v1.0.2 / chapter 9 of 24 / 01 may 09 / greg goebel / public domain
* The Soviets started the Space Race by placing Sputnik 1 in orbit, and kept up the pressure by beating the US in the first Moon shots. Now the two superpowers ramped up their efforts to put a man in space.
* Even before the US announced the Mercury program, the USSR was moving full speed ahead on placing a man in space. In November 1958, following over two years of preliminary design work, Sergei Korolyev had been able to persuade Kruschev and other senior Soviet leaders that a program to put a man into orbit around the Earth was a worthwhile use of resources.
Not everybody agreed. The Soviet military felt, with justification, that a spy satellite was far more valuable. Korolyev shrewdly managed to create a program that addressed both goals. In a sense, the approach was obvious. The Soviets had decided that film-return spy satellites were the best option for orbital reconnaissance in the short term. Such spacecraft needed a reentry vehicle that could return to Earth, make a soft landing, and be recovered. The same was true of a manned space vehicle.
Korolyev could design a single spacecraft that could be used for both functions. It would be big and heavy compared to the American Corona satellites, but so what? He had plenty of lift capability, all the more so because Kosberg had been refining and uprating the second stage engine that had been used for the Luna shots, resulting in the "RD-109" LOX-kerosene engine, with about 11% more thrust. Since the Soviets lagged the Americans in miniaturized technology, the USSR would have built a larger spy satellite in any case. Premier Kruschev liked space spectaculars; the Soviet military grudgingly gave in, though no doubt many of the generals felt like Korolyev was pulling a fast one on them.
The spacecraft was implemented by a team led by Oleg G. Ivanovsky of Korolyev's design bureau, with the work formally beginning in early 1959 and ready for implementation by May. In its manned form, it was known as "Vostok", translating as "East" or more to the point "Upward Rising", since the east was the direction of the sunrise. In its spy satellite form, it was known as "Zenit (Zenith)". The two versions were very similar externally. The R-7 derivative booster that launched it would also be referred to as the "Vostok" by association. It was very similar to the Luna booster, except that the second stage was modified to use the more powerful RD-109 engine and to mate to the Vostok / Zenit spacecraft.
The spacecraft itself weighed about 4.75 tonnes (5.25 tons) and was 4.4 meters (14 feet five inches) long. It consisted of a spherical re-entry capsule, called the "sharik (little sphere)", with a diameter of 2.3 meters (7 feet 6 inches) on top of a spacecraft "bus" that looked like a cut diamond, with a shallow conical base. The top of the bus, where it mated to the capsule, was ringed with spherical nitrogen and oxygen tanks, and the bottom of the "diamond" was fitted with a retro-rocket that would be used to kick the spacecraft back to Earth. The spacecraft was littered with antennas on top, on the bottom, and at one side. The contraption was entirely non-aerodynamic, and unlike the American Mercury capsule had to launched inside an aerodynamic shell or "shroud" that would split open after the vehicle left the atmosphere.
The sphere would discard the bus for re-entry and land under a single large parachute. The pilot of the Vostok version wouldn't stay with the capsule to the ground, however, instead ejecting from the capsule and landing by his own parachute. The capsule was so heavy that it would have required very big parachutes or a retro-rocket system to achieve a safe landing. Adding such additional landing systems would have added weight that couldn't be handled by the boosters available at the time, and a man-rated landing wasn't necessary for the Zenit variant in any case. The Vostok spacecraft contained enough expendables to keep the pilot alive for ten days. No Vostok capsule would ever spend more than five days in space, but the additional stores provided some margin for error in case difficulty arose in bringing the spacecraft back down to ground, or recovering it after landing.
The whole exercise had a bit of an improvised feel to it, but that was characteristic of the entire early Space Race in both East and West. Although the Soviet military did not like the diversion of resources from the spy-satellite effort into the manned program, the Vostok-Zenit scheme had its merits, making the manned program in part a test-bed for the spy-satellite program, and the reverse.
Vostok also provided an excellent public cover for Zenit. The American Corona program might hide behind Discoverer capsules that carried mice, but the Soviet spy-satellite effort could obscure itself behind fully functional and legitimate man-carrying space capsules. This subterfuge did not seriously mislead knowledgeable Americans, but the US wanted their own space reconnaissance capability so badly that they weren't going to object very strongly if the USSR wanted one, too.
Work on the R-7 and space capsule pushed ahead, while a small army of technicals addressed all the concerns of putting a man into space, keeping him alive there, and then recovering him safely. Work progressed on design of a space suit, which would emerge as the "SK-1 Sokol (Falcon)". The Soviets had recently begun a new series of high-altitude balloon flights under the "Volga" program; the effort was focused on scientific research, but flights were conducted to evaluate the suits, as well as cabin pressurization and life-support systems.
