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  The Mercury Seven, for their part, seemed unfazed. The test-pilot mortality rate at the time was horrendously high; in 1952, at the air force’s test-pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base, sixty-two pilots had died in just thirty-six weeks. Overall, about one in four test pilots perished. Eight men had been killed getting just one fighter jet, the F-104, operational. Test pilots were on close terms with death, and they were even blasé about it. A few of the Seven had told their examiners that they were onboard with the program as long as there was a good chance of survival—by which they meant at least 50 percent. Because of this, some of the psychologists suspected that these test pilots might even have a death wish. They did not; they had simply become professionally inured to the concept, believing that accidents could be avoided through knowledge and careful planning.

  The astronauts appeared to be a remarkably homogeneous bunch. Each was from the Midwest and had an IQ over 130, well above average. Each was a “superb physical specimen,” though not muscle-bound—one newspaper likened them to “a group of square-jawed, trim halfbacks recruited from an All-American football team.” All were from small towns, all were middle-class, all were Protestant, all were white (in fact, there were no non-white test pilots at the time), and each an only or eldest son. Six of the seven were veterans of World War II, the Korean War, or both. They spoke of duty and country and faith in platitudes, but it was clear they meant it. The American public, and the press, ate it up.

  The Soviets hadn’t been satisfied with their satellites. On January 2, nine weeks before the Mercury Seven were introduced, the Soviets had accomplished another first, launching a man-made object to leave Earth’s orbit. The plan was for Luna 1, a four-foot-wide metal ball, to crash into the moon, but it missed by 3,600 miles. When it achieved orbit around the sun instead, they renamed it Mechta (“Dream”). And the Pentagon reported receiving word from behind the Iron Curtain that another Soviet space spectacular was coming up soon—maybe they would even send a man into space.

  Chapter Three

  “The Howling Infinite”

  Man’s first trip into space will be a new human experience, to be highly desired by courageous and adventurous men, but fraught with hardships, difficulties and danger.

  Time, April 20, 1959

  By the time NASA’s Space Task Group was formed, in the fall of 1958, Max Faget had been thinking about the difficulties of manned spaceflight for a few years, often while standing on his head. One particular obsession of his was the danger of atmospheric reentry, in which the friction from plummeting into Earth’s thick atmosphere at ten thousand miles an hour or more would result in temperatures of about three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Meteorites were also on his mind.

  Faget was a man whose brain worked somewhat differently than others’—though usually successfully—when fixed on a problem; it was a trait that apparently ran in the family. His father, a doctor, had helped develop the first practical treatment for leprosy; one of his great-grandfathers, a New Orleans physician, had discovered an accurate way to diagnose yellow fever. Young Max grew up in Louisiana building model airplanes and submarines with his older brother and reading science fiction novels and Astounding magazine, the first “hard SF” publication that insisted on stories with a solid grounding in science. A gymnast in college, wiry and about five six, Max had an elfin appearance (decades later, it would invite comparisons to the Yoda character from the Star Wars movies). After receiving his engineering degree from LSU in 1943, Faget spent almost three years as a junior naval officer aboard a submarine in the South Pacific, eventually serving as executive officer. He had a penchant for startling people in conference rooms, restaurants, almost anywhere, by leaping over chairs and sometimes standing on his head to improve blood circulation to his brain while continuing discussions with colleagues.

  His roommate at LSU had been a chemical engineering major named Guy Thibodaux, a Cajun also from New Orleans. Neither ever made the honor roll or took to rote learning, and while other students were pulling all-nighters for exams, they played pool and watched movies. Before they went off to war—Faget with the navy, Thibodaux with the army—they made a vow that if they survived, they’d reunite and look for jobs together.

  In the spring of 1946, Guy got a call from Faget, who was following up on that promise and had an idea about where they should apply. Max’s father had a 1941 Ford coupe that they could borrow. It had airplane tires—all that was available, since there was still a shortage of rubber—but it ran, so in June the two headed to the NACA’s Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia, where they walked in and applied for jobs wearing Hawaiian shirts, work pants, and sandals. The agency being what it was—somewhat eccentric in both hiring and methods, often finding employees at model-airplane contests—both were hired immediately. (It didn’t hurt that the man in charge of making the decision was also an LSU graduate.) Thibodaux was put to work in rocket propulsion and Faget in ramjets for Robert Gilruth’s newly created Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD). At a starting annual salary of $2,644, they were now working with the world’s leading experts on aerodynamics in the most exciting venture they could imagine—trying to break the sound barrier. Not bad for a couple of Louisiana Aggies without graduate degrees. Both of them advanced quickly in the loose, merit-based NACA hierarchy—a “classless society where every member of the team was an equal contributor to the success of NACA’s mission,” Thibodaux observed later—and Faget was soon Gilruth’s right-hand man in PARD. Only three years later, Thibodaux would be running his own section.

