"The Right Stuff" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Tom)

8 — The Thrones

In the eyes of the engineers assigned to Project Mercury the training of the astronauts would be the easy task on the list. Naturally you needed a man with the courage to ride on top of a rocket, and you were grateful that such men existed. Nevertheless, their training was not a very complicated business. The astronaut would have little to do in a Mercury flight except stand the strain, and the engineers had devised what psychologists referred to as "a graded series of exposures" to take care of that. No, the difficult, the challenging, the dramatic, the pioneering part of space flight, as the engineers saw it, was the technology.

It was only thanks to a recent invention, the high-speed electronic computer, that Project Mercury was feasible at all. There was an analogy here with the great Admiral of the Seas himself, Columbus. It was only thanks to a recent invention of his day, the magnetic compass, that Columbus had dared to sail across the Atlantic. Until then ships had stayed close to the great land masses for even the longest voyages. Likewise, putting a man into space the quick and dirty way without high-speed computers was unthinkable. Such computers had not been in production before 1951, and yet here it was, 1960 and engineers were already devising systems for guiding rockets into space, through the use of computers built into the engines and connected to accelerometers, for monitoring the temperature, pressure, oxygen supply, and other vital conditions of the Mercury capsule and for triggering safety procedures automatically—meaning they were creating, with computers, systems in which machines could communicate with one another, make decisions, take action, all with tremendous speed and accuracy…

Oh, genius-engineers!

Ah, yes, there was such a thing as self-esteem among engineers. It may not have been as grandiose as that of fighter jocks… nevertheless, many was the steaming enchephalitic summertime Saturday night at Langley when some NASA engineer would start knocking back that good sweet Virginia A.B.C. store bourbon on the patio and letting his ego out for a little romp, like a growling red dog.

The glorification of the astronauts had really gotten out of control! In the world of science—and Project Mercury was supposed to be a scientific enterprise—pure scientists ranked first and engineers ranked second and the test subjects of experiments ranked so low that one seldom thought about them. But here the test subjects… were national heroes! They created a zone of awe and reverence wherever they set foot! Everyone else, whether physicist, biologist, doctor, psychiatrist, or engineer, was a mere attendant.

At the outset it had been understood—it didn't even require comment—that the astronauts would be just that: test subjects in an experiment. Mercury was an adaptation of the Air Force's Man in Space Soonest concept, in which you would attach biosensors to your human subject, seal him up in a capsule, propel him into space ballistically—i.e., like an artillery shell—and bring him back to earth with completely automatic guidance and see how he made out. In November 1959, six months after the seven astronauts were chosen, Randy Lovelace and Scott Crossfield presented a paper at an aerospace medical symposium in which they said that biomedical research was "the sole purpose of the ride," so far as having an astronaut on board was concerned. They added that an aerodynamic space vehicle, such as the proposed X-15B or X-20, would require "a much more highly trained pilot." Since he was involved in the X-15 project, Crossfield had his own ax to grind, but what he and Lovelace were saying was perfectly obvious to any engineer who knew the difference between ballistic and aerodynamic space vehicles. In short, the astronaut in Project Mercury would not be a pilot under any conventional definition.

Even as late as the summer of 1960, at an Armed Forces-National Research Council conference- at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, on "the training of astronauts," various engineers and scientists from outside NASA thought nothing of describing the Mercury rocket-capsule vehicle as a fully automated system in which "the astronaut does not need to turn a hand." They would say, "The astronaut has been added to the system as a redundant component." (A redundant component!) If the automatic system broke down, he might step in as a repairman or manual conductor. Above all, of course, he would be wired with biosensors and a microphone to see how a human being responded to the stress of the flight. That would be his main function. There were psychologists who advised against using pilots at all—and this was more than a year after the famous Mercury Seven had been chosen. The pilot's, particularly the hot pilot's, main psychological bulwark under stress was his knowledge that he controlled the ship and could always do something ("I've tried A! I've tried B! I've tried C!"…). This obsession with active control, it was argued, would only tend to cause problems on Mercury flights. What was required was a man whose main talent was for doing nothing under stress. Some suggested using a new breed of military flier, the radar man, the Air Force Strategic Air Command radar observer or the Navy radar intercept officer, a man who had experience riding in the rear in high-performance aircraft under combat conditions and doing nothing but reading the radar, come what may, abandoning all control of the craft (and protection of his own life) to someone else, the pilot ("I looked over at Robinson—and he was staring at the radar like a zombie!"). An experienced zombie would do fine. In fact, considerable attention had been given to a plan to anesthetize or tranquillize the astronauts, not to keep them from panicking, but just to make sure they would lie there peacefully with their sensors on and not do something that would ruin the flight.

The scientists and engineers took it for granted that the training of the astronauts would be unlike anything ordinarily thought of as flight training. Flight training consisted of teaching a man how to take certain actions. He was taught how to control an unfamiliar craft or how to put a familiar craft through unfamiliar maneuvers, such as bombing runs or carrier landings. On the other hand, the only actions the astronauts would have to learn how to take would be to initiate the emergency procedures in the case of a bad rocket launch or a bad landing and to step in as a backup (redundant component) if the automatic control system failed to hold the heatshield in the correct position prior to re-entry through the earth's atmosphere. The astronaut would not be able to control the path or the speed of the capsule at all. A considerable part of his training would be what was known as de-conditioning, de-sensitizing, or adapting out fears. There was a principle in psychology that maintained that "bad habits, including overstrong emotionality, can be eliminated by a graded series of exposures to the anxiety-arousing stimulus." That was what much of astronaut training was to be. The rocket launch was regarded as a novel and possibly disorienting event, in part because the astronaut would have no control over it whatsoever. So they had devised "a graded series of exposures." They took the seven men to the Navy's human centrifuge facility in Johnsville, Pennsylvania. The centrifuge looked like a Wild Bolo ride; it had a fifty-foot arm with a cockpit, or gondola, on the end of it, and the arm could be whirled around at astonishing speeds, great enough to put up to 40 g's of pressure on the rider inside the gondola, one g being equal to the force of gravity. The high g-forces generated by combat aircraft in dives and turns during the Second World War had sometimes caused blackouts, red-outs, gray-outs, or made it impossible for pilots to lift their hands to the controls; the giant centrifuge at Johnsville had been built to explore this new problem of high-speed flight. By 1959 the machine had been computerized and turned into a simulator capable of duplicating the g-forces and accelerations of any form of flight, even rocket flight. The astronaut was helped into his full pressure suit, with his biosensors attached and his rectal thermometer inserted, and then placed into the gondola, in a contoured seat molded for his body, whereupon all the wires, hoses, and microphones he would have in actual flight were hooked up, and the gondola was depressurized to five pounds per square inch, as it would be in space flight. The interior of the gondola had been converted into a replica of the Mercury capsule's interior, with all the switches and console displays. The taped noise of an actual Redstone rocket firing was played over the astronaut's headset, and the ride began. Using the computers, the engineers would put the man through an entire Mercury flight profile. The centrifuge built up the g-forces at precisely the same rate they would build up in flight, up to six or seven g's, whereupon the g-forces would suddenly drop off, as they would in flight as the capsule went over the top of its arc, and the astronaut experienced a tumbling sensation, as he would, presumably, in flight. All the while the astronaut would be required to push a few switches, as he would in actual flight, and talk to a mock flight controller, forcing his words out into the microphone, no matter how great the pressure of the g-forces on his chest. The centrifuge could also duplicate the pressures of deceleration a man would experience during the return through the earth's atmosphere.