* The American Mercury capsule began to come together during 1959. As it finally emerged, it was a metal cone fitted on top with a cylindrical nose that contained parachutes for a sea landing. At launch, the nose of the capsule was fitted with an "escape system", consisting of a framework tower with a solid rocket motor mounted on top. The solid rocket motor had three nozzles that direct the blast to the sides of the capsule below and a spike on top to divert high speed airflow around it.
If there was a booster failure, the escape system would blast the capsule off the booster, allowing the capsule to deploy parachutes and, in principle, return safely to Earth. The escape system would be discarded before the spacecraft reached orbit. Once in orbit, the spacecraft could change its orientation using a set of reaction thrusters driven by hydrogen peroxide.
There was a dish-shaped ablative heat shield on the rear, with a solid-fuel retrorocket pack strapped onto it that would kick the spacecraft out of orbit and then be discarded. The heat shield would tolerate temperatures of up to 1,650 degrees Celsius at a maximum reentry speed of 24,100 KPH (15,000 MPH). To land, the capsule popped out a ribbon drogue parachute 1.8 meters (6 feet) in diameter to stabilize itself and then deployed the main parachute, which was 19.2 meters (63 feet) in diameter. Once the parachute deployed, the heat shield dropped off the bottom of the capsule to pull open a 1.2 meter (4 foot) tall inflatable "landing bag" that acted as a shock absorber on landing. The heat shield was retained to act as the bottom of the landing bag. The spacecraft would in principle float until recovery by helicopter.
The spacecraft was 1.89 meters (6 feet 2.5 inches) wide across the heatshield, and 7.9 meters (26 feet) tall with the escape system. All-up launch weight was 1,934 kilograms (4,265 pounds). The spacecraft carried no real scientific gear other than systems to monitor the pilot's health. Accommodations were minimal and it was a snug fit for its pilot in a space suit. The suit would be provided by B.F. Goodrich, a modification of the existing US Navy Mark IV high-altitude pressure suit. The suits would be custom fitted to each pilot.
* While the capsule took shape, STG officials assembled the details of how it would be flown. Walt Williams became the program manager, while Chris Kraft and others defined the bits and pieces of what would be eventually known as "Mission Control", a central headquarters at Cape Canaveral where the launch would be directed, communications and telemetry from the capsule collected from a set of ground stations being set up around the world, and decisions made for direction of the mission. Chuck Mathews became the operations manager, focusing at the outset on setting up the global communications and tracking network.
It was a massive job, involving a mind-numbing range of items. The work was complicated by the fact that NASA was basically a guest at Cape Canaveral, which was run by the Air Force. The USAF was also basically responsible for providing and launching the Atlas boosters for the orbital flights. There were tensions because some Air Force brass resented NASA as a gang of upstarts that had stolen the manned space program from them.
One of the most important details to work out was who was going to ride in the capsule. The volunteers were to be young men, qualified military test pilots, with college degrees. The idea was to obtain men who were in excellent physical condition; entirely used to operating in challenging situations, where their ability to make immediate decisions was essential for survival; educated and intelligent; and with no strong inclination to question the agenda.
Originally, the STG had not focused on military test pilots, but further consideration suggested that test pilots would probably need the least training, and that it would be relatively straightforward to obtain records on candidates from the military. Over Christmas 1958, Eisenhower approved the plan. The request for volunteers went out in January 1959, and 110 applicants were considered. They were sent to the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to undergo a week of medical screening.
* It was very thorough screening, with the candidates given examinations that involved the collection of every kind of sample and the deepest, most painful possible probing of every body opening. One of the candidates described it as "sick doctors working on well patients". The physical examination was only the start. The candidates then put through tests that would have been judged torture if they had been performed on prisoners of war, such as forcing them to sit with their feet in ice water or locking them up in soundproofed isolation chambers. They were also put through exhaustive and seemingly ridiculous batteries of psychological examinations. It was all humiliating and sadistic, and it was designed to be. NASA only wanted men who were unbreakable.
Seven unbreakable men emerged from the week of degradation and torture to be unveiled in a public press briefing on 7 April 1959. They included:
As wasn't surprising given the tone of the times, in which the term "diversity" was barely understood, they were all mainstream white American males, They were all under 183 centimeters (six feet) tall, so they could fit into the capsule. Although they were military men, they wore civvies; NASA, after all, was a civilian organization. There had been some talk of even having them resign their military commissions, but that idea had been quickly shot down.
Despite the fact that they had been warned ahead of time that there seemed to be intense public interest in the manned spaceflight program, the press conference still came as a shock. The group, known as the "Mercury Seven", was all but mobbed by the press at the briefing, with reporters flashing pictures in their faces and asking them all sorts of ridiculous questions. Shepard nudged Schirra and whispered: "I can't believe this. These people are nuts."
That was the general reaction. Deke Slayton, something of a rugged sort of few words who could have played a tough-guy TV detective, found it worse than the medical screening session in Albuquerque, "the worst stress test I've ever been through." However, John Glenn, who had tasted a bit of celebrity before, seemed very natural with it all, able to pass back glib and reassuring answers to the most absurd questions. The press ate him up, but he annoyed the other astronauts. Gordon Cooper thought: "Who is this Boy Scout?" Glenn later insisted that it wasn't an act, it was the natural response of a patriotic lad from a small town: "The questions opened a tap, and vintage New Concord, Ohio, came pouring out." He did admit that he'd "probably said too much".
