25 Years Later, Mercury Team Launches New Task

Into a cool Florida dawn a quarter-century ago this morning, Americans--not just a country, but a whole people--rocketed into space for the first time.

Alan B. Shepard, an insouciant, crew-cut Navy pilot, had eaten a steak-and-eggs breakfast, then lain on his back inside the minuscule Freedom 7 capsule for more than three hours, waiting to be boosted on his 15-minute ride by an eight-story Redstone rocket and an aerospace technology that has long since been dwarfed by newer science.

His trip was only 116 miles up--the distance of a Los Angeles to San Diego outing--but it catapulted America into the manned space race, and well into the Space Age.

On 55 occasions since, American men and women have soared into the heavens, to the moon and around it, and--this past January--into fiery death. But none captivated the nation like those first seven, the Mercury astronauts. They were all the boy next door, if the boy next door had winged feet.

Although in the past 25 years the United States has grown more wary of heroes, the Mercury Seven still sound boyish in their enthusiasm for the goals of space science. But they are not bashful in their criticism of a space program that suddenly seems at a dismal nadir, nor in proclaiming the need for a mid-course correction to restore it to the direction and daring they once knew.

Tonight, they will be together in Los Angeles, lending their collective cachet for the first time to launch a fund-raising enterprise: the Mercury Seven Foundation, a scholarship foundation for science.

“We thought, as a group, we’d collectively have a lot of credibility still, and maybe we should use that to help inspire young people to become involved in space,” Shepard told The Times.

A Senate session may keep John Glenn, the Marine aviator who is now a U.S. senator, from the black-tie, $150-a-plate banquet. Another empty chair will be Gus Grissom’s; the second American in space died on a launch pad in 1967 with two other astronauts in the pure-oxygen inferno of Apollo I. His wife, Betty, will represent him.

The other men on the dais will be William Douglas, former physician to these astronauts, and Henri Landwirth, a Holocaust survivor who owned the Holiday Inn near Cape Canaveral, where the seven often gathered, and who helped begin the foundation.

But it is the astronauts whom people will undoubtedly go to see. The adulation accorded them 25 years ago--when Glenn remembers people crowded onto the sidewalks in New York City, weeping joyously as their parade passed by--fixed them forever in the nation’s firmament of frontiersmen.

“It’s a responsibility, it’s a chore,” Scott Carpenter said, “but the honor is a pleasure.”

Some of the seven have been divorced and have remarried. Some have had business reverses. None of them is more than a few years away from Social Security, a fact that Carpenter, at 60, confronts “resentfully. I grow old without grace.”

They may have a little less hair, or a little more belly. But they are still the Mercury astronauts (there seems to be no such thing as an ex-astronaut), America’s emeritus demigods. Even the programs they flew in--Mercury, Apollo--bore the names of Greek divinities.

In 1961, when Grissom tossed out words like “G-forces” and “Mach 1” at a press conference, reporters felt constrained to provide a glossary of those alien terms. Now, every kid who watches Saturday morning cartoons knows about G-forces, and every day, little old ladies skim the Atlantic at Mach 1 on their way to Paris.

In 1962, two weeks before John Glenn orbited the Earth in Friendship 7, scientist Wernher von Braun was scolded by a woman for his space work: “You folks ought to stay at home and watch TV like the Lord intended for people to do.”

America had been playing Cold War catch-up, in what Glenn calls “a cosmic drag race,” since the Sputnik panic of 1957; now, after the humiliation of a Russian soaring first into space, Americans were told that these seven daring men were going to sprint the nation into the lead.

The military-trained test pilots were put into NASA’s seven-mule public relations harness, for the jolting ride on the thrust of public adoration. “We went through the hoops,” said Wally Schirra, who flew on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.

Callings the Plays

Terse career aviators, they now had to play deejay for the Free World, calling play-by-plays from their capsule booth. “What a beautiful view!” exclaimed Shepard, the first to have to strive for adjectives. “Tremendous!” was Glenn’s heartfelt contribution, which reduced the available adjective pool by about 20%. These were fliers, not tour guides.

Schirra later made space bilingual with a folksy “ buenos dias “ delivered from above South America. Years later he was “color” man for Walter Cronkite’s launch commentaries, and still does TV commercials with a hearty assurance that resonates in private conversation.

For these men, accustomed to near-daily military flying, NASA’s flight schedule was often like a three-hour wait in a ski-lift line for one spectacular 30-second downhill run. Some, like Carpenter, would go up only once. Deke Slayton, grounded by a minor heart irregularity, had to wait an aggravating 10 years for his one flight, the Apollo-Soyuz mission.

Slayton had waited that May morning, too, as Shepard strapped in for another wait: three hours for a 15-minute ride. So Shepard’s first contribution to in-flight research was an intimate, urgent one: He finally had to urinate in his flight suit. Next time, NASA thought of everything.

“It really doesn’t seem that long ago” since he rumbled skyward on the first of his two flights (the second one to the moon in 1971, where he smacked a golf ball a country mile), except when he remembers the hidebound attitudes before his flight. “In the early days,” said Shepard, now a wealthy Houston businessman, “we found a group of people who expressed doubt and cynicism as to the advisability of putting humans in space at all.”

From Shepard’s literal vantage point of space and time, “what surprises me most is that we’ve done as much in space now. We knew we were going to make progress, but I wouldn’t have been able to predict we’d come as far as we have.”

