The Right Stuff

Came time for the launch, and now Rene and the children watched the countdown on the TV in the safe house, with Wainwright and a Life photographer in attendance. Then the children rushed out and watched part of the rocket's slow ascent through a telescope mounted on a garage roof. The children didn't seem at all apprehensive. Flying was what their father did. They were in high spirits… And now they were following the re-entry, as best they could, on television. They had CBS turned on. There was Walter Cronkite. Rene knew him. Cronkite had become an astrobuff. He had more than the usual reasons to like the astronauts. It was his coverage of John Gle

As a matter of fact, she was correct. Scott had come through the atmosphere in good shape. The capsule began rocking violently in the dense atmosphere below 50,000 feet, and he had to release his parachute early and by hand, the automatic system being out of fuel. The capsule had overshot the target area by some 250 miles. A reco

Over the next two weeks Scott received a hero's homage. It was not on the scale of John's, which was understandable, but it was sweet enough. There were parades in the East and parades in the West. He rode in a motorcade through Boulder, his old hometown, and through Denver, which was just down the highway. It was a great day. The sun was out and it was a light fluffy Rocky Mountain day in May, and Rene was beside him, sitting up on the ridge of the seat back in the convertible, wearing white gloves, like a proper Navy wife, and smiling and looking absolutely beautiful and radiant. Well, Scott thought he had just shot the moon.

Back at the Cape, Chris Kraft was telling his colleagues: "That sonofabitch will never fly for me again."

Kraft was furious. The truth was, he had been quietly put out before… about the seven brave lads. As he saw it, Carpenter had ignored repeated warnings from capcoms all around the world about wasting fuel, and this had almost resulted in a disaster, one that might have done irreparable damage to the program. As it was, Carpenter's performance had cast doubt on the capability of the Mercury system to carry out a long flight such as Titov's seventeen orbits. And why had this catastrophe nearly occurred? Because Carpenter had insisted on comporting himself like an Omnipotent and Omniscient Mercury Astronaut. He didn't have to pay attention to suggestions and warnings from mere groundlings. He apparently believed that the astronaut, the passenger in the capsule, was the heart and soul of the space program. All of the resentment that the engineers had about the top-lofty status of the astronauts now crept out of its cage… at least within NASA. Outside of NASA, publicly, nothing was to change. Carpenter, like Grissom before him, was an exemplary brave lad; just a little dicey scrape at the end of the flight, that was all. Very successful flight; go ahead, let him have his medals and his receiving lines.

And now that the wound had been opened, there were those who were only too pleased to see the following line develop concerning the Carpenter flight: Carpenter had not merely wasted fuel while up there playing with the capsule's attitude controls, doing his beloved "experiments." No, he had also become… rattled… when he finally realized he was getting low on fuel. The evidence for this was that he forgot to turn off the manual system when he switched to fly-by-wire and thereby really blew his fuel supply. And then he… panicked!… That was why he couldn't line the capsule up at the right angle and that was why he couldn't fire the retro-rockets right on the button… and that was why he hit the atmosphere at such a shallow angle. He nearly skipped off it instead of going through it… he nearly skipped off into eternity… because… he panicked! There! We've said it! That was the worst charge that could be brought against a pilot on the great ziggurat of flying. It said that a man had lost whatever stuff he had in the most awful ma