Failure Is Not an Option Read online

  Shepard shimmied out of his suit and downed a shot of brandy. An alert reporter standing by the hangar door had seen him and broke the story: “FIRST U.S. ATTEMPT TO PUT MAN IN SPACE POSTPONED 48 HOURS. SHEPARD GIVEN FIRST CALL FOR HISTORIC VENTURE.” The secret was out. Hard-charging Al Shepard was at the head of the line.

  We drowned our disappointment in the usual way—with a mission scrub party. No matter what hour the test was scrubbed, we would return to the motel wide awake, after the lounges had closed, or before they opened. We had stashed beer and snacks at the Holiday Inn, which often donated food left over from the previous day’s menu. We would eat and drink, and talk about what had gone wrong. It was a little like throwing a rueful party after a nonbirth; at least we hadn’t experienced another disaster, and the baby was still there in the womb, ready to go. All we could do was pace the floor and wait.

  In the heat of the following day, some of us headed to the ocean or the pool, or played full-contact volleyball, to sweat off the beer we had tossed down. The chalked volleyball sidelines didn’t last long and there was the usual quibbling on out-of-bounds calls. The solution was to dig a trench and mark the sidelines with gravel embedded in concrete. Out-of-bounds calls were a lot easier when you came up with bloody forearms after a diving save. Bruises, sprains, jammed fingers, and nasty cuts were the order of the day.

  Kraft, a standout baseball catcher and center fielder in college, was a fierce competitor. But on the volleyball court he was no longer the boss, just one of the team members. Carl Huss, the MCC RETRO, was a burly five-foot-eleven guy with black bushy eyebrows and hair. When playing volleyball he had a habit of rising on his toes and shifting from left to right with a rolling motion. His menacing visage, combined with this motion and his perpetual growl, earned him the nickname “Dancing Bear.”

  During one match, Huss spiked a shot straight into Kraft’s face; the ball drove the prongs of his sunglasses deep into the flesh of his nose. Without flinching, Kraft pulled out the prongs, wiped the blood off his face, looked at Huss, and growled, “Nice shot. Try me again!”

  After multiple injuries to his team members, Kraft set the rule: no volleyball after L – 3—launch minus three days. Any controller violating the rule and unable to perform his console duties would be “disciplined.” No one was willing to find out exactly what kind or degree of discipline Kraft meant.

  The beverage of choice after these matches was Swan Lager, an Australian beer, and our supplier was Jack Dowling, the Australian government’s envoy to NASA. Jack was the picture of a typical Aussie. He was a bit older than most of us, stocky, with wavy black hair, flecks of gray in his mustache, and eyebrows like caterpillars. All he needed to complete the image was the Crocodile Dundee bush hat. He had the accent, the one you never missed when you called “Goddard voice” and the switchboard operator patched the voice communications to the Australian tracking stations. You had to be careful about confusing their language with the one we were developing for space.

  When we had needed a tracking station in the Southern Hemisphere, the people Down Under were quick to respond. They have always been our stout allies, and their very isolation inspired them to sign up for any new adventure. They sent their volunteers to train with us, and Dowling was one of those who learned to love the States so much he never left.

  The personal relationships that developed in the early years at Cape Canaveral provided the foundation of a brotherhood that extended through Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. This bonding got us through the difficult times. We worked together, played together, and lived together.

  If I close my eyes I can recall images of that strip of coastal Florida—a line of motels, restaurants, and bars (some pretty funky) lining the highway that ran south from Daytona Beach through Titusville and Cocoa, where a causeway across the Indian and Banana rivers took you to the small town of Cocoa Beach. It was a two-lane blacktop that shimmered in the hot sun and paralleled the swamp that stood between the Cape and the mainland. Although Orlando was only a short drive inland, it might as well have been on Mars. Our world was confined to a small, tight circle centered on those strange new structures—gantries and launch pads and telemetry antennas—sprouting up on an overgrown sandbar. NASA’s arrival in this once calm and sleepy area would change it forever—and make it perhaps a greater tourist attraction than the locals ever dreamed it could be (and perhaps more than many wanted it to be).