“Now we’ve shifted from emphasis on the individual,” Glenn said, “to basic research with returns of benefit to everyone,” from medicine to biology. “We’re a curious, questing people,” and the probing of space will come.

The Mercury group still has reunions--which later astronaut groups don’t, Schirra said. And they still keep close tabs on their alma mater.

California Businessman

The Oklahoma-born Cooper, whose aggressive pose gave new luster to the term “Sooner,” now operates a Southern California firm that certifies methanol fuel for aviation. “I’m a little disappointed that they haven’t pursued more pure exploration. I think they’ve gotten a little mundane.” NASA should have gone back to the moon and to Mars--”I think we as mankind owe to ourselves to find out what is out there in the universe.”

To Slayton, president of a Houston private satellite company, such jaunts “will take a lot of resources. During the Apollo program, we had a national edict that said we’d put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, and dumped in all the resources necessary to make it happen. There hasn’t been anything like it since.”

“NASA has been a victim of its own successes,” said Slayton, agreeing with Carpenter that public complacency followed NASA’s complacency at its apparently clockwork programs.

But public interest has endured, Cooper finds. They never have a dearth of audiences, although “NASA is not a very good communicator. . . . The interest is there, but it hasn’t been fed very well. NASA sort of develops the attitude that: ‘We’re the only game in town, we don’t have to work hard at putting out the word.’ ”

Twenty-five years ago, it was all ticker tape.

To Schirra--bemused after a recent interview by a 24-year-old Illinois TV reporter who really couldn’t understand why this was such a big deal--public perception has changed dramatically. “People are still excited,” but now, “people understand the science of it. Before, it was just emotions running high” at the Mercury men’s patriotic daring.

On the day Shepard flew, Betty Grissom watched from the public sands of Cocoa Beach, “just like everybody else . . . in the early years, to go down to a flight to see your husband, you didn’t go onto the Cape. Wives were almost considered liabilities, I think . . . you would have thought we were criminals; they wouldn’t let us in.”

Not that she would have gone. “Gus didn’t want me to go to liftoff. That went through my mind with the Challenger. He said he had enough to worry about and he didn’t want me to have to go through something like that.”

Betty Grissom was not there the January day in 1967--19 years and one day before the Challenger vaporized--when her husband died. Now, she lives in Houston, and keeps up mostly “through the papers.” There is the $350,000 settlement that she and her sons got from a lawsuit against a major contractor of the capsule in which those first astronauts died--the first charred spot on the space program’s halo.

One son flies with Federal Express, the other is an air traffic controller. The fan mail still comes--the latest from a 9-year-old girl who wanted a picture of Gus Grissom. NASA no longer keeps such files, Betty Grissom has been told, and her own stock is “mighty low.”

She was not watching when the Challenger blew up. But she did know what it was like for the families. And she remembered something her husband had told her. “He said they learned more from mistakes than from whenever the flights go right. That comes back to me quite often now.”

Mistakes. There were some in Mercury, although, Carpenter said of the “unconscionable” communications breakdown preceding the Challenger explosion, “I don’t want to think anything like that went on when I was part of it.”

Within weeks of his flight, Glenn, with Shepard and Grissom accompanying him as America’s space veterans, solemnly told a jubilant Congress something it did not want to hear: “We don’t envision every flight coming back as successfully as the three so far. There will be failures.”

Two months later, Glenn complained that he had been kept in the dark about a signal--erroneous, it turned out--that his heat shield was failing, which could have killed him.

Those echoes come back, and some criticize NASA’s eagerness to “go commercial,” and the haste that makes deadly mistakes. Says Schirra: “NASA got caught reading its own notices about itself being able to generate a profit--that’s the last thing they should be thinking about. . . . My line is, the only government agency that makes money is the mint. . . .”

To Slayton: “They shouldn’t be doing it. Money should be spent on research, development, the long haul.”

In the close-knit Mercury days, Carpenter said, “flight crews were more directly involved in all major decisions,” and unlike pressures on the space shuttle “our judgment and decisions were not colored . . . by budgetary constraints. They’re still flight crews and should be given all the information, and they weren’t.”

It was Slayton’s departure as head of the astronaut team--and factors like a larger astronaut corps, not all of them pilots--that lost the astronauts the clout they enjoyed in Mercury, Schirra said.

With seven-member shuttle crews, Slayton said, “I think they’ve probably gone a little too far, trying to get too many people at once; my ground rule was always: Don’t send anyone you can’t justify losing.”

On the Front Lines

This is the future in space, from the men who have been closer to it than the rest of the people:

When we go again, Schirra said, “We’ll do it with less pizazz, less PR, sensibly.”

Carpenter, irked at the prospect of the Soviet Union beating the United States to a lunar base, would love to go back up, “as any thinking person would; it’s addictive.” Now, though, they need cinematographers and photographers up there, poets and physicians, he said. “They’ve used me.”

Other things may fade from memory; the Mercury capsules already look comically clumsy to those like the young TV interviewer who grew up with the sleek strength of the shuttle.

But Glenn will always remember that last handshake as he climbed into his capsule. And for Shepard, as for every American who was of the age of reason that May morning, “nothing can recapture or replace the sheer excitement” of that first flight. It is the surpassing glory of man’s visions, in the simplest of man’s terms: “The most exciting thing that ever happened to me.”