The Right Stuff

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 begi

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!

9 — The Vote

Even the scenery was depressing. There was nothing to see but the snow blowing over the road and the stunted countryside rolling by in slow motion. Between Langley and Arlington even the woods looked stunted. There had been a buzzard the day before, but the landscape was all so raggedy it didn't even look good in the snow. Over the car radio he could hear John F. Ke

That was ironic, because at first Loudon Wainwright thought that Gle

The curious thing, in light of what happened yesterday, was that for about three months the intense competitive feeling among the seven of them had died down. The entire Mercury project, the astronauts included, had been in serious—no, horrendous—trouble. After the MA-1 fiasco and the Popped Cork fiasco, it had no longer been a question of which one of them was going to get the first flight, but whether any of them would go into space at all, or even continue to bear the title astronaut.

Naturally it would have been crushing to Bob Gilruth, Hugh Dryden, Walt Williams, Christopher Kraft, and all of the NASA brass to have Mercury canceled for delays or ineptness or whatever. But not so crushing as it would have been to the Mercury astronauts! Oh, no! To be pronounced the seven bravest lads in America, the fearless pioneers of space, to be on the cover of Life, to have factory workers in San Diego agonize over your hide and every sweet little Konakai cookie on both shores lust over it… and then to be told, "Thanks a lot, but we've called the whole thing off"… They would become factory seconds! They would be back in uniform, in the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marines, saluting and flapping in the breeze as the seven most laughable duds in the service!

One had only to imagine it… and it was easy to imagine by late 1960. All of them, astronauts, administrators, engineers, technicians, were suddenly in such trouble that a wagon-train phase began. Everyone, from top to bottom, began pulling together like pioneers besieged in the pass. It was now of supreme importance to push the Mercury-Redstone program forward before the new President and his science advisor, Wiesner, had time to go to work on NASA. The frantic hope was to complete some tests that would bring the program so close to the first ma

That was the spirit of the hour—ride! mas alla! over the next hill! don't look back!—when Bob Gilruth called in Gle