It all seemed thoroughly absurd, particularly since none the group had actually flown in space yet. They would go through the same drill again, though in a much less hysterical fashion, on 28 May 1959 when they were brought before the House Subcommittee on Science & Astronautics so the politicians could see what they were getting for their money.
* In the meantime, the astronauts were preparing to go to space. They were based out of NASA Langley in Virginia under Bob Gilruth's STG and moved their families to the area. They weren't home a great deal, being focused on their training, which involved sessions in contraptions that could only be described as "amusement park rides from hell". One, the "Multiple Axis Space Training Inertial Facility (MASTIF)", consisted of three concentric cages that could be spun in any direction. A cot was set up nearby to allow giddy astronauts to recover, and a bucket and mop were kept handy in case the ride really disagreed with them.
Another was a centrifuge at a Navy facility at Johnsville, outside of Philadelphia. It could put enough gees on them to leave their backs mottled from broken blood vessels, and would have done them more injury if they hadn't been sitting in custom-fitted conformal couches. Above about six gees they were completely immobile, and as the gees increased they had to strain harder and harder to keep from blacking out, even though they were lying on their backs. One Navy man got up to 20 gees for a few seconds on a bet, but 16 gees was judged the practical limit.
Riders sat in a capsule that looked something like a flying saucer, and to make the damned thing a true nightmare the capsule could be flipped around to change positive gees to negative gees in an instant. The astronauts described it as "eyeballs in, eyeballs out"; the practical limit for a session involving a flip was nine gees, and an astronaut's head had to be strapped down to ensure that he didn't snap his neck. John Glenn, who had ridden the centrifuge before as a test pilot, called it "sadistic".
The astronauts also spent time in formal coursework and field survival training exercises. The training was exhaustive and exhausting, and after a while the astronauts realized that it was also somewhat haphazard. After all, nobody had ever flown in space before, and so nobody had a very clear idea of how to train anyone to do it.
One thing that grated was that while they were getting ready to fly in space, they weren't getting any flight hours in the air. This was not merely an irritant; it meant they would lose flight pay. Gordo Cooper, who for better and for worse liked to speak his mind, complained about it to a reporter, setting off a little political tempest.
There were some politicians who called the astronauts spoiled brats, but it didn't really make sense to hire people on the basis of their piloting skills and then let those skills go rusty. Besides, the astronauts were national heroes, and heroes had their privileges. NASA finally got them some Lockheed T-33 trainers on loan from the Air Force; they weren't supersonic jets by any means, being nothing more than two-seat versions of the old F-80 Shooting Star, America's first true operational jet fighter, but they were fun to fly. The Air Force then loaned NASA three F-102 Delta Dagger interceptors, including a two-seater. The Daggers were marginally supersonic, but they were followed a few years later by two F-106 Delta Dart interceptors, including a two-seater. The F-106 was a reengineered, much improved F-102 and was about as hot as they came, capable of Mach 2; in fact, in 1959 one set a world's speed record for a single-engine jet aircraft that still stands.
* One of the interesting footnotes of the early days of the Mercury program were the activities of an experienced female pilot named Jerrie Cobb, who had thousands of flight hours and didn't feel like taking the all-male status quo of the astronaut corps lying down. She started a "shadow" astronaut program with herself and twelve other femmes, running them through qualifications similar to that being undergone by the male astronauts and conducting an aggressive promotional campaign in parallel. Apparently Cobb had some support in NASA, but overall the "establishment" found the whole exercise irritating.
Well-known female air race pilot Jackie Cochrane helped promote the group, She was too old to be a potential astronaut herself, but she was notoriously loud and pushy, and had many contacts. Eventually organizational resistance ground down Cobb's effort, and Cochrane administered the deathblow by flipping around to side with her test-pilot buddies and assert that women had no place in the astronaut corps for the time being.
* The astronauts had expected to train hard for space, but the storm of publicity was a surprise. The astronauts were played up as red-white-&-blue heroes, fighting for American supremacy in the new frontier in space. The press descended on the astronauts and their families, and so NASA public affairs officer Walter Bonney looked into setting up some arrangement so the astronauts wouldn't be "pecked to death by ducks", offering exclusive access to the highest bidder.
LIFE magazine, then a direct connection to the heartland of America, was the high bidder, offering to buy the astronauts' exclusive stories for a half-million dollars spread over three years, at the time a tidy sum even when split seven ways. The deal was cut by Leo D'Orsey, a prominent Washington DC lawyer and celebrity business agent, who had shocked the astronauts when he told them he would refuse to take any fee or reimbursement. He would become a very valuable long-time financial advisor for several of the astronauts.