To get the seven men used to weightlessness, they took them on parabolic rides in the cargo holds of C-131 transports and backseat in F-100Fs. When the jet came up over the top of the arc of the parabola, the subject would experience from fifteen to forty-five seconds of weightlessness. This was the only flying scheduled for the astronauts' entire training program; and they were, of course, merely passengers on board, as they would be in the Mercury flights.

The only way the astronaut would be able to move the capsule in the slightest would be to fire hydrogen-peroxide thrusters during the interval of weightlessness, tipping or swinging the capsule this way or that, in order to get a particular view out the portholes, for example. NASA built a machine, the ALFA trainer, to accustom each trainee to the sensation. He sat in a seat resting on air bearings and used a hand controller to make it pitch up and down or yaw back and forth. On a screen in front of him, where the capsule's periscope screen would be, aerial photographs and films of the Cape, the Atlantic Ocean, Cuba, Grand Bahama Island, Abaco, all the landmarks, rolled by… and veered off as the astronaut pitched or yawed, just as they would in actual flight. The ALFA even made a whooshing sound like that of hydrogen-peroxide thrusters when the astronaut pushed the stick.

By mid-1960 the engineers had developed the "procedures trainer," which was in fact a simulator. There were identical procedures trainers at the Cape and at Langley. At the Cape the trainer was in Hangar S. It was there that the astronaut spent his long day's training. He climbed into a cubicle and sat in a seat that was aimed straight up at the roof. The back of the seat was flat on the floor of the cubicle, so that the astronaut rested on his back. He looked up at a replica of a console that would be used in the Mercury capsule. It was as if he were on top of the rocket, with his face aimed at the sky. The console was wired to a bank of computers. About twenty feet behind the astronaut, on the floor of Hangar S, sat a technician at another console, feeding simulated problems into the system. The technician would start off saying, "Count is at T minus fifty seconds and counting."

From inside the trainer, over his microphone, the astronaut would answer: "Roger."

"Check your periscope—fully retracted?"

"Periscope retracted."

"Ready switch on?"

"Ready switch on."

"T minus ten seconds. Minus eight… seven—six… five… four… three… two… one… Fire!"

Inside the trainer the dials in front of the astronaut would start indicating that he was on his way, and he was supposed to start reading the gauges and reporting to the ground. He would say, "Clock is operating… okay, twenty seconds… one thousand feet [altitude]… one-point-five g's… Trajectory is good… Twelve thousand feet, one-point-nine g's… Inner cabin pressure is five p.s.i… Altitude forty-four thousand, g-level two-point-seven… one hundred thousand feet at two minutes and five seconds…" The instructor might pick this point to hit a button on his console marked "oxygen." A red warning light marked O₂EMERG would light up, and the astronaut would say: "Cabin pressure decreasing!… Oxygen is apparently leaking!… It's still leaking… Switching to emergency reserve…" The astronaut could throw a switch that brought more oxygen into the simulator system—i.e., into its computer calculations—but the instructor could hit his "oxygen" button again, and that meant that the leak was continuing, and the astronaut would say: "Still leaking… It's approaching zero-flow rate… Abort because of oxygen leak! Abort! Abort!" Then the astronaut would hit a button, and a button marked MAYDAY would light up red on the instructor's console. In actual flight the escape tower was supposed to fire at this point, pulling the capsule free of the rocket and bringing it down by parachute.

The astronauts spent so much time hitting the abort handle in the procedures trainer that it got to the point where it seemed as if they were training for an abort rather than for a launch. There was very little action that an astronaut could take in a Mercury capsule, other than to abort the flight and save his own life. So he was not being trained to fly the capsule. He was being trained to ride in it. In a "graded series of exposures" he was being introduced to all sights, sounds, and sensations he might conceivably experience. Then he was reintroduced to them, day after day, until the Mercury capsule and all its hums, g-forces, window views, panel displays, lights, buttons, switches, and peroxide squirts became as familiar, as routine, as workaday as an office. All flight training had a certain amount of desensitizing built into it. When a Navy pilot practiced carrier landings on the outline of a flight deck painted on an airfield, it was hoped that the maneuver might also desensitize his normal fear of landing a hurtling machine in such a small space. Nevertheless, he was there chiefly in order to learn to land the machine. Not until Project Mercury had there been a flight training program so long and detailed, so sophisticated, and yet so heavily devoted to desensitizing the trainee, to adapting out man's ordinary fears, and enabling one to think and use his hands normally in a novel environment.

Oh, all of this had been well known at the outset!… so much so that the original NASA selection committee had been afraid that the military test pilots they were interviewing would regard the job as boring or distasteful. Since they figured they needed six astronauts for Mercury, they had considered training twelve—on the assumption that half of them would resign once they fully understood how passive their role would be. And now, in 1960, they began to realize that they had been correct; or halfway, in any case. The boys were, indeed, finding the role of biomedical passenger in an automated pod, i.e., the role of human guinea pig, distasteful. That much had proved to be true. The boys' response, however, had not been resignation or anything close to it. No, the engineers now looked on, eyebrows arched, as the guinea pigs set about… altering the experiment.

The difference between pilot and passenger in any flying craft came down to one point: control. The boys were able to present some practical, workmanlike arguments on this score. Even if an astronaut were to be a redundant component, an observer and repairman, he should be able to override any of the Mercury vehicle's automatic systems manually, if only to correct malfunctions. So went the argument. But there was another argument that could not be put into so many words, since one was forbidden to state the premise itself: the right stuff.

After all, the right stuff was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life (by riding on top of a Redstone or Atlas rocket). Any fool could do that (and many fools would no doubt volunteer, given the opportunity), just as any fool could throw his life away in the process. No, the idea (as all pilots understood) was that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back at the last yawning moment—but how in the name of God could you either hang it out or haul it back if you were a lab animal sealed in a pod?

