The Right Stuff

The day only got hotter. After the little ceremony, with Webb waxing sonorous, they drove Gus and Betty and the boys to the VIP guesthouse at Patrick Air Force Base. This was supposed to be a big deal. They were told that these were secret quarters where they would be completely screened off from the press and the gawkers. The VIP guesthouse… Betty looked around. Even the military VIP quarters here at Cocoa Beach were Low Rent. This VIP guesthouse was like some musty cabin court from the late 1930's. She looked out the window. Over there was the beach, that amazing hot-brick Cocoa Beach. But between the guesthouse and the beach was Route A1A, with cars roaring back and forth in the screaming heat of mid-July. She would never even make it across the highway to the beach with the children. Well, they could watch TV—but there was no TV; and no pool. Then she looked in the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was stuffed with food, everything you could imagine. For some reason this made her furious. She could see the afternoon shaping up and the rest of the day and tomorrow, too. She would stay here with the children, cooking and risking her life dragging them to the worst beach in Florida… and Gus would no doubt go to the space center or into town…

Town meant the Holiday I

Listen, while you're getting settled, I think I'll—

Suddenly Betty was furious: She was not staying in this place! Gus didn't know what had gotten into her.

She said she wanted to go to the Holiday I

She gruffed it out with such fury that Gus called the Holiday and pulled the strings and got them a room. If Gus had managed to park her here in this faded VIP mausoleum and vanish, so that she could sit here in the heat of the slab watching the hours go by while he tooled around the pool at the Holiday as the big shot—she would have slit a wrist. That was how grim it was. That was how shabbily they had treated her. That was how grossly they had welshed on the compact. Now… they truly owed her.

12 — The Tears

Since the pooch proved to be unscrewable, officially, and Gus Grissom's flight was therefore on the record as a success, NASA was suddenly in great shape. John Ke

Naturally, true to form, that was the moment the anonymous and unca

Just sixteen days after Grissom's flight, which is to say, on August 6, 1961, the Soviets sent Vostok 2 into orbit with a cosmonaut named Gherman Titov aboard. Titov circled the earth for an entire day, completing seventeen full orbits, and landing where he had started, on Soviet soil. Three times he came over the United States, 125 miles overhead. Once again, all over the country, politicians and the press seemed profoundly alarmed, and the awful vision was presented: suppose the cosmonaut were armed with hydrogen bombs and flung them as he came over, like Thor flinging thunderbolts… one here, one there… Toledo disappears off the face of the earth… Kansas City… Lubbock… Titov's flight seemed so awesome it made the Shepard and Grissom flights look terribly insignificant. The Integral and its Chief Designer could apparently do anything they wanted, and at any time.

Seven days later, August 13, 1961, Nikita Khrushchev began the steps that led to the building of a wall, precisely like a penitentiary wall, through the middle of an entire city, Berlin, to prevent the population of East Berlin from crossing over to the West. But the world was still blinking at the radiance of the day-long space flight. "They're a bit brutal—but you have to admit they're geniuses. Imagine keeping a man in space for twenty-four hours!"

So far as NASA was concerned, the Titov flight put an end to the Mercury-Redstone program then and there. The next astronaut in line to ride on top of the Redstone, John Gle

After Titov's flight the phrase the space gap began to be repeated throughout the American press. Space gap was a superstitious condition. It began to seem of urgent importance for NASA to put a man into space before the sands stopped flowing in the hourglass on the last day of the year 1961. The great cowboy rush of the winter of 1960-61 started all over again. The hell with fastidious precautions… For example, the Soviets revealed that Titov had suffered from nausea throughout his flight. Later they changed that to say that he had suffered nausea after "prolonged" flight. They would have probably not revealed even that much, except that they decided to participate in international scientific conferences in order to publicize their space feats. It also came out—although few specifics were given—that the Soviet ma

In September NASA successfully launched a Mercury-Atlas capsule with a dummy astronaut aboard and brought it back on target into the Atlantic, near Bermuda, after one orbit of the earth. The press speculated that Ke

This time, out at Edwards, the True Brothers didn't even derive a chilly smile from the fact that once more in the exalted Project Mercury an ape would be taking the first flight. An ape would make the first orbit of the earth for the U.S.A. The prestige of Project Mercury had by now rendered such considerations meaningless. On October 11, at Edwards, Bob White had made an extraordinary flight in the X-15—and the country hardly noticed. White took the X-15 up to 217,000 feet with the Big Engine—and the press merely nodded perfunctorily. So a man had just flown very high in an airplane; how interesting; and that was that. The fact that White was on top of a rocket, the same sort of rocket as the Redstone or the Atlas, the fact that his flight to 217,000 feet was in effect piloted space flight—none of this was likely to impress Ke