  Faget had been working on supersonic aircraft, including the X-15, for years, and his unique ability to find the simplest solution to design problems often led to valuable breakthroughs. He understood, sooner than many of his colleagues, that there was no advantage to an aerodynamic shape in space, since there was no atmosphere—no air—to act on it or slow it down. With that in mind, he was excited about designing a craft that would operate in a vacuum, and he was even more excited when he and other Space Task Group members visited Huntsville just a few days after NASA started up. Faget, von Braun, and his engineers discussed working together to launch a manned capsule into space.

  Faget and several others at the NACA—a small group that some at headquarters called the Space Cadets—had been wrestling with the thorny problem of reentry for a while. They’d been “bootlegging” a manned space program for at least a year before NASA was formed; they figured that since no one had told them not to do it, they might as well, even without official approval. They all agreed that space was where they were heading. The big question was: What shape should the spacecraft be? Initially, they chose a needle-nosed, streamlined spaceship—like the ones they’d read about in science fiction magazines and seen in space artist extraordinaire Chesley Bonestell’s illustrations—to offer as little air resistance as possible. Someone even suggested using the X-15 experimental plane, designed to fly up to the fringe of space—maybe they could send it to the moon. Faget knew that wouldn’t work. For one thing, after reaching Mach 6, the X-15 began suffering serious heat damage. Besides, its aerodynamic shape wouldn’t dissipate that enormous heat, and with no heat-resistant external surface, the plane would completely disintegrate when it reentered the atmosphere at extreme velocity.

  So when two of Faget’s colleagues, Harvey Allen and Alfred Eggers, pointed out that meteors with rounded noses were aerodynamically stable and survived the searing heat of the plunge—they had been studying the concept for years—Faget and designer Caldwell Johnson came up with a blunt-nosed shape like a shuttlecock that would slow down the craft on reentry and create a shock wave that would deflect much of the blast-furnace heat away from and around it. A paper Faget presented in March 1958, “Preliminary Studies of Manned Satellites—Wingless Configuration, Non-Lifting,” introduced key features of a simple but workable spaceship. His co-workers at Langley weren’t convinced that a blunt design was a good idea, and neither were many others in N
ASA. The staff at Ames Research Center in California believed a craft with some lift would be better, and military flight surgeons argued a man would black out from the eight g’s expected in this craft during reentry. But the unassailable simplicity and logic of Faget’s arguments—and the fact that a ballistic craft could take only one path and thus its splashdown point could be easily predicted—eventually won them over, and his blunt body design was officially adopted.

  After much refinement, endless wind-tunnel, spin-tunnel, heat, and drop tests, and trajectory work on primitive computers, the cone-shaped, blunt-bottomed Mercury capsule was finished. Faget added a thick ablative heat shield (the concept of which had been described in 1920 by rocket pioneer Robert Goddard and later fine-tuned by Eggers) made of an aluminum honeycomb and several layers of fiberglass. The outer layer of the shield would absorb some of the heat and burn away, or ablate, protecting the capsule itself during reentry. A pack of small rockets strapped to the bottom of the craft would also decrease its speed and massive g-forces during reentry. Faget and a couple of other aerodynamicists had determined the capsule would decelerate at eight g’s or so, which would be bearable if a man was on his back on a surface designed to help him withstand that force. So Faget and his colleagues fashioned (and patented) a fiberglass contoured survival couch that would do the job.

  Now, if they could keep the weight down and secure the Mercury capsule to the nose of a rocket powerful enough to launch it into space (first just a simple ballistic arc beyond Earth’s atmosphere and then a larger booster that would reach the 17,500 miles per hour necessary to balance the Earth’s gravitational pull and maintain a stable orbit), it just might work. And, of course, if they could find a way to keep its occupant alive.

  The craft that would convey the first American into space was nothing like any spaceship in the comic strips or the movies—or in the previous history of manned flight. Some dubbed it the “Flying Ashcan.” Since the underpowered Redstone’s payload capacity was limited, the capsule wouldn’t be very large—eleven feet long and six feet across at the wide end of the cone. And it would weigh only three thousand pounds; its shell would be constructed of thin but strong titanium covered with hundreds of heat-radiating shingles of equally strong alloys to resist the expected thirty-five-hundred-degree temperature of reentry. The crew compartment would be just big enough for one person. “You don’t climb into it. You put it on,” said John Glenn. The astronaut would sit on his personally shaped contour couch with his back to the heat shield, facing about a hundred and twenty switches, levers, buttons, and fuses a couple of feet in front of him. There was no computer; any trajectory or reentry calculations would be made by computers on the ground and transmitted by radio. The capsule’s path could not be changed, although its attitude—the direction it was pointed—could, both from the ground and by the astronaut, with eighteen small thruster jets powered by hydrogen peroxide that altered the three axes of up-down pitch, right-left yaw, and side-to-side roll.

  After the basic plans were set, McDonnell Aircraft, producer of many of the country’s finest fighter planes, was chosen to build it. Its bid was far from the lowest, but the Mercury program had been placed on the Master Urgency List, meaning its administrators did not have to choose the lowest bidder.