The agreement was inked on 5 August 1959, and the 14 September issue of LIFE magazine, then a direct connection to the heartlands of America, featured an 18-page cover story lionizing the Mercury Seven. The next week, their wives got a 14-page cover story of their own. LIFE staff writers helped draw up the stories. The astronauts particularly liked writer Loudon Wainwright, Glenn commenting that he "had a way of putting words in our mouths that we wished we'd had sense enough to say."
The public ate it all up; a half-million dollars was a bargain price for what the magazine got back out of it. The astronauts not only got a comfortable boost in pay, the deal kept the press generally off their backs, since LIFE had a contract with the astronauts and they weren't legally allowed to talk with other reporters about personal matters. There was some discomfort over the cozy arrangement, particularly with reporters from other organizations that didn't like the way it gave LIFE the inside track, but it was all aboveboard, and few, at least at NASA, begrudged the astronauts the fringe benefits they were getting considering the risks they were taking. The LIFE deal was only the beginning of the perks. A few got deals on shiny new Chevy Corvette sportscars, leasing them for a year for a dollar and then handing them back to the dealer, who would sell them as "astronaut cars" at a markup.
The Mercury Seven also soon acquired their own "press agent", USAF Lieutenant Colonel John A. "Shorty" Powers, a little firecracker of a guy, endlessly energetic, quick to blow up, with a huge voice all out of proportion to his small size, and an amazing ability to put away hard liquor. He had been a pilot in World War II and Korea and had become a USAF public relations officer in the mid-1950s. Powers found his job basically thankless: he had to fend off the press while trying to persuade the astronauts to remember they were in the public eye, and the astronauts found his continuous nagging obnoxious. Deke Slayton thought Powers was a "real pain in the ass."
Powers did his aggressive best to shield them from the media, even trying to keep LIFE reporters at arm's length. That wasn't easy because the LIFE people, particularly head photographer Ralph Morse, were very good at what they did. Morse was a classic wiseguy New Yorker who had gone ashore at Guadalcanal and Normandy with the troops, had photographed world leaders, and Powers was simply not in his league. Morse managed to track the astronauts down during field training sessions that were supposed to be secret, even on one occasion offering them coffee when they arrived at the training site. The astronauts respected Morse, and the fact that he made Shorty Powers fly into rages made them like him even more.
* Although the astronauts were based out of NASA Langley, of course they spent a fair amount of time at Cape Canaveral. The Cape's on-site living facilities for the astronauts were limited and uncomfortable, but they quickly found better digs.
There was a small town named Cocoa Beach just to the south of the NASA / Air Force facilities at the Cape. A Cocoa Beach hotel manager named Henri Landwirth, a European immigrant born in Belgium and raised in Poland, gave the astronauts rooms at bargain prices when they were in town. It helped pack other guests in, but he also honestly thought the world of the astronauts and did everything he could to make their stay comfortable.
The astronauts became close with Landwirth, and they thought much of him. When they wondered why he always wore long-sleeved shirts when it was so warm in Florida all the time, he rolled up his sleeve to reveal a tattoo: B4343. He was Jewish; his parents had been murdered in Hitler's extermination camps and he had spent several years in Nazi labor camps as a teenager, until he escaped and made an epic journey across war-torn Europe. Glenn thought the tattoo was a badge of honor and told Landwirth as much. It seems unlikely that Landwirth rolled out the red carpet for von Braun and his people when they came to Florida.
* Not everybody was impressed by the Mercury 7. Famed test pilot Chuck Yeager publicly commented that "a monkey's gonna make the first flight" in Mercury, suggesting the level of skill involved, and saying that somebody "would have to sweep the monkey shit off the seat" after a flight. Anybody who knew much about Yeager realized that although he was a man of many accomplishments, they didn't include putting much thought into what came out of his mouth, or for expressing high opinions of anyone but himself.
Still, it was the truth: the first "pilots" for the US space shots were going to be monkeys and chimpanzees. Gordo the squirrel monkey had already flown. Since that shot had been five months before the astronaut's press conference, obviously any linkage with Gordo Cooper was coincidental, but no doubt some jokers snickered at it anyway. Even more moderate test pilots, such as the well-known Scott Crossfield, described the Mercury flights as "a man in a can", a comment which ended up circulating as the slogan "spam in a can". There was a certain feeling that the Mercury 7 had turned their military careers down a dead-end street, and the astronauts themselves often wondered if that wasn't the case.
There were also those in the space community who thought the astronauts were redundant. Space scientists like Dr. James van Allen thought that robots could do space studies more effectively than humans, and there were many "rocket" engineers who regarded passengers as an unnecessary complication. The quarrel over the usefulness of humans in space had begun, with bitter partisans on both sides, and it would go on forever.
However, it took extraordinary people to ride the Mercury capsule. The astronauts would indeed have little control over the flights, at least in comparison to the control they had over an aircraft. On the other side of that coin, given the fact that big-rocket technology was both immature and unreliable, it took a lot of nerve to take a ride at the mercy of an whimsical fiery monster that could kill the rider in a wide variety of unpleasant ways. The astronauts witnessed an Atlas launch on 18 May, only to have it blow up right overhead.
