The Right Stuff

On May 25, twenty days after Shepard's flight, Ke

"Now is the time to take longer strides," he said, "time for a great new American enterprise, time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth." He said that the Russians, thanks to "their large rocket engines," would continue to dominate the competition for some time, but that this should only make the United States step up its efforts. "For while we ca

Congress was not about to quibble over expenses. NASA was given a $1.7 billion budget for the next year, and that was merely the start. It was made clear that NASA could have practically as much as if wanted. Shepard's flight had made quite a hit. An amazing period of "budgetless financing" began. It was astonishing. Suddenly money was in the air. Businessmen of all sorts were trying to bestow it directly upon Shepard. Within a few months Leo DeOrsey, who was still the boys' unpaid business manager, had counted up half a million dollars' worth of proposals from companies who wanted Shepard to endorse products. One congressman, Frank Boykin of Alabama, wanted the government to give Shepard a house. Shepard turned it all down, but it did make one stop and think.

If Smilin' Al's experience was any indication, then this astronaut business was becoming even more of a Fighter Jock Heaven than it had been in the first year of Project Mercury. Eisenhower had never paid much attention to the astronauts personally. He had looked upon them as military volunteers for an experiment, and that was that. But Ke

The other fellows had gone along for Al's trip to the White House, but the wives had remained at the Cape. When they flew back down to Patrick, the wives were out at the field to meet their plane. And they all had a single question: "What's Jackie like?"

Jackie Ke

"What's Jackie like?"

Soon enough they would all meet her. They would go to private lunches at the White House, where there were so many servants there seemed to be one behind every chair. They played you like man-to-man basketball. Jack Ke

And for the fellows, it was pure heaven. None of this altered the Edwards-style perfection of their lives. It merely added something new and marvelous to the ineffable contrasts of this astronaut business. Within hours after lunch at the White House or waterskiing in Hya

"How you doing?"

And she says: "So-so, how you doing?"

"I ain't doing any more," he says. "It's dragging in the mud and it won't come up"—and since this doesn't get a rise out of her, he says it again: "It's dragging in the mud and it won't come up," and she just clamps a burglar-proof look of aloofness across her face—and all this was bound to make you smile, because here you were, listening to the merry midnight small talk of the hardiest hardtack crackers of the most Low Rent stretch of the Cape, and just twelve hours ago you were leaning across a table in the White House, straining to catch the tiny shiny pearls of tinytalk from the most famous small talker in the world—and somehow you belonged and thrived in both worlds. Oh, yes, it was the perfect balance of the legendary Edwards, the fabled Muroc, in the original Chuck Yeager and Pancho Barnes days… now brought forward into the billion-volt limitless-budget future.

The truth was that the fellows had now become the personal symbols not only of America's Cold War struggle with the Soviets but also of Ke

For Gus Grissom that was a very fortunate thing.

Gus was assigned to the second Mercury-Redstone flight, scheduled for July. He would be in a newer capsule, one in which certain changes had been made—all of them in response to the astronauts' insistence that the astronaut function more like a pilot. It had been too late to renovate the capsule Shepard used, but Grissom's had a window, not just portholes, and a new set of hand controllers designed to let the astronaut control the capsule's attitude in a ma