Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys (33 page)

In a speech he gave in 1961, President John F. Kennedy said it was time to send as American to walk upon the moon—and then return him “safely to the Earth.” If that wasn’t enough of a challenge, he pledged to see it done before the end of the decade. He’d been elected in November 1960 after a campaign in which, among other things, he’d promised the American people superiority over Russia in the fields of space exploration and missile defense.

When he set his nation the target of the moon that day, he made it sound as if it should be done because it was a dream deserving of being made real. It’s hard to imagine what dream any of our leaders could pledge themselves to today in order to match JFK’s: maybe a trip to the sun, or to the constellation Orion. Whatever else he did or didn’t do, JFK knew how to shape a dream. In truth, though, he was unnerved by the advances communist Russia had made into the new frontier of space and he was desperate to close the gap.

Sputnik I,
the first manmade satellite, had launched in 1957. On April 12, 1961, Russian Yuri Gagarin completed the first manned mission into space. American Alan Shepard followed him into the new domain on May 5, when he managed a 15-minute suborbital flight in the cramped capsule of the Mercury
Freedom 7
. Shepard had shown his class—not least because of the calming influence he’d had upon a nervous ground crew and Mission Control during the long wait for ignition. He’d been strapped into the claustrophobic cabin for four hours, but elsewhere other men were unhappy with the weather and the feedback they were getting from their machines. Finally Shepard’s quiet voice came over the radio.

“Why don’t you fellows solve your little problems,” he said. “And light this candle.”

And so they did, and the world turned and Shepard flew.

But everyone on that world could see that a two-horse space race had begun and America was running second. There was a cold war on as well—or at the very least a cold peace—and JFK needed to show his people there was something they could beat the Russians at. What followed was the most extraordinary demonstration yet seen of the power of imagination and ambition when coupled with near-limitless wealth. By the end it would cost the American people $24 billion—$100 billion in today’s money—using as much as 5 percent of the annual federal budget.

It was also a demonstration of how desire can persuade ambitious
men to turn a blind eye to inconvenient truth. By the end of World War II America had acquired the services of Hitler’s chief rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun. The Allies knew the development of von Braun’s V2 rocket-bombs had been dependent upon slave labor. But the benefits to be had from rocket technology were deemed more important than the means used to acquire it, and so the SS officer became an unlikely ally.

According to legend, it’s to the summit of the Brocken, tallest of Germany’s Harz Mountains, that the Devil summons all his witches on the night of April 30 each year before taking them into the underworld. It’s a place of mischief. It was in factories beneath those same mountains that von Braun’s rockets were built—and where an unknown number of innocent and uncomprehending lives were used up and thrown away. But when in the last months of the war von Braun guessed Hitler’s sun was about to be eclipsed, he betrayed his master and placed himself, and scores of his fellow scientists, into the hands of the Americans. He knew such a move would ensure the continuation of his work, and that was all that mattered. America was delighted to have him. It was the undoubted genius of von Braun, tainted though it was, that eventually gave the US the
Saturn V
rocket that would propel all the Apollo astronauts beyond Earth’s grasp and out toward the unsullied moon.

But the best and worst of times and men often travel together—as though one draws the other. Away from the politics, the dream of traveling into space had reached out, faster than the speed of sound, toward brave men. It reached the ears of the test pilots at Edwards Air Force base—men who risked their lives every day in the bright cloudless skies high above California’s Mojave Desert. Here was home to men who were already legends. King of kings was Captain Chuck Yeager, who had broken the sound barrier in the
Bell X-1
rocket plane on October 14, 1947—but who would never sit in a space capsule. He had no college degree and so lacked a minimum requirement for
the job of spaceman. (It’s said he felt that flight in a space capsule—deprived of the means of actually
flying
it but traveling instead as a kind of glorified passenger—was beneath an aviator’s dignity. It was Yeager or someone close to him who dismissed the
Mercury
astronauts as “spam in a can.”)

But the credo of the test pilots was about being the best. Author Tom Wolfe described their essential quality as “The Right Stuff,” in his book of the same name, and defined it as the instinctive ability to always do the right thing at the right time. The men selected for the Mercury program in 1959 didn’t try to be good, they simply were good.

It was also about unspoken personal bravery—of the sort Shepard showed in 1961 when he told his ground crew to get on with their job. Wolfe recounts an anecdote thought to have come out of the Korean War. A young pilot in a dogfight found an enemy MiG locked onto his tail and preparing to fire. Radio channels were kept clear for all but essential tactical communications—but the youngster was filling the airwaves with his shouts and cries, begging to be told how to save his skin. In a break in his transmission another flyer cut in and told him: “Shut up—and die like an aviator.”

Such was the way of the flyers, and it was this hard, straight edge they brought to the race for space. The first of them, the so-called
Mercury 7
of Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton were fêted as champions selected for mortal combat—much like gladiators, or Spartan hoplites. These were the men who stepped up in the days before deep space flight was even possible, far less taken for granted, and for that reason, perhaps, they were the bravest of them all—whether they had to fly their ships or not.

By the time Mercury had run its course, NASA—the specially created National Aeronautics and Space Administration—had learned how to put men into Earth-orbit and bring them back alive. More
astronauts followed, ready to slip the surly bonds of Earth, and by 1963 the Gemini Program, successor to Mercury, was teaching them to dock vehicles in space. Jim Lovell, the man who would later command
Apollo 13,
was among them.