If a launch went wrong, there might not be much the astronaut could do about it. Still, they always did have some options, and having the right man in place who could make a decision quickly might make the difference between success and failure.
The astronauts spent time with the prime contractors for the elements of the flight, with each astronaut assigned a particular element. They lobbied McDonnell engineers persistently and successfully for changes in the capsule design, which, as Deke Slayton put it later, included a joystick to control the thruster system, a periscope to let the astronaut see out, and a hatch "that we could blow off so we could get out of the damned thing."
* The astronauts themselves were keenly aware of the comparisons between themselves and monkeys and of course resented them, all the more so because the monkeys were making headlines at the time. On 28 May 1959 two female monkeys, a rhesus monkey named "Able" and a squirrel monkey named "Baker", were packed into a reentry vehicle on top of a Jupiter IRBM and launched on a suborbital trajectory that took them 579 kilometers (360 miles) high and 2,735 kilometers (1,700 miles) downrange from Cape Canaveral. Unlike the Gordo shot back in December, the Able-Baker shot went well. Both of the monkeys were safely recovered, though Able died four days later, due to a reaction to anesthetic after an operation to remove an infected electrode. Baker showed no signs of problems, and in fact lived to a ripe old age in Huntsville, dying in 1984 at the age of 27.
On 4 December 1959, NASA packed a male rhesus monkey named "Sam", after the USAF "School of Aviation Medicine", into a Mercury capsule prototype. The capsule was then blasted to an altitude of 85 kilometers (53 miles) on top of a Little Joe booster, launched from the NASA Wallops Island facility off the Virginia coast. This was a simple hop above the atmosphere to validate the technology, and all went well. Sam's mate, "Miss Sam", then took a hop of her own in a Mercury capsule on top of a Little Joe on 21 January 1960. She actually never left the atmosphere, since the flight was intended to test the Mercury escape system, and the maximum altitude reached was about 15 kilometers (9 miles). The test also went well.
On some occasions, project officials publicly referred to the monkeys as "astronauts". Even if no deliberate mockery had been meant, the Mercury Seven couldn't have helped but wince.
* The astronauts had to be satisfied with the fact that they were public celebrities, clean-cut red-blooded American boys fighting for Mom, apple pie, and the flag in a time when the whole notion was taken dead seriously by a large proportion of the population. The media played them up, and the Air Force had even gone so far as to send some of them to a "charm school" for indoctrination on how to act in public. They managed to cram a bit of public-relations touring into their schedules, doing what they could to sell themselves and the program to the public. Alan Shepard, always competitive, had not liked being shown up by John Glenn at the initial press conference and quickly picked up the skills of playing himself up to the reporters.
They also used their touring to counter the jokes about "monkeys" and "spam in a can". Deke Slayton, normally the last person to enjoy public speaking, decided he'd "had enough of this monkey shit business" and got up in front of a convention in Los Angeles of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots (SETP), the forum of the very community where the jokes originated and where they really mattered, to deliver a half-hour defense of the astronaut corps. He pointed out with surprising eloquence: "If you eliminate the astronaut, you concede that man has no place in space." He got a standing ovation.
It is obvious now and was likely obvious to anyone with any sense then that all the media hype, all the publicity campaigning, wasn't the complete truth and sometimes wasn't the truth at all. The astronauts were portrayed as good family men with faithful women being strong, upright men, but not all the marriages were very good. Gordon Cooper had been separated from his wife, but she was a pilot herself and was excited about the mission too, so they moved back in together, both putting on a happy face over the whole thing in the LIFE articles.
More to the point, the astronauts were military fighter jocks, not Boy Scouts. As a Navy pilot, Shepard had been fond of buzzing crowds, flying under bridges, and so on; if he hadn't been the very best there was, his flight career would have been history, and he even at that he rode a very thin edge more than once. Some of the others were similarly rambunctious, and they all loved to play pranks on each other. After Slayton delivered his address to the SETP, he got totally drunk and passed out on his bed at the Hilton. Partly because Slayton snored loud enough to shake the windows, the other astronauts threw him on a sturdy cot and carried him outside to the landing above the hotel marquee, where he woke up with the blinding California sun in his face.
On top of all that, they were now celebrities. Cocoa Beach had been a somewhat tattered coastal village, but the space boom turned it into a miniature glittering Las Vegas, "a little harlot of a town" as a British reporter put it. There were plenty of pretty young women around and there were plenty of temptations for the "happily married" astronauts. The astronaut corps acquired a reputation for racking up huge scores in bed, though some reporters who were on the inside with the astronauts insisted later the stories were, to no surprise, sensationalism, wildly exaggerated. The astronauts were on very rough working schedules, they didn't have time to chase skirts. Still, if any of the astronauts felt inclined to pick up pretty girls, it didn't take very much time: the general feeling was that if an astronaut left his hotel room door open, it wouldn't be long before a pretty femme walked in and locked it behind her. As a rule, there was definitely some screwing around.
