Страница 47 из 94
Even so, the esprit throughout NASA was tremendous over that Christmas holiday. Everyone was working like a zealot. Christmas itself was a mere syncopation in the mad cowboy rush. Bureaucratic lines no longer meant anything. Anyone in Project Mercury could immediately get in to see anybody else about any problem that came up. At Langley, if some GS-14 wanted to get hold of Gilruth face to face, all he had to do was wait around in the cafeteria at lunchtime and walk up to him while he waited in line, edging his tray along the stainless-steel tubing. There weren't enough hours in the day to do all the things that had to be done.
On January 19, the day before Ke
This had been a very difficult decision, he said, because all seven of them had worked with such dedication, and he knew that any of them would make a capable pilot for the first flight. But it had been necessary to come to a decision. And the decision was that the prime pilot would be… Alan Shepard. The backup pilots would be John Gle
The words hit Gle
A peer vote!—it was unbelievable! Every move Gle
But Smilin' Al Shepard—Smilin' Al was the fighter jock's fighter jock, if all you were doing was taking a peer vote. He was His Lordship of Langley and the King of the Cape. He gave off the aura of the hot pilot. Since they had done practically no flying for twenty-one months, there had been no way for Gle
And so now Gle
The astronaut headquarters on the base at the Cape were in the building known as Hangar S. The hangar had been rebuilt inside to house the procedures trainer, a pressure chamber, and most of the other facilities an astronaut would need in the final preparations for a flight. There was a suite of rooms for living quarters, a dining room, a medical examination room, a ready room in which the astronaut would put on his pressure suit, a special doorway where the astronaut would get into a van to be driven out to the launch pad, and so forth. The boys seldom stayed there overnight, however, much preferring the motels in Cocoa Beach—and of course they had yet to use Hangar S for an actual flight. In fact, the first creatures to use Hangar S fully, from procedures trainer to rocket launch, were the chimpanzees. The chimpanzees were already at Hangar S on the morning before the inauguration, when Gilruth told the seven men that Alan Shepard had won the competition for the first flight. The chimpanzees had been there, ready for the first flight for almost three weeks. The veterinarians at Holloman Air Force Base had cut the original field of forty chimpanzees down to eighteen and, finally, to six, two males and four females, and had flown them to the Cape and installed them out back of Hangar S in a fenced-in compound. In the middle were two long, narrow trailer units, each made up of two eight-foot-wide trailers hooked up end to end. Around them was an assortment of other trailers and vans, including a special transfer van for carrying a chimpanzee from Hangar S to the rocket launch pad. The press was not invited into the little trailer park, nor would the good Gent have been interested. The chimpanzee test seemed to be merely one more tedious preliminary to the main event. Not even people at the base had much of an idea what was going on out back of Hangar S. The apes spent most of the day inside the two double-trailer units. The trailers were home and office, cage and operant conditioning cubicle, for the beasts. Inside each unit were three cages, two procedures trainers, and a mockup of the Mercury capsule. The veterinarians in their white smocks and the attendants in their white T-shirts and white ducks had a trailer unit of their own; they were on hand, in shifts, twenty-four hours a day. Within those long ski