Every signal they received told the boys that the true brethren at Edwards looked upon them as glorified "klutzes," to use Wally Schirra's phrase. Schirra knew the Edwards outlook in such matters well enough. He had done some major testing of the F-4H at Edwards for the Navy in 1956. But it was Deke Slayton who felt the condescension of the brethren most of all. He had come into Project Mercury straight from Fighter Ops at Edwards, and his pals there kidded him unmercifully. "A monkey's gonna make the first flight." That was the typical refrain. When the boys went to Edwards for their briefings on the X-15 program and their weightless parabolas—riding backseat with Edwards pilots—they picked up a whiff of… contempt… It hadn't helped any that Scott Carpenter and a couple of the others had taken over the controls on the F-100Fs and tried to fly the weightless parabolas from the front seat… and had failed. They hadn't been able to fly the correct profile and produce the weightless interval. Of course, with a little practice they could have no doubt mastered it… Nevertheless!… Rightly or wrongly, some of the boys felt that rocket pilots like Crossfield were high-hatting them. And what about the Society of Experimental Test Pilots? The SETP was the main organization within the fraternity. Several of the boys didn't even qualify for membership. The SETP required that a member have at least twelve months' experience in the first flights of new aircraft, probing the outer limits of the envelope. The SETP was not about to accept astronauts until they had done a hell of a lot more than volunteer for Mercury and sign a contract with Life. On the upper elevations of the pyramid the brave lads—they could sense it—were viewed as seven green rookies; and all the while there was the infuriating question: "Are astronauts even pilots?"

Deke Slayton, who was a member of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, had been invited to address the annual conference in Los Angeles in September 1959 on that very subject: the role of the astronaut in Project Mercury. The meeting happened to come just two weeks after Life had started its sunburst of stories categorizing the seven astronauts as the best and bravest pilots in American history. No reader of Life would have recognized the Deke Slayton who went to the podium in a hotel convention hall to speak to the brotherhood. From the start his tone was defensive. He said he had some "stubborn, frank" comments on the role of the pilot in Project Mercury. There were people in the military, he said, who wondered "whether a college-trained chimpanzee or the village idiot might not do as well in space as an experienced test pilot." (A monkey's gonna make the first flight!) He knew there was that kind of talk going around, and it annoyed him. These people were confusing Mercury "with the Air Force Man in Space Soonest or Army Adam programs, which were essentially man-in-a-barrel approaches." His audience looked at him blankly, since such had been precisely the origin of the Mercury program. "I hate to hear anyone contend that present-day pilots have no place in the space age and that non-pilots can perform the space mission effectively," he said. "If this were true, the aircraft driver could count himself among the dinosaurs not too many years hence." That was hardly likely, he went on. A non-pilot might be able to do part of the job. But in those critical moments when it was necessary to keep your head and make observations and record data while cantilevered out over the bottomless Gulp… who else could cope with it but someone made of the stuff of the professional test pilot?

Slayton possessed a forcefulness that people often failed to detect at first. His remarks may not have convinced many skeptics within the Society of Experimental Test Pilots. Nevertheless, they became, in effect, the keynote address of the campaign that began inside NASA.

By now, September 1959, Slayton and the rest of them realized that, as Glenn had first divined, the astronaut corps was like a new branch of the service and that in this new branch no one outranked them. Certainly Robert Voas didn't outrank them. Voas was a Navy lieutenant who had been designated as the astronauts' training officer. Voas was neither a flight instructor nor an aeronautical engineer but an industrial psychologist who had been chosen precisely because the training of astronauts was regarded not as a form of pilot training but as a form of psychological adaptation. Voas was no older than they and ranked below them even in the regular military; so one of the boys' first moves was to see that Voas, as training officer, functioned more like a trainer on a sports team and, in any case, not like the coach. They began telling him what their training schedule was going to be. Voas became a coordinator and spokesman for the astronauts in matters of training.

Gordon Cooper had been frowned upon a few months before when he complained about the lack of supersonic fighter planes for "proficiency" flying, but now the boys took up his complaint within the corridors of NASA, with Slayton and Schirra leading the way and Voas arguing their case for them. Soon they had two F-102s on loan from the Air Force. The ships were somewhat the worse for wear, however—absolute junkers, in fact, in the eyes of the seven pilots. The Air Force had sloughed these wrecks off on them like hand-me-downs. The poor condition of the F-102s wasn't the worst of it, however. The galling thing was that the F-102, which had been one of the first in the Century series, was by now a back number. It would go supersonic but just barely, Mach 1.25 being about top speed. Wally Schirra knew how to formulate the argument on this score. Wally was not merely an expert prankster; he could also turn stern and bang the table and conjure up the aura of the right stuff and its privileges and prerequisites without once uttering the unspoken things. Wally would say to the brass: You're presenting us to the American people as the seven best test pilots in America, and we are among the best, all the p.r. aside, and yet you're not even giving us the opportunity to keep up our proficiency! Before I joined this program I was flying fighter aircraft capable of Mach 2 or better. And now we're supposed to keep up our proficiency with a couple of old clunkers that will hardly go Mach 1 even when they're in half-decent shape. It doesn't make any sense! It's as if you decided to prepare a major-league ball club for World Series competition by having them take a year off to play against a bunch of old crocks in a Parks amp; Recreation league in south Jersey. Wally was terrific in moments like this; and by and by, the boys would get a couple of F-106s, which were second-generation F-102s and capable of Mach 2.3. In the meantime, they tried to make do with the F-102s. But, hell, even flying F-102s was a big step beyond the original training agenda—which assumed that proficiency flights of whatever sort would be of no use for the astronaut in Project Mercury. Nor had this assumption yet died, Wally and Deke or no Wally and Deke.

At the Woods Hole conference Voas described the advantages of the F-102 flights in sustaining the astronauts' "decision-making abilities," and an aviation psychologist from the University of Illinois, Jack A. Adams, could scarcely believe what he was hearing.

"Frankly," he said, "I cannot see how decision making, or any other type of response, for that matter, in the F-102 can transfer significantly to the comparatively unique responding required of the astronaut in the Mercury vehicle." Then he added: "The astronaut's task is actually more like a radar observer's job than a pilot's." Another aviation psychologist, Judson Brown of the University of Florida, was just as baffled: "It has been frequently mentioned that skilled pilots must be used for Mercury, for the X-15, and the Dyna-Soar projects. Clearly, the use of skilled pilots seems to be of much less importance for Mercury than for the other two. There is a serious question whether positive transfer will occur from pilot training to Mercury capsule operation."