The most prominent exception to the rule was John Glenn, the oldest of the Seven, who actually was a good family man. He had met his wife Annie when the two of them were toddlers; he drove a Studebaker instead of a sports car and taught Sunday School classes. He didn't approve of the screwing around and didn't conceal his disapproval, but didn't make a major issue of it at first. However, during a tour that took them to San Diego, one of the astronauts went across the border to Tijuana and picked up a girl in a bar. It was a trap: he found himself being photographed in a compromising situation.
Shorty Powers got a call from a major West Coast newspaper about the story and the photographs they were planning to run, asking for comment. He called Glenn immediately. Glenn called the publisher and waved the red-white-and-blue in his face, saying that the US was in a race with the Communists, that America was behind, and that running the story would hurt the country. From a much later perspective it was all hopelessly corny, but people felt it was for real in those days, and the story didn't run. Glenn would later register his amazement at getting away with it.
It remains uncertain just how compromising the position really was. Glenn also never said who the unlucky victim had been, though the rumors would go around that it was Shepard. Glenn then had a session with the other astronauts, where he angrily told them that the indiscretions were getting out of control and would reflect badly on the astronauts, NASA, and the military if they became public knowledge. He told them to "keep their pants zipped". The lecture didn't go over well in spite of, or maybe because of, the fact that it was the truth. Shepard told him it was absolutely none of his business what his fellow astronauts did, and only Scott Carpenter sided with Glenn.
In a later age, after America became much more concerned with, even obsessed, with scandals involving public figures, Glenn's concern would have been more relevant, but at the time it was less of an issue. CBS News reporter Walter Cronkite, who would become one of the most prominent commentators for the US manned space program and get within the astronauts' circle, admitted much later that "we were quite aware that the image that NASA was trying to project was not quite honest. But at the same time, there was a recognition that the nation needed new heroes."
* NASA officials of course were all for the publicity circus, as long as it helped the agency achieve its goals. They didn't always appreciate that being in the public eye necessarily meant that the agency's deficiencies, both real and imagined, were also a matter of public discussion. Keith Glennan bitterly complained in his diary about criticisms against NASA in the press.
To be sure, few people are comfortable with criticism, particularly when the criticisms seem off-base, but Glennan didn't always appear to realize that it was part of the bargain the agency had made. The irony of the situation was that while NASA bureaucrats often regarded the reporters as so many whores for their fickleness, the reporters had as much or more reason to regard the bureaucrats as whores for their attempts to manipulate the media.
The sometimes painful visibility of press coverage was also a necessary part of the fact that NASA was conducting a civilian space program that was in principle in service to the public and was, by national policy, conducted in the open. Like any bureaucracy, NASA was not always entirely forthright about the facts, but in comparison to the Soviet space effort, which was conducted under a cloak of secrecy in which the information released was often mixed with disinformation, the US agency was a shining beacon of truth. For this, the organization could and still can take deserved credit.
* While NASA and other space factions plotted to put a man into orbit, a rocket plane was already being prepared to put men into space: the North American "X-15".
The US military and NACA had conducted flights of experimental rocket aircraft in the postwar years, flying the Bell X-1, the first aircraft to exceed the speed of sound, advanced versions of the X-1, and the Bell X-2.
Other "X-series" research aircraft that followed were mostly jet-powered aircraft. However, in 1952, Walter Dornberger, then with Bell, had suggested the development of a much more capable rocket plane that could explore the domain of very high speeds and fly above the atmosphere for short excursions. This concept led in 1954 to the X-15 program, a collaboration of the US Air Force, the US Navy, and NACA.
North American won the contract for the X-15 in December 1955. The project was directed by North American's chief engineer, a pushy and temperamental type appropriately named Harrison Storms. The result was a big black spike of an aircraft with stubby wedge wings that would be dropped from the wing of a Boeing B-52 carrier aircraft for launch to high speeds and altitudes. The rocket plane was 15.5 meters (51 feet) long, had a wingspan of 6.7 meters (22 feet), and a launch weight of 17,240 kilograms (38,000 pounds).
The X-15 was powered by a Reaction Motors (Thiokol) XLR-99-RM2 engine with 254 kN (25,850 kgp / 57,000 lbf) thrust. The rocket plane would go so high that the pilot would need to wear a full-pressure suit. At such altitudes, the X-15's flight surfaces would no longer be effective, and so it was fitted with a set of twelve hydrogen peroxide thrusters, with four in the wings and eight in the nose. The rocket plane was built of titanium, with a special nickel alloy named "Inconel X" on leading-edge surfaces that were exposed to frictional heating. The landing gear consisted of conventional two-wheeled nose gear, plus a pair of long skids back along the fuselage. The X-15 had a ventral fin under the tail; the bottom of half of this fin had to be dropped before landing to provide clearance.
