The Right Stuff

Deke Slayton, who was a member of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, had been invited to address the a

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 Gle

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 & 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 ca

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 u