  In this setting our bonding produced a spirit that responded to the challenge of John Kennedy’s inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

  This was the spirit that a few days later would bring space and the astronauts to the front pages of newspapers and into the homes and hearts of America.

  May 5, 1961, Mercury-Redstone 3

  When the launch was scrubbed on May 2, it was reset for May 4—and then scrubbed again because of weather. But then the weatherman gave us a solid Go for the next day. The weather was windy but clearing when Huss and I left the motel shortly after midnight. As we left, I drove around the east end of the motel to see if the searchlights at the launch pad were on. If we saw the lights, we would know that the launch complex was active and the countdown progressing. The lights drew me like a magnet; when I saw them I picked up speed, and to hell with the local cops. Our sleepiness quickly vanished during the twenty-minute drive.

  Highway A1A took you through the heart of Cocoa Beach. With only a single stoplight, it was a small town in the process of trying to grow and live with its newfound fame. The brilliant, garish neon of the motels and restaurants and go-go bars seemed more like Las Vegas, but they were soon behind us. The traffic was heavy, as it usually was, cars pulling out of motels and dark streets to join you as you passed by. You drove into an inky darkness after passing Fat Boy’s restaurant, which marked the city limits of Cocoa Beach. This traffic was different from the usual relaxed pace of tourists and locals. From this point the cars on the road were moving swiftly, their drivers knowing exactly where they were headed—a personal rendezvous with history.

  The interior of the space capsule that Alan Shepard would soon climb into was so small that a human being could barely fit. The back of his couch was within inches of the heat shield. The instrument panel was less than two feet from his face and the parachutes only five feet forward. John Glenn had hung a sign on the panel: “No Handball Playing in This Area.”

  The Redstone rocket would lift Shepard’s two-ton capsule on a fifteen-minute foray into space. He would reach an altitude of 100 miles, experience five minutes of weightlessness followed by a crushing 11-G entry, and land 260 miles downrange from the launch pad.

  Closing in on the Cape, I could see that the lights looked much like the lights of the small cities amid swamplands when I trained and flew in Georgia. After a brief stop for a badge check, we continued toward Mercury Control, passing the security roadblocks that are always erected as launch time nears.

  Huss was not a man given to making small talk. Like a bear coming out of hibernation, he would wake up slowly, so we didn’t talk to each other. I enjoyed the silence, which allowed me to think about what lay ahead as I made the long swooping turn to the north and the searchlights. The stars were occasionally visible through the muggy haze of the Cape. The outline of the launch tower was not yet visible through the palmetto as we approached Mercury Control. After parking the car, I started to psych myself up, just as I did when I was flying. In my mind, I could hear the marches of John Philip Sousa and the cadence quickened my step.

  The support team finished its systems checks and I sat down to check out the communications at my console. There had been no countdown delays and the capsule test conductor (the team leader for the capsule check-out) came on and reported, “The count is on schedule.” I then moved to Kraft’s console to check communications from his voice panel to the pad team. On this day, I was covering his tail, watching for problems while Chris went about the business of being the fli
ght director. A half hour later, he arrived, dressed nattily as usual, regardless of the time of day. He made his standard comment: “How’s it going, young man?” I gave him a thumbs-up. He reached in the drawer for his headset, adjusted it, and then sat down.

  At his console, Kraft projected the image of a general reviewing his forces prior to battle. The only time he showed any uncertainty was when the IBM engineers, Ira Saxe and Al Layton, periodically reported on the results of the network data flow testing. Tec Roberts and Carl Huss were monitoring the flow of data coming in from the tracking stations to Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, which in turn came down, via dedicated telephone lines, to the data display on the four plot boards in front of them. Saxe and Layton were concerned that there was a lot of ambient noise on the data lines and, like the rest of us, were not sure how a burst of static might affect the two computers at Goddard.

