposition. The document amounted to a license to wage virtually unrestricted technological and political warfare against the Russians at any cost, in the process raising the stakes of the cold war far beyond anything Eisenhower thought was sensible or Khrushchev could match. Appropriately, the memorandum was delivered to Kennedy by Johnson on the afternoon of May 8, right after he awarded the medal to Shepard.
Two days later, the president ratified the recommendations with his senior advisers, including Sorensen, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, McNamara, Webb, Dryden, Wiesner, Welsh, and two officials from the budget office, Bell and Elmer Staats. Bundy would recall that Kennedy had at that point pretty much decided to go for the Moon and was not interested in hearing arguments to the contrary.* Bundy, in fact, did argue to the contrary, saying that it was unsound scientifically and, besides, that it would be difficult, complex, and in a sense, a “grandstand play.” But that is precisely what appealed to JFK, who was also a football fan. Sending Americans to the Moon would amount to the longest forward pass in history. “You don’t run for President in your forties unless you have a certain moxie,” Kennedy told Mac Bundy.
Destination Moon
Kennedy addressed a joint session of Congress about “urgent national needs” on May 25. He couched his speech as a second State of the Union address, made necessary because of the “extraordinary times” that had been caused by the Communist challenge in the developing world. The preamble was followed by a littany of measures he said had to be taken to counter the threat of global subversion and strengthen the United States itself. Foreign economic and military aid therefore had to be increased, Kennedy said, while the Army and the Marine Corps, the U.S. Information Agency, and even the Small Business Administration had to be strengthened. There would even be a tripling of the amount of money spent for the construction of fallout shelters as a way to discourage a Soviet nuclear attack. Then Kennedy, who had written key parts of the speech himself, wound up for the pitch:
Finally, if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.…
Now it is time to take longer strides—time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement which, in many ways, may hold the key to our future on earth.
While Kennedy pointedly said that the competition between his country and its rival was “not merely a race,” he made it clear that that was precisely what it was, first by noting that the Soviet Union’s head start in large rockets would allow it to exploit its lead, and then by adding that “while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last.”
Furthermore, the president continued, “We take an additional risk by making it in full view of the world. But as shown by the feat of astronaut Shepard, this very risk enhances our stature when we are successful.” It was a brilliant riposte. In one adroit move, he simultaneously scorned Soviet secrecy and set the basis for turning any American space disaster into an act of national heroism and a validation of freedom of speech and therefore of democracy itself. Then, mindful that the United States had exactly fifteen minutes and twenty-two seconds of manned space time, Kennedy got to the point:
I therefore ask the Congress, above and beyond the increases I have earlier requested for space activity, to provide the funds which are needed to meet the following national goals:
First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space. And none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.
We propose to accelerate the development of the appropriate lunar spacecraft.
We propose to develop alternate liquid and solid fuel boosters much larger than any now being developed, until certain which is superior.
We propose additional funds for other engine development and for unmanned explorations—explorations which are particularly important for one purpose which this nation will never overlook: the survival of the man who first makes this daring flight. But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon. We make this judgment affirmatively: it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.
As he neared the end of the forty-seven-minute speech, Kennedy challenged his audience to rise to the goal he had set for them, making it clear that the decision would be theirs. “Let it be clear that this is a judgment which the members of Congress must finally make,” he said. “Let it be clear that I am asking the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment to a new course of action—a course which will last for many years and carry very heavy costs—five hundred and thirty-one million dollars in fiscal ’62 and an estimated seven billion to nine billion additional over the next five years. If we are to go only halfway, or reduce our sights in the face of difficulty,” he added, baiting the legislators and their millions of constituents, “in my judgment, it would be better not to go at all.” He implored his audience in an almost plaintive tone, the whole time talking to the Republican side.
Although Kennedy drew applause eighteen times, he was so worried about what he took to be a tepid response by the legislators that for the first and only time he departed from his text in a congressional address to lay special emphasis on points he felt were particularly important, while dropping those he thought distracting. “Unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful,” he said, no longer reading, it made no sense to try to send a man to the Moon.
Driving back to the White House, he complained gloomily to Sorensen that the reaction to his speech had been less than enthusiastic and that Congress knew of better ways to spend $20 billion.* Kennedy himself had no doubt about the feasibility of the Apollo program, Sorensen would say later. But he would worry for the remaining thirty months of his life about the resolve of Congress and the people to see it through.
What Kennedy had no way of knowing during his address and in the hours immediately following it, though, was that the majority of the lawmakers were neither apathetic nor hostile. To the contrary, most of them were so weary of what they saw as years of presidential torpor that they had a very positive, visceral reaction to his call for action. In the words of some of those who chronicled the episode, they were in “dumb accord.”51