X-15 flights involved the B-52 carrying the vehicle to its launch point over Utah from its home base at Edwards Air Force Base in California, and then blasting up into the sky and back down again over a corridor about 800 kilometers (500 miles) long to land at the dry lake at Edwards. There were other dry lakes at intervals in the corridor that could be used for emergency landing sites.
The X-15 was basically a spacecraft, and in fact in the days when the US was getting organized about putting a man into space it was considered as a potential orbital vehicle, to be launched on top of an Atlas booster. This concept was rejected, as were later schemes to use it to test a "supersonic combustion ramjet (scramjet)" or as a delta-winged launcher to put small payloads into orbit.
The first test flight was an unpowered drop test on 8 June 1959, with Scott Crossfield at the controls. The B-52 for the tests was handed over to NASA from the Air Force and was fitted with a reinforced wing pylon to carry the rocket plane. 198 more flights of the X-15 would follow to the end of the program in 1968.
Three "X-15A-1s" were built, flying to a maximum speed of Mach 6.7 (7,280 KPH or 4,520 MPH) and maximum altitude of 108 kilometers (67 miles). Eight pilots obtained the "astronaut's wings" decoration by flying higher than 76 kilometers (47 miles) in it. One broke in half on landing, with the pilot walking away unscathed. This machine was rebuilt as the "X-15A-2", with large external tanks to allow a longer engine burn for higher speed and altitude.
However, the last flight of the X-15, in November 1967, was a disaster, with the machine breaking up at high altitude and killing the pilot, Captain Michael Adams. One of the surviving X-15s ended up at the USAF Museum in Dayton, Ohio, and the other at the Smithsonian Museum of Air & Space in Washington DC.
* The X-15 provided valuable research data for future aerospace efforts. It also seemed, to some Air Force minds at least, to be the first step towards USAF "spaceplanes".
The Air Force's MISS effort had been sidelined by the Mercury program, which was strictly a civilian effort, but the Air Force still had plans for manned spaceflight. Walter Dornberger had also proposed a "Bomber-Missile (BOMI)" that eventually became a "Rocket Bomber (ROBO)" much like Eugen Saenger's "Antipodal Bomber" rocket plane concept of World War II. In 1955, Air Force studies had suggested evolving the X-15 to create ROBO, as well as a reconnaissance craft with the name BRASS BELL and a research craft named "Hypersonic Weapons Research & Development Supporting System (HYWARDS)".
These studies evolved to a request for a more capable vehicle issued by the USAF on 30 April 1957 under the designation "Weapon Systems 464L". In June 1958, Boeing was given the contract for WS-464L, now named was named "Dyna-Soar", for "Dynamic Soaring". The Martin Company was to modify Titan to launch it. Dyna-Soar was to be the basis of a space bomber, reconnaissance platform, satellite inspection vehicle, and space interceptor. The vehicle was defined as a reusable winged "spaceplane" that would carry a single crewman to at least the edge of space, and then glide back to Earth to land on a runway. However, other details remained vaguely defined.
In fact, the Air Force was still somewhat muddled as to where the service was going in space. There was a faction at the time that was utterly space-happy. In January 1958, Robert Goddard's disciple Homer Boushey, by that time a USAF brigadier general, delivered a public lecture proposing the development of an Air Force base on the Moon that could launch nuclear-tipped missiles back to Earth. A year later, General Boushey wrote a memorandum in which he proposed that the Air Force acquire networks of reconnaissance, navigation, weather, and communication satellites; manned space interceptors, bombers, and reconnaissance craft; a space station to support them; bomb satellites; and several lunar bases.
The military would indeed acquire their own satellite networks, but the rest of it was simply mocked by politicians, becoming a topic of embarrassment for most Air Force officers. Senior USAF brass listened to dreams of squadrons of space fighters with beady-eyed scowls.
* While the US created a tiny astronaut corps for the Mercury program, the USSR was selecting and training a similar cadre of "cosmonauts" for the Vostok program. In early 1959, Mstislav Keldysh had chaired a committee that put the plan into motion, and came to the conclusion that Red Air Force fighter pilots would be the best candidates for the job. There was no insistence that they have degrees or be test pilots, and in fact since the selection process focused on younger men, many of those who ended up being selected would have been thought of as novices by their American astronaut counterparts. Not one would be a test pilot.
Selection began in the summer, with a recruiting team making the rounds of air bases. The candidates were initially only told that they would be flying "aircraft of a completely new type." They generally thought that it meant they would be flying helicopters or the like, which they saw as an implicit demotion from their status as fighter pilots. They were quietly told the truth in broad terms and became enthusiastic. 3,000 candidates were screened, with about a hundred put through final qualification in early 1960.
The final selection was performed in February 1960, with 20 pilots making the grade. They included:
They began training in March 1960 at facilities in Moscow, with the cosmonaut corps under the command of General Nikolai P. Kamanin. Initial training consisted of classroom work, which the people in charge quickly realized was so eye-glazingly dull that even the disciplined cosmonaut corps couldn't digest it. The coursework was diversified, and then the cosmonauts went on to more lively activities such as parachute training, to prepare them for ejecting from the Vostok after their stint in orbit.