Inside NASA, however, this position was no longer tenable. From a sheerly political or public relations standpoint, the astronaut was NASA's prize possession, and the seven Mercury astronauts had been presented to the public and the Congress as great pilots, not as test subjects. If they now insisted on being pilots, great or otherwise—who was going to step in and say no? The boys sensed this; or as Wally Schirra put it, they realized they had "a fair amount of prestige around the country." So next they began whittling down the number of medical and scientific experiments they were expected to take part in—the guinea-pig stuff—simply by characterizing them as useless or stupid and cutting them out of their schedules. Here they tended to have the support of Gilruth's chief of operations, Walt Williams. Williams was a big hearty powerful-looking engineer who had been one of the true geniuses of the X series at Edwards, the man who had turned supersonic flight test into a precise and rational science. Williams was a flight-line engineer; he didn't have much patience with matters of flight test that were not operational. The one engineer who didn't mind letting it be known that Astropower, as it came to be called, was getting out of hand was one of Williams's lieutenants, Christopher Columbus Kraft, Jr. Chris Kraft was a hard-driving young man, thirty-six years old, urbane and sharp-witted, as aeronautical engineers went, and he was scheduled to be flight director for Mercury; but he didn't yet have the clout to do much of anything where the astronauts were concerned. The seven men pressed on. They were tired of the designation of "capsule" for the Mercury vehicle. The term as much as declared that the man inside was not a pilot but an experimental animal in a pod. Gradually, everybody began trying to work the term "spacecraft" into NASA publications and syllabuses. Next the men raised the question of a cockpit window for the spacecraft. As it was now designed, the Mercury capsule had no window, just a small porthole on either side of the astronaut's head. His main way of seeing the outside world would be through a periscope. A window had been regarded as an unnecessary way of inviting rupture due to changes in pressure. Now the astronauts insisted on a window. So the engineers went to work designing a window. Next the men insisted on a hatch they could open by themselves. The hatch, as currently designed, would be bolted shut by the ground crew. In order to leave the capsule after splashing down, the astronaut would either have to slither out through the neck, as if he were coming out of a bottle, or wait for another crew to unbolt the hatch from the outside. So the engineers went to work designing a hatch with explosive bolts so that the astronaut could blow it off by hitting a detonator. It was too late to incorporate the new items into the capsule—the spacecraft—that would be used for the first Mercury flight. That vehicle was already badly behind schedule as it was. But they would be in each craft thereafter…

And why? Because pilots had windows in their cockpits and hatches they could open on their own. That was what it was all about: being a pilot as opposed to a guinea pig. The men hadn't stopped with the window and the hatch, either. Not for a moment. Now they wanted… manual control of the rocket! They weren't kidding! This was to take the form of an override system: if the astronaut believed, in his judgment, as captain of the ship (not capsule), that the booster rocket engine was malfunctioning, he could take over and guide it himself—like any proper pilot.

How could they be serious!—the engineers would say. Any chance of a man being able to guide a rocket from inside a ballistic vehicle, a projectile, was so remote as to be laughable. This proposal was so radical the engineers knew they would be able to block it. It was no laughing matter to the seven pilots, however. They also wanted complete control of the re-entry procedure. They wanted to establish the capsule's angle of attack manually and fire the retro-rockets themselves without any help from the automatic control system. This suggestion made the engineers wince. Slayton even wanted to redesign the hand controller that would activate the hydrogen peroxide thrusters to make the capsule pitch, roll, or yaw. He wanted the hand controller to operate the pitch and roll thrusters only; yaw would be controlled by pedals which the astronaut would operate with his feet. That was the conventional setup on aircraft: a two-axis stick plus pedals. That was the way pilots established attitude control.

Life magazine and the worshipful public and the worshipful politicians and all the others who had already exalted the seven astronauts did not care in the slightest whether they functioned like pilots or not. It was enough that they were willing to climb atop the rocket at all, in the name of the battle with the Soviets for the high ground, and be exploded into space or to the harp farm. It was not enough for the men themselves, however. All of them were veteran military pilots, and five of them had already reached the higher elevations of the invisible ziggurat when Project Mercury began, and they were determined to go into space as pilots and as nothing else.

Control—in the form of overrides at the very least—was the one thing that would neutralize the recurring taunt within the fraternity: A monkey's gonna make the first flight. In his speech before the brotherhood Slayton had brought that out into the open with his crack about the "college-trained chimpanzee." That had seemed like a Slayton sortie into sarcasm and hyperbole. He made no reference to the fact that such a college actually existed.

But in the deserts of New Mexico, about eighty miles north of El Paso and the Mexican Border, at Holloman Air Force Base, which was part of the White Sands missile-range complex, NASA had set up a Project Mercury chimpanzee colony. There was nothing secret about it, but it attracted little notice. The chimpanzee program had been devised mainly to satisfy "the medical Cassandras." From the moment a Joint Armed Forces-National Research Council Committee on Bioastronautics had visited the new NASA facility at Langley in January 1959, there had been doctors warning that the weightless state or high g-forces, or both, could be devastating and that animal flights should be mandatory. So NASA had twenty veterinarians training forty chimpanzees in a compound at the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman. Eventually one of the beasts would be chosen for what amounted to a dress rehearsal of the first manned flight. The idea would be not only to see if the chimpanzee could stand the strain but also to see if he could use his brain and his hands normally throughout the ride.

Chimpanzees were chosen as much for their intelligence as their physiological similarity to humans. They could be trained to do fairly complex manual tasks, on cue, particularly if one got hold of them when they were young. Once they were trained to do the tasks on the ground, it would be possible to give them the cues to do the same tasks during a space flight and see if the weightless condition impeded them. Early in the game the vets decided that rewards, mere positive reinforcement, would not be sufficient for the job at hand. The only sure-fire training technique was operant conditioning. The principle here was the avoidance of pain. Or, to put it another way, if the ape didn't do the job right, he was punished with electric shocks in the soles of his feet.

The Holloman veterinarians, like most veterinarians, were compassionate men who were interested in relieving pain in animals and not in inflicting it upon them. But this was war! The chimpanzee program was an essential part of the battle for the high ground! It was no time for halfway measures! As congressmen told you every day, national survival was at stake! The veterinarians' brief was to get the job done with the utmost speed and efficacy. There were several ways of training animals, but only operant conditioning, based on concepts developed by B. F. Skinner, seemed anywhere near foolproof. In any case, the "psychomotor stimulus plates" were attached to the beasts' feet and they were strapped into chairs, and the process began… And when the apes did well, you gave them hugs and nuzzles, to be sure, first taking the precaution of making certain they weren't in a mood to bite your goddamned nose off.