  It wasn’t much of a spacecraft, this hollow meteor, but it would get the job done—the job of putting a man into space and returning him to Earth alive—if the rocket it perched on did its job. Because NASA was required to use only rockets already in production, von Braun’s Redstone, designed for the battlefield, would be employed for the first flights, the suborbital ones that would be quick up-and-down trips. The kerosene-fueled Atlas, the new ICBM the air force was developing, would launch the Mercury into orbit on later missions, since it was the only one in the nation’s arsenal with the thrust capable of doing the job. But the recent history of the Redstone and Atlas boosters wasn’t encouraging. The Atlas, especially, had a nasty habit of exploding or malfunctioning in some other way. It had been designed to carry H-bombs, not humans, and its skin was so thin that a steel belly ring, like a large, jury-rigged hose clamp, would need to be fitted around its girth as a brace. But the rocket engineers and launchpad technicians, aided by newly hired safety and quality-assurance inspectors, committed themselves to doing all they could to keep their passengers from being blown to bits.

  Some of the dangers of space travel were known. Many more were not.

  A fragile human in the vacuum of space would die almost instantly. Even if he held his breath, it would take only seconds; the absence of external pressure would cause his lungs to rupture and send air into his bloodstream, resulting in a quick death when air bubbles lodged in his heart and brain. Even if his lungs didn’t rupture, the deoxygenation of the blood would result in the loss of consciousness in fifteen seconds or less. As the water in his body vaporized and his oxygen disappeared, the moisture on his tongue, in his eyes, and elsewhere would begin to boil and bubble; his skin and the tissue beneath it would start to swell and turn bluish purple; and the gases in—and possibly the contents of—his stomach, bowels, sinuses, and other body cavities would release rapidly. His heart would continue to beat for a minute and a half or so. If pressure and oxygen were restored before then, the astronaut might survive.

  And what effects would weightlessness have on a man? No one knew exactly, but several possibilities were postulated. Gravity, many experts asserted, was necessary for some body organs to function. Without it, eyeballs might explode or vision might blur, the heart might stop beating, esophageal muscles might constrict, the digestive system might shut down, the vestibular system of the inner ear might malfunction and cause extreme dizziness and nausea, or sleepiness might occur. The brain might simply cease to function.

  And could an astronaut survive the fierce gravitational forces of acceleration and deceleration during liftoff and reentry and remain conscious without suffering any lasting damage? What would be the effects of space radiation unfiltered by the Earth’s atmosphere? Perhaps it would burn retinas and skin, mutate DNA, sterilize gonads. A burst of deadly radiation from a solar flare might kill an astronaut. And heaven help him if he had a bout of space-sickness while wearing a pressurized spacesuit and helmet. Without gravity, the vomit would remain near his mouth and nose; there would be no way to wipe it away, and with every breath he would inhale more until he drowned—hardly a heroic death.

  These fears and others consumed the medical community. And if the physiological dangers weren’t enough, there were the psychological ones as well. An astronaut in a confined space for an extended period might become depressed and take his life. He might even succumb to what some psychologists called the breakaway phenomenon (a sense of being completely cut off from everyone on the planet) and decide not to return to Earth. Others suggested that the spaceman might faint or even die of fright during the flight. Some thought that he might go berserk.

  There were other worries: meteors large enough to puncture a spacecraft’s hull, extreme noise or vibration strong enough to rip a man’s organs loose. All possibilities were carefully considered and researched. The prime concern of each mission would always be the safety of the astronaut, and toward that end, each system was refined to a point never before seen in any machine, vehicular or otherwise, from the planning and designing stages to production, training, and monitoring. The engineers gave the old term redundancy new meaning. Virtually every system—electrical, environmental, navigation, and so on—was backed up two and sometimes three times. The oxygen system, for example: If an astronaut’s suit failed him in flight, he could open his faceplate and breathe the cabin’s pressurized air, which was 100 percent oxygen (unlike the Earth’s atmosphere, which is 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, and 1 percent other gases). If that failed, an emergency supply of oxygen—about eighty minutes of breathing time—was available; that would keep him alive long enough to finish an orbit and make an emergency reentry. If all three systems failed, he would
be dead within minutes.

  And though a mission might last only fifteen minutes, wherever possible, every unit was tested ten to a hundred times longer than that, until its reliability could be statistically measured and predicted to the nth degree. As von Braun described it:

  A methodology was created to assess each part with a demonstrated reliability figure, such as 0.9999998. Total rocket reliability would then be the product of all these parts’ reliabilities and had to remain above the figure of 0.990, or 99 percent.

  Reliability of each part and redundancy in each system became central to NASA’s culture. But not every system could be backed up, and no matter how well components were made or how rigorously they were tested, they occasionally failed, and 99 percent is not complete reliability.

  The astronauts were supposed to be little more than passengers in a fully automated system; in this grand experiment, they were glorified guinea pigs or, at most, the final backup in emergencies. But after the press conference, the seven test pilots became national celebrities, and they realized they could use their celebrity to effect change in the program’s hardware and in their role in the mission. Since the men couldn’t be replaced without national embarrassment, their popularity gave them the power to make demands. The capsule was designed to fly without a man—at least at first—but the seven test pilots did their damnedest to change that.