Leaving Orbit (30 page)

One of the things that makes the job title
astronaut
different from other jobs is that it existed in the collective imagination for centuries before it was ever actually anyone’s occupation. In the second century CE, Lucian of Samosata imagined travelers going to the moon and fighting a war with its inhabitants. In Jules Verne’s immensely influential 1865 novel
From the Earth to the Moon
, the word
astronaut
is never used, but three men seal themselves into a metal capsule in order to fly to the moon. Many of the details Verne came up with were so outlandish as to invite ridicule if they had not become reality a hundred years later in the Apollo program, including a launch from Florida and a safe splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Verne’s three space travelers behave in some ways we now associate with astronauts—they solve problems that arise on their mission, analyze new information they observe outside their windows, and do calculations to figure out their location and speed. On the other hand, they indulge in non-astronaut-like behaviors such as getting drunk, becoming histrionic about unexpected problems, and expressing doubt about the meaning of their journey, about whether they should be doing this at all.

One of the first uses of the word
astronaut
to refer to a human traveling in space was in Neil R. Jones’s short story “The Death’s Head Meteor” in 1930.

Jones was probably as surprised as anyone to learn how soon his new word became an actual job title, only twenty-nine years later. In between, during World War II, the first actual rockets emerged. This was the beginning of a new era in which the astronaut became a consistent character to tell stories about, if still speculative. Though the rockets weren’t ready to safely contain humans, their streamlined hulls brought with them a clearer image of the astronaut fantasy. Part fighter pilot, part frontiersman, the helmeted spaceman climbed into sleek machines and left Earth in the black-and-white television shows of the fifties. In 1954, Walt Disney created
Man in Space
, a series intended to promote his new Disneyland, which was set to open the following year. In the opening shot of the series, Walt himself speaks into the camera. “One of man’s oldest dreams has been the desire for space travel,” he tells us with an avuncular twinkle. “Until recently this seemed to be an impossibility.”

Man in Space
gives a brief history of rockets, complete with a racist cartoon of the first Chinese rocket builders. This historical overview is politely evasive about the German rocket program, referring to the V-2 rockets as “forerunners to space travel” rather than as instruments used to rain death upon our allies in Europe. Wernher von Braun, the German rocket engineer responsible for the V-2, gives a talk about multistage launches. Von Braun is movie-star handsome and looks disturbingly like a textbook illustration of what Hitler’s anthropologists meant by the term
Aryan.
His English is extremely fluent, but his unmistakable German accent must have sounded jarring to an American audience not all that many years after the war.

Man in Space
dramatizes the experiences astronauts were expected to encounter, especially the experience of weightlessness. “How will man’s subconscious mind react,” the cartoon voice-over asks, “to his first experiences with space travel? Will he not suddenly be aware of his precarious situation trapped in a tiny metal box floating through the incomprehensible nothingness of space? We do not know.”

The idea of the astronaut evolved significantly in 1959, the year the Mercury astronauts were chosen. Crew-cut, Caucasian, and confident, most were veterans of World War II or Korea or both. They were all husbands and fathers. They embodied the contradictions embedded in the American masculine ideal: they were military men (rule followers, patriots) on the one hand and test pilots (steely-eyed maverick cowboys) on the other. Their names tripped off the tongue: Carpenter, Cooper, Glenn, Grissom, Schirra, Shepard, and Slayton. They were handsome and daring. Asked at their first press conference whether they would be willing to launch into space tomorrow, they all raised a hand. Some of them raised two. Even for those of us who hadn’t been born yet then, in many ways what we imagine when we say the word
astronaut
is still those seven men.

Stories about astronauts are stories about risks. It is precisely the risks they take that make us admire them, that makes the wonders they encounter so wondrous. Tom Wolfe started writing about the Mercury astronauts after he met some of them at the last Apollo launch; in a foreword to
The Right Stuff
, Wolfe describes his motivation for writing the book: to understand what gave the astronauts the courage to undertake such daring missions. “What is it, I wondered, that makes a man willing to sit on top of an enormous Roman Candle … and wait for someone to light the fuse?” The answer, as Wolfe constructs it, is the so-called Right Stuff. He uses an extended analogy with the ancient concept of single-combat warfare—the strongest combatant from each army would fight each other one-on-one. By doing so, the single-combat warrior took the burdens of an entire war upon himself, risked death so none of his countrymen would have to. At the same time, the single-combat warriors were “revered and extolled, songs and poems were written about them, every reasonable comfort and honor was given them, and women and children and even grown men were moved to tears in their presence.” More than the best and the brightest, more than role models, the Mercury astronauts embodied the best we were capable of. Astronauts still do. They are our avatars for our dreams of spaceflight, for our dreams of escaping Earth.