  Saxe and Layton retested the lines and announced, “We had 270 failures out of the last 11,250 transmissions.” The perplexed expression on Kraft’s face indicated his annoyance. Softly, he asked Saxe, “Dammit, will you please tell me if that is okay?” That was the one thing they could not do. Getting a less than satisfactory answer, Kraft frowned, pretending to make sense of their report. Nobody knew how much bad data the computers could digest and still come up with acceptable answers. Computers just seemed to work, crash, or go off on tangents for no reason, with Huss and Roberts at their mercy.

  Shepard had awakened at 1:00 A.M. and, after breakfast with John Glenn and Dr. Bill Douglas, began to undergo his physical exam, sensoring, and suiting. The weather was definitely better than the day before and a feeling of bullishness pervaded the control room. More controllers arrived and began making their checks.

  Walt Williams, rumpled as usual, showed up about 2:00 A.M., after a quick, how-goes-it conversation with Shepard and Glenn. Chain-smoking, Walt talked briefly with Shorty Powers, then moved to his desk behind Kraft, his voice hoarse, grunting a question to Kraft. (Another sign of the times was that most people smoked in those days—and smoked a lot. Mercury Control would have been a nightmare for those who object to secondhand smoke because the air was regularly blue with tobacco haze.) Chris gave Walt a high sign, happy about the weather forecast.

  The report that Shepard had entered the transfer van and was en route to the capsule gave me a chill. I passed the report to the controllers on the two tracking ships in the Atlantic about 280 miles down-range, north of Grand Bahama Island. When the van arrived at the pad, we saw a flurry around the base of the Redstone. It was surreal. The brilliant floodlights turned the night to day. The silver-suited Shepard paused, looked up, and then strode to the gantry for his sixty-five-foot elevator ride up to the capsule. I noted in the log that Shepard entered the capsule at 5:20 A.M. Again, I felt a shiver. This was history. I hoped that the other controllers were doing a better job of keeping their minds on their work than I was at that instant.

  The countdown continued sporadically with five holds. During one of them I got Kraft his customary pint of milk to calm his ulcer. Williams spent more time outside checking on the weather, which was becoming increasingly overcast. With the launch gantry removed, the Redstone rocket stood starkly silent and alone on its platform.

  It was now a little before seven o’clock in the morning. Looking up at the countdown clock I thought, If there ever was a time and place to get it all together it was now. It was time to kick in the afterburners and regain our confidence as Americans and as leaders.

  Williams called a weather hold at launch minus fifteen minutes. Shortly thereafter, a problem developed in a Redstone power supply, and the decision was made to roll back the gantry and recycle the countdown to thirty-five minutes and hold. I got up to get a cup of coffee and stretch. Nerves were taut. It wasn’t a subject anyone talked about openly, but we in MCC fully expected to lose one or two astronauts in Mercury. The prayer at that moment was, “Not now, Lord, please, not today.”

  Pilots don’t growl at their crew chiefs, so it came as a surprise when Shepard, in Freedom 7, the tiny Mercury capsule atop the Redstone rocket, growled at his ground crew, “Why don’t you guys fix your problems and light this candle?”

  The countdown had been holding for weather when our computer at Goddard crashed, requiring a complete check run. This was our third attempt to launch MR-3 and the pressure from Washington was mounting.

  Goddard estimated a delay of ten minutes for the computer check. Kraft, sensing the tension that had built up in the control room over the delay, told his keyed-up team to “take five and get a cup of coffee.”

  When I returned from my coffee break I lit another cigarette, and as the test conductors completed the recycle and announced the hold, the air-ground loop to the capsule came alive. To my astonishment, I heard the then popular comedian Bill Dana’s high-pitched parody of a reluctant astronaut:

  “My name . . . José Jimenez . . . Do you know what it really takes to be an astronaut?”

  “No, José. Tell me.”

  “You should have courage and the right blood pressure and four legs.”

  “Why four legs, José?”

