The brass felt a need to reassure the public there was no split in the ranks. Wally Schirra, Deke Slayton, Gordon Cooper, and Scott Carpenter stepped forward at a press conference a few days later to confirm that there was plenty to do and they all were still on one team, not divided into “red” or “gold” factions. Their reassuring words and smiles could not cover up the fact that someone else had indeed been chosen to be first. NASA did its best to soothe the egos of those who did not make the first cut. The lyrics to the music went like this: Each astronaut had an important role to play. There were plenty of flights for all. And, sure as hell, there was enough work to go around.
We in MCC were not surprised by the choice of Glenn, Grissom, and Shepard to make the initial flights. The controllers had worked briefly with all three, but only our bosses and the astronauts knew who would fly this very first mission. Since we had seen more of Shepard, we were betting on Al. The media seemed to favor Glenn. In part it was his image as a God-fearing, clean-cut American patriot and good family man. But journalists may have reported this in hopes of provoking someone into saying who it would be.
Shorty Powers, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, was the man in charge of public relations and the “voice of Mercury Control.” To Shorty, dealing with the press was just like a game of poker: never let on what is in your hand—and try to bluff them into showing you theirs.
Like Williams, Shorty never seemed to sleep and his exhausting work schedule only compounded his irritability; it took very little provocation to make him lose his temper. When he did, it was like a launch, a great deal of energy and noise expended amid the fire and smoke. He was a bantam cock of a guy, about five-foot-four or-five, always dapper and a bit of a strutter. For the most part, Powers had an unenviable job, setting up a public relations barrier behind which the engineers and the astronauts could work in peace, while at the same time trying to feed reporters’ insatiable demands for information. He really needed two sets of astronauts, one to do the mission, the other to perform for the media.
The astronauts and controllers stayed at the Holiday Inn at Cocoa Beach. It was not unusual to see Walt Williams charging into the bar late at night to get an answer to a problem from one of the controllers or engineers. He was likely to find the man he wanted there, because all of us sat around and chewed over rules and procedures endlessly and tuned in on Williams’s questioning to get the latest word.
We knew that three days prior to the launch the selected astronaut would check out of the Holiday Inn and quietly try to move out to the crew quarters at the Cape. Reporters hung around the Holiday Inn fishing for information, striking up a conversation, occasionally trying to pass as a member of the launch team. The press, which had become somewhat negative and adversarial after the Gagarin flight and the Atlas 3 failure, was now caught up in the excitement of this new chapter. Realizing that a man’s life and the future of the program were at stake, their coverage finally began to capture the excitement and suspense surrounding the imminent mission. The control team, taking our lead from Powers, neither confirmed nor denied any of the press speculation and ignored all the rumors that buzzed around the program like a swarm of busy bees.
The weather was stormy at midnight on May 2, 1961, when the control team arrived to support the initial check-out. The countdown progressed through the fueling of the Redstone while the launch team held the transfer van (used to move the suited astronaut from the hangar to the launch pad) at the hangar until the weather improved, or the launch was scrubbed
We had adopted the call sign “Freedom 7” during our final training runs, but I never knew who had named the capsule. Just one week after the Mercury-Atlas 3 failure we were once again in Mercury Control counting down to launch for our first manned mission. The headlines read: “AS HOP NEARS ASTRONAUT X IN SECLUSION.” Soon the world would find out—and so would we. I think only Kraft, Willams, and the flight surgeon knew it was Shepard. It had been decided in Washington that the identity of the first man would remain a secret until he stepped forward to climb atop the rocket.
The Russians did not announce any launch in advance; in fact they didn’t release any news about their manned spacecraft effort until they were good and ready, and even then they gave only carefully selected details about a flight. They could do this quite easily in a closed society in which news was strictly controlled by the government. We did not have this luxury. From its earliest days, NASA had followed a policy of maximum, though prudent, disclosure. We had to do everything openly—and soon under intensive, live TV coverage. In their own good time, the Soviets had announced that Gagarin spent 108 minutes in orbit before returning safely to Earth in a parachute-cushioned landing.
We wanted to catch up and we believed that, at last, we were ready to do it—at least for the first step, a suborbital mission of limited duration. Dressed in his silvery space suit, Alan Shepard stood behind the door of Hangar S. Outside, the van that would deliver him to the launch site waited, along with a large group of reporters and photographers who were eager to tell the world which astronaut would step through the door.
Lightning and rain had been playing about the Cape all morning, and when the clouds had not cleared by 7:25 A.M. local time, the flight was canceled. No one could be responsible for the weather, but it struck us as another in an unending series of tough breaks. Who would stop the rain?
Shepard shimmied out of his suit and downed a shot of brandy. An alert reporter standing by the hangar door had seen him and broke the story: “FIRST U.S. ATTEMPT TO PUT MAN IN SPACE POSTPONED 48 HOURS. SHEPARD GIVEN FIRST CALL FOR HISTORIC VENTURE.” The secret was out. Hard-charging Al Shepard was at the head of the line.
We drowned our disappointment in the usual way—with a mission scrub party. No matter what hour the test was scrubbed, we would return to the motel wide awake, after the lounges had closed, or before they opened. We had stashed beer and snacks at the Holiday Inn, which often donated food left over from the previous day’s menu. We would eat and drink, and talk about what had gone wrong. It was a little like throwing a rueful party after a nonbirth; at least we hadn’t experienced another disaster, and the baby was still there in the womb, ready to go. All we could do was pace the floor and wait.
In the heat of the following day, some of us headed to the ocean or the pool, or played full-contact volleyball, to sweat off the beer we had tossed down. The chalked volleyball sidelines didn’t last long and there was the usual quibbling on out-of-bounds calls. The solution was to dig a trench and mark the sidelines with gravel embedded in concrete. Out-of-bounds calls were a lot easier when you came up with bloody forearms after a diving save. Bruises, sprains, jammed fingers, and nasty cuts were the order of the day.
Kraft, a standout baseball catcher and center fielder in college, was a fierce competitor. But on the volleyball court he was no longer the boss, just one of the team members. Carl Huss, the MCC RETRO, was a burly five-foot- eleven guy with black bushy eyebrows and hair. When playing volleyball he had a habit of rising on his toes and shifting from left to right with a rolling motion. His menacing visage, combined with this motion and his perpetual growl, earned him the nickname “Dancing Bear.”
During one match, Huss spiked a shot straight into Kraft’s face; the ball drove the prongs of his sunglasses deep into the flesh of his nose. Without flinching, Kraft pulled out the prongs, wiped the blood off his face, looked at Huss, and growled, “Nice shot. Try me again!”
After multiple injuries to his team members, Kraft set the rule: no volleyball after L – 3—launch minus three days. Any controller violating the rule and unable to perform his console duties would be “disciplined.” No one was willing to find out exactly what kind or degree of discipline Kraft meant.
The beverage of choice after these matches was Swan Lager, an Australian beer, and our supplier was Jack Dowling, the Australian government’s envoy to NASA. Jack was the picture of a typical Aussie. He was a bit older than most of us, stocky, with wavy black hair, flecks of gray in his mustache, and eyebrows like caterpillars. All he needed to complete the image was the Crocodile Dundee bush hat. He had the accent, the one you never missed when you called “Goddard voice” and the switchboard operator patched the voice communications to the Australian tracking stations. You had to be careful about confusing their language with the one we were developing for space.
When we had needed a tracking station in the Southern Hemisphere, the people Down Under were quick to respond. They have always been our stout allies, and their very isolation inspired them to sign up for any new adventure. They sent their volunteers to train with us, and Dowling was one of those who learned to love the States