Oh, the apes knew a thing or two! Their intelligence was only just below that of man. They had memories; they could figure out the situation. At an early age they had been seized in West Africa and separated from their mothers by this new species, the humans, and removed from all familiar surroundings and put in cages and shipped to this godforsaken alien landscape, the New Mexico desert, where they remained in cages… when they weren't in the hands of a bunch of human ball-breakers in white smocks who strapped them down and zapped them and put them through insane exercises and routines. The beasts tried everything they could think of to escape. They snapped, snarled, spit, bit, thrashed at the straps, and made runs for it. Or they bided their time and used their heads. They would go along with a training task, seeming to cooperate, until the white smocker seemed to let his guard down—then they'd make a break for it. But the resistance and the wiles were of no avail. All they got for their struggles was more zaps and blue bolts. Some of the brightest apes were also the most intractable and resourceful; they would take the electric shocks and then seem to give up and submit to fate—and then try to tear the white smockers a new asshole or two and make a run for it. With these implacable little bastards it was sometimes necessary to give them a tap or two with a rubber hose, or whatever.

Then, at last, the sophisticated part of the training could begin. It took two main forms: the desensitizing or adapting out of the fears that a rocket flight would ordinarily hold for the animal (just confining an untrained chimpanzee in a Mercury capsule would have driven him berserk with fear); and placing the animal in a procedures trainer, a replica of the capsule he would be inside in flight, and teaching him to respond to lights and buzzers and throw the proper switches on cue—and having him do this day after day until it became a thoroughly familiar environment, as familiar, routine, and workaday as an office.

The vets took the chimpanzees by airplane to Wright-Patterson for rides on the centrifuge the Air Force had there. They would strap each ape into the gondola, close the hatch, and pipe in the sound of a Redstone rocket launch and start him spinning, gradually introducing him to higher g-forces. They took them for parabolic rides backseat in fighter planes to familiarize them with the feeling of weightlessness. They put them in the simulator for endless hours and endless days of on-cue manual-task training. Since the chimpanzee would not be wearing a pressure suit in flight, he was put inside a pressurized cubicle, which in turn would be placed in the Mercury capsule. The monkey's instrument panel was inside the inner cubicle. Therein, day by day, month by month, the monkey learned to operate certain switches in different sequences when cued by flashing lights. If he did the job incorrectly, he received an electric shock. If he did it correctly, he received banana-flavored pellets, plus some attaboys and nuzzles from the vets. Gradually the beasts were worn down. They were tractable now. The operant conditioning was taking place. A life of avoiding the blue bolts and gratefully accepting the attaboys and pellets had become the better part of valor. Rebellion had proved to be a dead end.

The apes had begun their training at the same time as the astronauts, i.e., in the late spring of 1959. By now, 1960, they had been through almost every phase of astronaut training, other than abort and re-entry emergency sequences and attitude control.

Some of the apes could operate their procedures trainer like a breeze, almost as rapidly as a man. The vets had every reason to be proud of what they had accomplished. On the outside the animals were as mild, tractable, smart, and lovable as the best little boy on the block, although inside… something was building up like Code Blue in the boiler room.

About eight hundred miles west of Holloman Air Force Base, in the same latitude of the great American desert, was Edwards. The X-15 program had begun to pick up some momentum. There were even journalists coming to Edwards—in the midst of this, the Era of the Astronaut—and talking about the X-15 as "America's first spaceship." There were two men on hand at the base writing books about the project; one of them was Richard Tregaskis, who had written the best seller Guadalcanal Diary. The X-15, America's first spaceship… could it be? A year ago it would have seemed impossible. But now the Mercury program was beginning to lag. NASA had talked of making the first manned flight in mid-1960; well, it was now mid-1960, and they didn't even have the capsule ready for unmanned testing.

NASA's prime pilot for the X-15 project was Joe Walker. He looked like a young towheaded version of Chuck Yeager, the country boy who loved to fly. He talked like Yeager. Well, hell, who didn't around here? But with Walker it came naturally. Just as Yeager was from the coal country of West Virginia, Walker was from the coal country of Pennsylvania, and Walker liked to do that Yeager thing where you mixed up a lot of up-hollow talk—"The mother liked to blowed up on me"—with postwar engineerese about parameters, inputs, and extrapolations. As a matter of fact, Yeager had let it be known that he thought Walker was the pick of the litter at Edwards now.

Yes, Walker looked and sounded like a younger version of Yeager—but in fact he was two years older. Yeager was still only thirty-seven, and Walker was thirty-nine. Walker was seven months older than Scott Crossfield. So aside from everything else, Walker didn't have time to cool his heels. If the X-15 and X-20 programs at Edwards got stalled while all the money and attention went to Project Mercury, it would be bad news.

Edwards had grown until it was about twenty times the size it was during the heyday of Yeager. Pancho Barnes's Happy Bottom Riding Club was long gone. The Air Force had taken her property by eminent domain for the building of a new runway. There had been a bitter fight in court, during which a base commander had accused Pancho of running a whorehouse, and Pancho had told the court that she had it on good authority that the old peckerwood had instructed his pilots to accidentally-on-purpose napalm her ranch. Pancho had gone into retirement, with her fourth husband, her erstwhile ranch foreman, over in the town of Boron, to the northeast of the base.

There were now about three thousand Air Force personnel at Edwards and about seven thousand civilians, some with NASA, including Walker himself. Yet the high desert was so vast and so open that it swallowed up all ten thousand of them with no trouble at all, and the place didn't look terribly different except during the afternoon traffic jam, when all the civil servants got off work and sped toward the air conditioners that awaited them in their tract homes. Walker and his wife and two children lived in Lancaster, a desert town about a half hour's drive west of Edwards. Walker had built a house in a tract that some inspired developer—inspiration was the choicest item in the real-estate boom of the period—had named White Fence Farms. You had to build a white fence around your house in order to live there. That he did. As for the Farm part—here you had yourself a problem, unless you farmed Joshua trees. The developer's idea, in his sales pitch, was that you could build chicken coops at the rear end of your lot and have a second income.