  “Because they really wanted to send a dog, but they decided that would be too cruel.”

  As the José Jimenez routine continued, I punched the loops on my intercom to see if the recording was coming from Mercury Control. “Dammit,” I thought, “who the hell is playing a nightclub act on the countdown loops?” I sure hoped it was not coming from Mercury Control. If it was, I knew I would catch hell from both Kraft and Williams. I expelled a sigh of relief when it became clear that the comedy routine was being piped in from the blockhouse. A wonderful discovery: our German colleagues had a sense of humor. But was now the time to display it? It would be a distraction for the launch and flight team—and if the mission had been scrubbed, the bosses would have been on the warpath. As it turned out, however, Gordo Cooper and Bill Douglas, the surgeon, had conspired to patch Dana’s recording of José Jimenez into the capsule. They felt Shepard needed to relax a bit during the hold. This informality added a degree of unreality to the fact that we were only minutes away from launching the first American into space.

  Not everybody was amused; I could see that Kraft was not happy. He did not like surprises that would distract his team. But by now the countdown was forgotten momentarily. The controllers were drinking coffee, joking and enjoying Bill Dana’s comic monologue. Dana had been dubbed the Eighth Astronaut by Shepard and Schirra and was a favorite of everyone working on Mercury. Later, in the bar after the launch, I would decide that this bit of humor was exactly what we needed to relax a bit and get loose and ready for launch. But I am damn sure the Russians wouldn’t have tolerated such shenanigans.

  Shepard had been in the capsule for more than four hours when the count again resumed. It went smoothly and, after a brief hold at two minutes, continued toward liftoff. During the last seconds I saw Kraft’s hand move to the liftoff switch on his console. I just hoped he didn’t throw it early and start the mission clocks. At T-equals-zero, I glanced at Kraft’s TV, saw the rocket ignition, and then heard Shepard say, “Ahhh, Roger, liftoff and the clock is started.”

  I logged the liftoff time (9:34 Eastern Standard Time) as 1434Z (Z for Zulu, or Greenwich mean, time, used to establish a standard time for all the tracking stations scattered throughout different time zones) in the Teletype message, turned in my chair, and took off to the Teletype center. Oops. I had not removed my headset. After I’d run about fifteen feet, the headset cord stretched to the maximum, snagged a chair, and sent it tumbling to the floor. Kraft, distracted, looked in my direction, frowned, then returned to the business of launching the first American into space.

  Sheepishly, I picked up the chair and returned to the console as Shepard made his thirty-second status report. Shorty Powers announced to the world that “everything is A-OK,” a phrase hated by the controllers and crews as “too Hollywood,” but one that soon became a part of the American voca
bulary. It seems quaint now, all these years later, virtually unused, almost forgotten.

  The two previous Redstone missions taught me that a ballistic mission is over in a flash. An energy-charged 142-second rocket launch followed by a five-minute weightless period, retrofire, and then a reentry. The drive from the hotel to Mercury Control was longer than the fifteen-minute flight time. Shepard’s mission was just like my first jet solo, a blur of noise and motion, an event long anticipated that was over far too soon.

  Indeed things were A-OK. After over four hours in the capsule, Shepard was in peak form reporting launch events. At liftoff his heart rate had briefly increased to 120, peaking five minutes later at 140 beats per minute as Shepard called, “Booster cutoff.” Now weightless and traveling one mile per second, Al was in the test pilot’s nirvana. I was damn happy that the mission was going well and that Al’s performance would answer the medical scientists’ concerns about whether man could function in space. I had always felt that the flight surgeons were too plodding, too conservative for the rapidly evolving program.

  After capsule separation from the booster the automatic system turned the capsule into a heat-shield-forward position. Approaching the 116-mile-high apogee (the highest altitude on the trajectory), Shepard took over manual capsule attitude control, maneuvering in the roll, yaw, and pitch axes and reporting that the capsule responded much as the simulators had. Using the periscope he reported seeing the western coast of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.