In July, they moved to a formal "Cosmonaut Training Center (TsPK)" named "Zvesdni Gorodok (Star Town)" a short drive outside of Moscow. There they would be subjected to much the same sort of tortures inflicted on the Mercury Seven, such as rides in a centrifuge, known to the cosmonauts as "the devil's merry-go-round", and stints in a soundproof isolation chamber for up to ten days. After these sessions of solitary confinement, the subjects would be either so eager to leave that they would almost tear the door from its hinges, or would be driven back inside by the tsunami of noise pouring in from the outside world.
Unlike the American astronauts, the freshly-minted cosmonauts weren't played up as propaganda heroes. In fact, officially they didn't exist, since the whole effort was kept under a cloak of typical Soviet secrecy. They only told their wives that they were involved in an unspecified "experimental program", and gave the women vague answers when asked about their absences.
The cosmonauts represented a good sampling of the different republics and ethnic groups in the Soviet "empire", but though on paper they were supposedly equals, in practice some were more equal than others. The Russian Republic dominated the USSR, and so the first man the Soviet Union sent into space would naturally be a Russian, not a Kazakh or Ukrainian, and certainly not a Jew. Ideology also dictated that the winner of this space "lottery" have good proletarian credentials. Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, of poor peasant origins near Smolensk, headed the top of the short list. He was very competent, photogenic, and self-assured without being immodest. He had made a very positive on Korolyev and the other powers-that-be. Gherman Titov's credentials were almost as good, and he was the backup pilot.
In retrospect, the initial cosmonaut selection would become known as the "Star Town Twelve", because of the 20 only 12 would end up flying in space. Western reporters would learn bits about the "Missing Eight", enough to occasionally contrive wild stories about failed missions conducted by these "phantom" cosmonauts. Eventually, however, their personal histories would become known and of course reveal nothing of the sort.
* A number of boilerplate reentry capsules, shariks, had been built in late 1959 for airdrop tests that began in early 1960, with the capsules carried to altitude by balloons or shoved out of the back of turboprop transports flying at their maximum ceiling; the abrupt loss of tonnes of payload at such high altitudes made the lives of the pilots exciting for a few moments after each drop. The capsules would fall and build up speed to terminal velocity, then go through an ejection sequence and deploy parachutes.
The first Vostok space launch took place in 15 May 1960, in the form of a spacecraft designated "Korabl Sputnik 1 (Satellite Test Craft 1)", carrying an instrumented dummy named "Ivan Ivanovich". It was a "Vostok 1KP" spacecraft, the "P" indicating "prototype", lacking heatshield and life-support systems. The flight went well enough until the spacecraft completed its 64th orbit and the time to deorbit. Then the retro-rockets fired in the wrong direction, sending the Vostok capsule into a higher orbit. It remained in space for over two years before finally falling back to Earth.
The Soviet newspaper PRAVDA announced the flight the next day, giving enough details to strongly suggest that it was indeed a test flight for a manned spacecraft. The flight was designated "Sputnik 4" in the West, where there was considerable suspicion that the flight had actually carried a pilot and that the capsule had become his coffin. Rumors to that effect circulated for decades, along with the other rumors of other Soviet space accidents that killed cosmonauts -- many of which were generated by the brothers Achille and Giovanni Battista Jordica-Cordiglia, two Italian amateur radio enthusiasts who set up a listening station in northern Italy, where they claimed to have picked up all sorts of startling transmissions from Soviet spacecraft up to 1965, when they got out of the business. Documents released after the fall of the USSR would later dismiss the stories about the "phantom cosmonauts".
The second Vostok launch attempt was on 15 July, this time with a functional "Vostok 1K" with heatshield, life support systems, and a crew of two dogs, "Chaika (Seagull)" and "Lisichka (Little Fox)", in an ejection seat system. The Vostok 1K also featured a self-destruct system to ensure that it wouldn't fall into the wrong hands; the self-destruct system proved redundant, since the booster exploded only seconds after launch, destroying the spacecraft and killing the two dogs.
Their "comrades" were given little time to mourn, with the dogs "Belka (Squirrel)" and "Strelka (Arrow)" launched in a Vostok 1K spacecraft designated "Korabl Sputnik 2" on 19 August 1960, along with rats, mice, flies, and plants. There were two TV cameras on board to observe the dogs: Big Brother was watching them. Belka proved an interesting test subject by becoming the first creature to come down with a case of spacesickness.
The sharik was brought down after the 18th orbit after over 26 hours in space, with the reentry going smoothly. The dogs and the biological payloads were ejected and recovered unharmed. PRAVDA proudly announced the mission, which would be designated "Sputnik 5" in the West, as paving the way towards a manned flight -- of course leaving unstated the fact that it was also a big step towards operational deployment of the Soviet Zenit space reconnaissance system.