At that, Walker's place looked like a little bit of heaven compared to Bob White's. But then, on the surface, Walker and White were different in every respect. White, who was a major, was the Air Force's prime pilot for the X-15 project. He was the eternally correct and reserved Air Force blue-suiter. He didn't drink. He exercised like a college athlete in training. He was religious. He was an usher in the Roman Catholic chapel of the base and never, but never, missed Mass. He was slender, black-haired, handsome, intelligent—even cultivated, if the truth were known. And he was terribly serious. He was not a beer-call fighter jock. Not many people picked out Bob White to just shoot the breeze with. White and his family lived on the base itself at 116 Thirteenth Street in a miserable grid of military housing plots known as the Wherry housing section. Or it had been known as Wherry at the outset. By 1960 it was usually referred to as Weary housing. Children grew up there thinking that Weary housing was the real name. Parked out front of White's place was an unpainted Model A Ford. The Air Force, being the newest branch of the service, was strong on instant tradition. This old junker, the Ford, was bestowed, as an ironic sculpture of the Right Stuff, upon whomever was the number-one Air Force test pilot at Edwards. Scott Crossfield, the prime pilot for the manufacturer, North American, had completed the first phase of testing the X-15, checking out the power system and basic aerodynamics. White and Walker had been chosen to push the rocket plane to its outer limits, which were envisioned as speeds in excess of Mach 6, or about 4,000 miles per hour, and, more important, an altitude of 280,000 feet. Just where "space" began was a matter of definition that had never been fully resolved. But fifty miles up was generally accepted as the boundary line. There was very little atmosphere left at that altitude; in fact, once a ship reached 100,000 feet, there was not enough air remaining to provide aerodynamics. The X-15's target of 280,000 feet was 53 miles up.

White and Walker had begun to fly the X-15 with the so-called Little Engine. This was, in fact, two X-1 engines built into a single fuselage. They provided 16,000 pounds of thrust. The X-15 was the most evil-looking beast ever put into the air. It was a 7.5-ton black chimney with little fins on it and an enormous blocky tail. The black paint had been created to withstand the heat generated by friction when the ship went up above 100,000 feet and re-entered the denser atmosphere below. Everyone was waiting for the delivery of the Big Engine, the XLR-99. This was a rocket with 57,000 pounds of thrust, or four times the base weight of the ship. Once the XLR-99 was installed… well, Walker just might become the first man to cross the boundary into space. The engine's 57,000 pounds of thrust were only 21,000 pounds less than that of the Redstone rocket, which—eventually—was supposed to take the astronauts on their first flights. As a matter of fact, it was the development of the Redstone as a missile that had first given NASA engineers like Walt Williams the idea for the X-15, back in the early 1950's.

How, then, could there be so much excitement over Project Mercury and so little over the X-15? Here was the thing that got to the boys after a while, no matter how nonchalant they tried to appear: the Mercury astronauts were national heroes without ever having left the ground—all because they had volunteered to ride on top of rockets. Well… Walker and White and Crossfield, like Yeager before them, had already ridden rockets, from the X-1 to the X-15. And they had ridden them as pilots. Your own brain was the guidance system for the X-15, and your own hand maneuvered the ship. In the Mercury-Redstone system, a bank of computers was the pilot, and the astronaut was a passenger. Why couldn't everyone comprehend such a simple fact? Was it because the astronauts were seen as America's front runners in the race with the Russians? Well, if so, that was pretty ironic. By now, mid-1960, the astronauts were supposed to have gone up in their first ballistic flights. That was the whole point of choosing the Mercury system. It was dirty—but it was quick; supposedly. But the Mercury capsule wasn't even ready yet. There had been one delay after another. It was beginning to look unlikely that there would be a manned launch before 1961. The X-15 project was now actually ahead of Project Mercury in the attempt to reach space.

On May 7 Walker had cut loose the X-15 on its first real speed run with the Little Engine and reached Mach 3.19 or 2,111 miles an hour, just a shade faster than Mel Apt's world record of 2,094 miles an hour in the X-2. On May 19 Bob White took the X-15 on its first bid for maximum altitude with the Little Engine and reached 109,000 feet, which was 17,000 feet under Iven Kincheloe's record in the X-2. And that was another point that everybody should have known about… and didn't. Kinch and Mel were now dead. Mel Apt died just a few minutes after he set his world speed record, the victim of a demon that was waiting especially for rocket ships reaching speeds of Mach 2 or more in the thin air up around, 70,000 feet: instability in the yaw or roll axis… followed by an uncontrollable tumble. Sometimes it took the form of "inertia coupling," which usually occurred when a pilot tried to bank a rocket ship and it snapped into a full roll and then began pitching and yawing—and rolling violently. This would throw it end over end. Some pilots felt that the formal term "inertia coupling" added damned little to your understanding of the phenomenon. The ship simply "uncorked" (as Crossfield liked to put it) and lost all semblance of aerodynamics and fell out of the sky like a bottle or a length of pipe. There was no way to maneuver out of a rocket-plane tumble. The pilot took a furious beating from the g-forces and from being thrown about the cockpit. The more he experimented with the controls, the worse fix he was in. Yeager had been the first rocket pilot to go through this particular hole in the supersonic envelope, and it was during the flight in the X-1A in which he set a speed record of Mach 2.42. He was battered unconscious and fell seven miles before hitting the denser atmosphere at 25,000 feet and coming to and managing to put the ship into a spin. That was good; a mere spin he knew how to get out of, and he survived. Kinch went into a tumble during his record flight and came out of it at low altitude, as Yeager had done. That was just twenty days before Mel Apt augered in. Mel went into the wild tumble and tried to eject, but wasn't able to complete the sequence in the X-2. Yeager had always figured it was useless to try to punch out of a rocket plane. Crossfield called it "committing suicide to keep from getting killed." Inertia coupling nearly killed Kit Murray in 1954, when he set an altitude record of 94,000 feet in the X-1A, and it had hit Joe Walker twice, once in the XF-102 and again in the X-3.

When he talked about it, Joe Walker would say he got out of it each time through "the J.C. maneuver." He'd say: "In the J.C. maneuver you take your hands off the controls and put the mother in the lap of a su-per-na-tu-ral power." And, in fact, that was the only choice you had.

The way Walker talked about it, with his big mountainboy grin on, it was… just like talking about sports… But every prospective X-15 pilot had seen the on-board film from Mel Apt's flight, and it was not a droll experience to watch that film. The camera had been mounted just behind Apt in the cockpit. It was a stop-frame camera that took one picture per second. In one frame Apt and his white helmet would be upright in the cockpit. In the next you would see his head, body, and helmet keeled over, crashing into the wall of the cockpit. In the first you saw a mountain ridge framed in the cockpit window, as if he were headed down in a dive, and in the next you saw empty sky: he was going end over end like an extra-point kick. The film seemed to go on forever. It was eerie looking at it, because you knew that at the end that little figure bouncing around in the white helmet would be dead.