Tom Wolfe defines the Right Stuff:

Yet Wolfe describes a growing concern among the astronauts: they were accustomed to testing themselves and besting one another through their flying, but the Mercury capsule itself would require no piloting. We tend to forget from our vantage point in history that even as the astronauts were chosen there was still controversy over whether space travel should involve humans at all. Robotic spacecraft could send back scientific data at half the cost, pragmatists pointed out; public opinion on the issue was divided. In 1960, President Eisenhower refused NASA’s request to fund the first steps in the proposed Apollo program—a three-man spacecraft and a rocket powerful enough to get to the moon—because his Science Advisory Committee had informed him that the motives for a moon shot involving astronauts were “emotional compulsions.” If this seems like a laugh line now that we know Apollo was in fact funded and did in fact carry out its missions successfully, it’s useful to keep in mind that this analysis was also pretty accurate.

The debate over whether it’s important for humans to go to space is a debate about the dream lives of taxpayers. The scientists and engineers didn’t see the point of sending astronauts, but the people who romanticize spaceflight—the ones who want to see their science fiction fantasies come true—felt in their geeky hearts that sending astronauts to space, seeing human protagonists for our stories of leaving Earth, was in fact the whole point. And those geeks won. Jules Verne’s
From the Earth to the Moon
was devoured, and loved, by Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, and Goddard, the three geniuses who developed rocketry more or less simultaneously and in isolation from one another; it was also read and loved in childhood by Wernher von Braun, who developed the rocket that actually achieved the goal. Viewed from more than a century on, the most outlandish bit of invention in Verne’s novel is the idea that a flight to the moon could be funded entirely by a subscription service—regular citizens all over the world voluntarily paying into the project with no hope of being paid back.

The Mercury Seven were so deluged with media requests for their time that they signed contracts with
Life
magazine for the exclusive right to their personal stories.
Life
paid them half a million dollars, a great deal of money for astronauts who were still living on military salaries, and gave them the added benefit of letting the astronauts and their managers at NASA control the story that reached the public. The
Life
contract did as much to cultivate and burnish the image of what it means to be an astronaut as anything else NASA did. One of the reporters for
Life
later admitted:

As Wolfe describes it, the risks of single-combat warfare earned the astronauts certain privileges (“every reasonable comfort and honor”), and drinking and womanizing were among them. Historian Margaret Weitekamp writes, “Such macho excesses did not worry NASA decision makers. The space agency viewed this particular kind of manhood as part and parcel of the talents NASA needed.”

I read
The Right Stuff
for the first time while I was researching my first novel. When I went back to the book before interviewing Serena Auñón, I found a note in the margin, in my own handwriting, that I didn’t remember writing: “A man is the opposite of a woman, and he is also the opposite of a monkey.” It was in a chapter about the astronauts’ medical testing at the Lovelace Clinic in Arizona. A monkey was going to make the first flight, attacking the definition of astronauts from one side; simultaneously, the definition was being attacked from the other side by women pilots who were demanding to know why they couldn’t be included in the space program.

A strange precedent had been set in the early days of the airplane—promoters had encouraged women to learn to fly and to do so publicly, with the idea that seeing a woman in lipstick and heels climb into a cockpit and fly away would encourage the public to think of aviation as easy and safe. As a result, there was an unexpectedly high number of very qualified women pilots around the time the Mercury astronauts were chosen, and some of the women wanted to go to space. A small group organized themselves to approach NASA.

The women were experienced pilots. Many of them had broken records; some had broken the sound barrier. Their efforts to get NASA to recognize them as potential astronaut candidates were met with evasion. When the women managed to gain access to the same rigorous physical and psychological testing the Mercury Seven had gone through at the Lovelace Clinic, thirteen of them passed. Some of the women beat records set by the men. By doing so, these thirteen women managed to create enough pressure that a congressional hearing was held to address the question of women joining the astronaut corps. In July 1962, only a few months after his triumphant orbital flight, John Glenn testified at the hearing and argued against the inclusion of women in space with a remarkable piece of circular logic: