A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts [1994] by Andrew Chaikin

Author:Andrew Chaikin [Chaikin, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Viking Books
Published: 1994-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

The Story of a Full-up Mission

APOLLO 14

I: Big Al Flies Again

Some memories are so bright that the passage of time cannot dim them. For Alan Bartlett Shepard, the brightest was May 5, 1961: On that Friday morning, while a nation watched and listened, he lay inside a tiny spacecraft called Freedom 7 atop a Redstone booster and waited to be hurled into space. The space program had suffered more than its share of failures, and images of exploding rockets were burned into the national psyche. The suspense was almost unbearable. This launch would give a badly needed boost to national morale and prestige—if Shepard wasn’t killed. As for Shepard himself, he had a different worry: he didn’t want to screw up.

Inside Freedom 7, Shepard fought nervousness by concentrating on his work. For hours the count was held up by one problem after another—first the weather, then technical difficulties—and Shepard’s mood turned impatient. With less than three minutes to go, minor trouble with the Redstone halted the count yet again. Over the radio Shepard could hear the engineers in the blockhouse, anxiously debating whether to postpone the launch, and what he said was the stuff of folklore: ‘Tm cooler than you are. Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?”

At 9:30 A.M. fire erupted from the Redstone and Shepard rose from the east coast of Florida and soared into a sunlit infinity. Fifteen minutes later, having arced like a guided cannonball to an altitude of 115 miles, Freedom 7 splashed down in the Atlantic, and a nation rejoiced. Within days Shepard stood in the White House rose garden to receive NASA's distinguished service medal from John F. Kennedy. Afterward, he rode in an open car down Pennsylvania Avenue, to the adulation of thousands. Sitting next to him, Vice President Lyndon Johnson was amazed. “Where did all these people come from? You're a famous man, Shepard."

Yes, he was a national hero, but the most precious thing Shepard gained that day wasn't glory—the true pilot, he would say years later, never does it for the fame—but the satisfaction of having been first. Fierce competition for the first Mercury flight—and with it, the chance to become the first man in space—had been an undercurrent in everything the Original 7 did. But the choice was up to their boss, Bob Gilruth, the soft-spoken head of the Space Task Group who thought of the astronauts as “his boys." One day Gilruth asked each of the Seven to conduct a peer vote: “If you yourself cannot be the one to make the first flight," he said, “who do you think it should be?" Shepard wondered if this was some kind of stunt dreamed up by the shrinks who had been part of the Seven's lives since the astronaut selection. There was actually a duty psychologist, Bob Voas, assigned to them; Shepard never did trust him.

Shepard had no idea whether the peer vote was important, but he didn't worry about it. There were no

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