Life magazine was writing about how Deke Slayton had once been in an inverted spin in an F-105. No picnic, to be sure, and yet the rocket pilots looked at inverted spins as their friends on the way out of supersonic instability. People were impressed because the seven Mercury astronauts were willing to risk having Redstone rockets blow up under them. Christ! Rockets had already blown up under good men! Skip Ziegler's X-2 exploded while still attached to the mother ship, a B-29, killing Skip and a B-29 crewman. The same thing had very nearly happened to Pete Everest in the X-1D—and to Walker himself in the X-1A. Walker was strapped into the X-1A, under the bomb bay of a B-29, at 35,000 feet, seventy seconds from launch, when a fuel tank exploded in the rear of the rocket plane. Walker got out, climbed back up into the B-29, passed out from lack of oxygen, was revived by a "walk-around" oxygen bottle, went back down into the burning X-1A, and tried to jettison the rest of the fuel so as to prevent both ships, the X-1A and the B—29, from burning up. The rocket plane was finally dropped, like a bomb, over the desert. Walker received the Distinguished Service Medal for his trip back into the burning ship.

That was back to August of 1955, and the newspapers talked about it for a little while, but now no one remembered, or comprehended, that all of these things had been adventures in manned rocket flight. With the Big Engine already on the way, the XLR-99—well, it was likely that if NASA would just pour the money and personnel and emphasis into the X-15 project and the X-20 project, the United States could have orbiting spacecraft in reasonably short order. Ships, vehicles with a pilot who took them aloft and brought them back through the atmosphere with his own hand and then landed them… on the dome of the world, at Edwards. It wasn't merely that the Mercury plan of a man in a pod splashing down in the middle of the ocean under a parachute was "dirty," primitive, and an embarrassing way for a pilot to come down, as the Edwards pilots saw it. It was also needlessly dangerous. A slight error in trajectory or timing and he might hit the water scores or hundreds of miles off target; and any man who had ever flown a search plane knew how hopeless it could be to spot a small object in the open sea, particularly in bad weather.

It could even be argued that the X-15 pilots were a year or so ahead of the astronauts when it came to training for space flight. The Mercury training program had borrowed a lot of X-15 training—without flying. Each X-15 flight was so expensive—about $100,000 if you figured in the time and wages of all the support personnel—it was impractical to have a pilot use the X-15 itself for his basic training. Using the new piece of engineering technology, the computer, NASA built the first full-scale flight simulator. The realism of it was uncanny. Of course, they couldn't simulate the g-forces of rocket flight—so they had dreamed up the idea of using the Navy's human centrifuge at Johnsville.

Up above the centrifuge arm there was a balcony, and this balcony was known as the Throne Room, because arrayed upon it was a lineup of green plastic seats with high backs. Each had been custom-made, molded to the contours of the torsos and legs of a rocket pilot. Each had his name on it: "A. Crossfield" (Scott Crossfield's first name was Albert), "J. Walker." "R. White." "R. Rush-worth." "F. Petersen." "N. Armstrong," and so forth. They looked like royal mummies when they were lined up like that, and they were already there in the Throne Room when the shells of "J. Glenn." "A. Shepard." "W. Schirra," and the four others joined the tableau. The astronauts took centrifuge training that had first been worked out for Walker and the X-15 pilots. The astronauts' procedures trainer was a modified version of the X-15 simulator. NASA even rigged up an inertia-coupling trainer for the astronauts, a device called the Wild Mastiff that spun you in all three axes, pitch, roll, and yaw, at once; but the ride was so horrendous it wasn't used much. Joe Walker amp; Co. had taken that ride in real time… at altitude… And where did the astronauts go for their parabolic rides in the F-100Fs, to experience weightlessness? To Edwards. Chuck Yeager himself had flown the first weightless parabolas for the Air Force, and then Crossfield had flown them for NASA. Edwards pilots took the astronauts up in the back seat.

For the most part, the men involved in the X-15 program were realistic about the situation. Technically there was no reason why the X-15 should not lead to the X-15B or the X-20 or some other aerodynamic spaceship. Politically, however, the chances were not good and hadn't been good since October 1957, when Sputnik 1 went up. The politics of the space race demanded a small manned vehicle that could be launched as soon as possible with existing rocket power. And as the Edwards brethren knew, there was no use trying to wish the politics of the situation away.

But now, in mid-1960, the political reality itself had begun to change. The first signs had come in May. This was the same month, it so happened, in which Walker and White had begun to unlimber the X-15 and the Little Engine. But the change was being caused by events quite outside of their control.

The starting point was the so-called U-2 incident. A Soviet surface-to-air missile—no one even knew the Soviets had created such a weapon—shot down an American CIA "spy plane," the U-2, flown by a former Air Force pilot named Francis Gary Powers. Khrushchev used the incident to humiliate President Eisenhower at a summit conference in Paris. This was an election year, of course, and both of the main Democratic contenders, Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy, began citing the Soviets' superiority in rockets as a means of attacking the Eisenhower Administration. Meanwhile, the Soviets and their mighty Integral began pouring it on in earnest. They sent up a series of huge, five-ton Korabl ("Cosmic") Sputniks, carrying dummy cosmonauts or dogs or both; they obviously had a system powerful enough and sophisticated enough to put a man into orbit. NASA was not only unable to keep up with its original schedule of a manned ballistic flight in 1960, it couldn't even deliver a finished capsule—and its test rocket launches, all public events, went from bad to worse.

On July 29, NASA brought the seven astronauts and hundreds of VIPs to Cape Canaveral for a highly publicized first test of the Mercury-Atlas vehicle, a Mercury capsule atop an Atlas rocket. The Atlas, with its 367,000 pounds of thrust, would be used for manned orbital flights; the first Mercury flights, which would be suborbital, would use the smaller Redstone. July 29 was a dark rainy day, which only made the lift-off of the mighty rocket all the more spectacular. The earth rumbled underfoot, and the rocket rose slowly on three columns of flame. It was a terrific show. After sixty seconds it seemed to be directly overhead and gradually nosing over on its long arc toward the horizon, and the astronauts and everybody else had their necks up and their heads bent back, watching the Ahura-Mazda surge, when—kaboom!—it blew up. Just like that, right over their heads. For a moment it seemed as if it was going to come down in a few thousand enormous flaming pieces, right on everybody's bean. There was no danger, in fact; the rocket's momentum carried the debris away from the launch site. It was damned sobering, however, with your gullet stuck up in the air like a bird's… And it was very bad news for Project Mercury.

It was not the ultimate fiasco, however. The ultimate fiasco came later in the year when NASA put on a test at Cape Canaveral designed to show all the politicians that the Mercury capsule-and-rocket system was now almost ready for manned flight. They flew five hundred VIPs, including many congressmen and prominent Democrats, down to the Cape for the big event. The rocket, the Redstone, was not powerful enough to place the capsule into orbit, but it was supposed to take it up more than one hundred miles, fifty miles above the earth's atmosphere, and then it would re-enter the atmosphere and splash down in the Atlantic by parachute about three hundred miles from the Cape, near Bermuda. Everything except an astronaut was on the launch pad. The dignitaries were all seated in grandstands, and the countdown was intoned over the public-address system: "Nine… eight… seven… six…" and so forth, and their "We have ignition!"… and the mighty belch of flames bursts out of the rocket in a tremendous show of power… The mighty white shaft rumbles and seems to bestir itself—and then seems to change its mind, its computerized central nervous system, about the whole thing, because the flames suddenly cut off, and the rocket settles back down on the pad, and there's a little pop. A cap on the tip of the rocket comes off. It goes shooting up in the air, a tiny little thing with a needle nose. In fact, it's the capsule's escape tower. As the great crowd watches, stone silent and befuddled, it goes up to about 4,000 feet and descends under a parachute. It looks like a little party favor. It lands about four hundred yards away from the rocket on the torpid banks of the Banana River. Five hundred VIPs had come all the way to Florida, to this goddamned Low Rent sandspit, where bugs you couldn't even see invaded your motel room and bit your ankles until they ran red onto the acrylic shag carpet—all the way to this rock-beach boondock they had come, to see the fires of Armageddon and hear the earth shake with the thunder—and instead they get this… this pop… and a cork pops out of a bottle of Spumante. It was the original Project Vanguard fiasco all over again, except that it was worse in a way. At least with Vanguard, back in December of 1957, the folks got lots of flames and explosion. It at least looked halfway like a catastrophe. Besides that, it was very early in the game, in the contest for the heavens. But this—it was ridiculous! It was pathetic!

Kennedy had won the election, and during the campaign he had made such a point of attacking NASA's ineptness that it was a foregone conclusion that NASA's chief, T. Keith Glennan, who was a Republican in any case, would be replaced. The question now was how many other heads would roll. What about Bob Gilruth? After all, he was in charge of Project Mercury, which was going nowhere. Or von Braun, the alleged German rocket genius? Much sarcasm was creeping into the debate, and even von Braun was being attacked. For that matter, what about the seven brave lads…

As this sort of talk began to circulate, people at Ed wards began to beam up the radar… For months the word within NASA had been that the X-15 project would be the last hurrah for "the flyboys." Now that was all changing. No one was saying it publicly yet, but the unthinkable was now possible: for the first time, Project Mercury itself was regarded as expendable. Kennedy's advisor in scientific areas was Jerome Wiesner of M.I.T. He had drawn up a report for Kennedy that said the following, in effect:

Project Mercury had been sold to the Eisenhower Administration during the original Sputnik panic as the "quick and dirty" solution to getting a man into space ahead of the Russians. It had merely proved to be dirty or, hopeless, as in the Popped Cork business, which demonstrated that NASA did not even have the primitive Mercury-Redstone system ready. Even if the system worked, the Redstone could put a man into only a suborbital trajectory, with just fifteen minutes in space. The mighty Soviet Integral had already launched a series of huge Korabls and was probably on the verge of putting a man not only into space but into earth orbit. But in one area, Wiesner was telling Kennedy, the United States was ahead of the Soviets, and this was in unmanned scientific satellites. Why not concentrate on that program for the time being and play down—in effect, forfeit—the losing race to put a man into space? Why not abandon all these frantic attempts to convert the underpowered Redstone and Atlas missiles into space rockets and instead develop a careful, solid, long-range program using bigger rockets, such as the Titan, which might be ready in eighteen months?

And there you had it! As Joe Walker and everyone at Edwards knew, the "solid, long-range program" using the Titan was the X-20 or Dyna-Soar program, which would begin at Edwards as soon as the X-15 project was completed. The Air Force, which was in charge of the X-20 project, had never abandoned its hopes of running the entire manned space program. All along it had seemed unjust that NASA had been able to appropriate all the research and planning that had gone into Flickinger's Man-in-Space-Soonest program and convert it into Project Mercury. Perhaps with the change in administrations the situation could be corrected.

Joe Walker was feeling good. In August he had pushed the X-15 just about as fast as the Little Engine could take it, to a new world speed record of Mach 3.31, or 2,196 miles per hour. After he landed it on Rogers Lake, he cut loose with a cowboy yell that startled everyone on the radio circuit: "Yippeeeee!" That was Joe Walker. A week later Bob White went up in the X-15 and set a new altitude record of 136,500 feet, or slightly more than twenty-five miles. It had been a perfect flight. It was as much as you could expect from the Little Engine. The conditions had been almost precisely the conditions of space flight. He took the ship up in a ballistic arc, the same sort of arc the Mercury-Redstone vehicle was supposed to go on… someday… He experienced five g's during the rocket thrust on the way up. An astronaut in Mercury was supposed to experience six. He was weightless for two minutes as he came up over the top of the arc. An astronaut was supposed to be weightless for five minutes. At 136,500 feet the air was so thin, White had no aerodynamic control at all. It was absolutely silent up there. He could see for hundreds of miles, from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

It was much like the Mercury flights were supposed to be—except that Bob White was a pilot from beginning to end! He was in control! He took the ship up and he brought it back down through the heavy atmosphere and he landed it at Edwards! He didn't splash down in the water like a monkey in a bucket! Bob White's picture wound up on the cover of Life. There was Justice, there was Logic, in the universe, after all. Bob White on the cover of Life! For a solid year Life had been the fraternity bulletin for the Mercury astronauts. But now even Henry Luce and that bunch had woken up to the truth. Perhaps they had been betting on the wrong horses! Right? Walker and White and Crossfield could afford a little jealousy now… toward one another for a change. People from the TV show This Is Your Life had turned up at Edwards and were talking to everybody they could find who knew Joe Walker. This was one of the most popular shows on television, and it was run like a surprise party; the subject, in this case Walker, didn't learn about it until the moment of the show itself, after a biography of him had been put together on film. Scott Crossfield had a book contract, to write his autobiography, and Time-Life was talking to Bob White about a contract like the astronauts'.

Bob White was all right. You could read the cover story they had already written about him in Life, and you could see that White had not unbent so much as one inch for the occasion. You could see them straining to manufacture one of those "personality profiles" about White, and all he would give them was the Blue Suit and a straight arrow. That was Bob White.

A True Brother!