The Apollo Program had been running since 1962 and began to send men into space in 1968, but not before the dream of the moon had claimed its first lives. On January 27, 1967, the crew of
Apollo 1
—Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee—were in their command module conducting launchpad tests. Their official flight designation was AS-204 (it would be renamed
Apollo 1
later, as a mark of respect) and they were scheduled to be the first of the Apollo astronauts to fly. All three were strapped into their seats, wearing full flight suits and helmets, when a technical fault caused a fire inside the module. It’s estimated that all three were dead within 17 seconds, although it’s hard to imagine how anyone can be certain about such a thing. It still sounds like a long time to be strapped inside a fire.

In December 1968
Apollo 8
became the first manned flight to finally break free of Earth’s gravity and head for someplace new—the moon. Aboard were Frank Borman, William Anders and Jim Lovell. During their flight they orbited the moon 10 times in 20 hours before returning safely home. These, then, were the first men to fly above another world and it does all seem like too much to believe. The further we get from that decade, when such things were briefly made possible, the easier it is to imagine none of it ever really happened. We don’t even have the
Concorde
any more. Will our children believe it was once commonplace to fly across the Atlantic in three and a half hours, faster than a bullet from a rifle, let alone fly on a rocket to the moon?

You couldn’t make it up. No wonder the world’s biggest conspiracy theory claims that man has never been to the moon and that the film of the
Apollo 11
landing was a fake directed by Stanley Kubrick. NASA
had to learn
everything
that was required of space flight: not just how to get to the moon, but even how to
train
to get to the moon. Everything about it was new and being imagined and invented from scratch. But perhaps if they were really going to fake the moon landings, Grissom, White and Chaffee wouldn’t have had to burn to death.

Apollo 11
blasted off from the launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island in Brevard County, Florida, at just a couple of minutes after 9:30 a.m. local time on July 16, 1969. The
Saturn V
rocket that lifted them clear of Earth’s gravity was a wonder to behold. There’s no other way to describe it. The first of its kind had carried Lovell’s
Apollo 8
into space as well. In all, 32
Saturns
would take to the air and not one of them would fail. The
Saturn V
stood 363 feet tall, less than a foot shorter than the dome of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, and was made up of 3 million parts. Every one of the components in that impossible maze of technology, inside a cylinder taller than a 30-story building, had to work the first time in order for the rocket to function properly—and they did, every time. The Vehicle Assembly Building—the VAB—in Florida, in which the
Saturns
were put together like the world’s most exciting toys, also has dimensions that are too much to take in. Although technically a single-story building, it stands 525 feet tall. Inside it encloses 129,428,000 cubic feet of space, and the people who’ve worked inside it insist it has its own weather system. When the conditions are just right clouds form, up toward the ceiling.

On the final descent to the moon’s surface, Armstrong was at the controls of the lunar module, a fragile bird of a thing appropriately named
Eagle
. They overshot the planned landing site, finally touching down into the dust with just seconds’ worth of fuel to spare. If Yeager had ever been right about astronauts being spam in a can, it wasn’t true by 1969 and
Apollo 11.
Armstrong had needed every ounce of his undoubted brilliance as a test pilot to put the
Eagle
safely onto
the surface. And while he and Aldrin prepared for their first steps, 60 miles above them their command module pilot, Michael Collins, was embarking upon his own odyssey. For the first time a man would travel alone into the blackness of the moon’s dark side. The moon does not rotate, keeping the same face always toward the Earth. When Collins hurtled into that nothingness he was more alone than any human being had ever been.

Apollo 13
blasted away from the launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center a couple of minutes before quarter past two in the afternoon of April 11, 1970. Its 42-year-old commander, Jim Lovell, from Cleveland, Ohio, was already the most traveled human being in history. He’d spent more than 570 hours in space, traveling a distance of around 7 million miles. As this latest journey got under way he became the first astronaut to make four journeys into space. He’d joined the US Navy in 1952 and flown jets in the Korean War before being selected for the space program in 1962. In the official NASA photographs taken before
Apollo 13
, wearing his flight suit, he has on his face the vaguely bashful and startled expression of someone who can’t quite believe his luck. He was generally considered easygoing, but those closest to him detected the competitive spirit that would elevate him to the status of mission commander.

He’d been back-up commander for
Apollo 11
—Armstrong’s understudy—and if things had gone as NASA originally planned, would have been the skipper of
Apollo 14.
As it turned out, the powers that be felt
Apollo 13’s
scheduled commander, Alan Shepard, needed more time to get back up to speed after a long lay-off following surgery for Menière’s disease. Shepard and his team were therefore ordered to swap with Lovell’s. Fate had played her hand, and now Lovell and his men had
Apollo 13.
In a further twist, they faced a last-minute change of personnel. Ken Mattingly had been training as the command module pilot, but with just days to go before the scheduled launch he was found to have been exposed to German measles. While Lovell
and Haise had had the disease in childhood, and so could be expected to remain healthy during the flight, Mattingly had not. He was duly bumped out of the line and replaced by Jack Swigert.

Born in Denver, Colorado, the quiet and unassuming 38-year-old Swigert had obtained his private pilot’s licence by the age of 16. He’d flown jets in Korea and joined the space program in 1966.
Apollo 13
would be his one and only space flight.

Fred Haise was the youngest of the three, just 36 years old. He was from Biloxi, Mississippi, and had been a NASA test pilot at Edwards. Like Swigert, he joined the space program in 1966 and before the twist of fate that put him on
Apollo 13
he’d been back-up lunar module pilot for
Apollo 9.
He had the same role for
Apollo 11,
making him understudy for Buzz Aldrin. As good luck would have it, he’d made a point of becoming an expert on the design and use of landing modules. It was knowledge that would shortly matter a great deal. No one made Haise acquire this detailed understanding of the craft that would soon mean so much to him and his two colleagues. He had done it for himself and by himself. This is presumably part of what it means to have “the right stuff.”