When Space-Age Imaginations Skyrocketed Into Reality

Imagine what it’s like to know a great secret. Not a trashy secret, but the kind that electrifies you and is powerful enough to go down in history.

That’s what it must have been like for Rufus Hessberg and Stanley White.

They’re senior citizens now, nondescript by all outward appearances but each with life stories to kill for.

Hessberg is 74, White 69, and in Orange County for the annual science meeting of the Aerospace Medical Assn. Now retired Air Force physicians, they spent their young professional lives in what was one of America’s truly shining moments--the heady days of the early space program.

And that’s why we’re chatting in a lounge at the Disneyland Hotel--so they can tell what it was like to know the secret before the rest of us.

The secret was that humans could fly in outer space. They knew it in the late 1950s when, as Air Force doctors in their 30s, they worked at the Aeromedical Research Lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and there was no such thing as NASA. Hessberg was running experiments in his lab that showed humans could withstand the “G-force” associated with rocket launches, and White was working on creating spacesuits and converting buckets of bolts into a safe space capsule.

“See,” White explains, “there was a fundamental argument going on in the intelligentsia of the United States at that time, which said, ‘Man cannot survive.’ I said, ‘OK, I accept that, but why can’t he survive?’ They just said, ‘He can’t survive. A human is an adapted guy on the surface of the Earth and he can’t survive out of that element.’ ”

You had to admit, White says, the point seemed reasonable and logical.

White wasn’t so sure, and neither was Hessberg. “First, someone would say, ‘Man can’t survive the acceleration of a rocket launch,’ ” Hessberg recalls, duplicating the debate he had with people nearly 40 years ago. “But I’m running a human centrifuge in my lab and we have volunteers withstanding the g’s of a rocket launch. So we can put that fear to rest, if you want to call it a fear or a doubt. Someone said they’re not going to be able to eat in weightlessness; the food won’t go down. So I got a box lunch and got a pilot to fly me in the back of his T-33 and we took off at Wright-Pat and went up to zero Gs and I ate the whole goddamn flight lunch in 30-second increments just to prove you could swallow, chew, the whole nine yards, in weightlessness.”

Their belief that man could survive in space evolved over a several-month period. They remember being invited to a conference sometime in the late ‘50s, where other scientists “had been debating all summer the issue of whether man could go into space. They came to the conclusion, no; we came to the conclusion, yes,” White says. “They thought they had a couple heretics in there.”

In those days, Buck Rogers fever was rampant. “We had a bit of that, but we didn’t have that comic book excitement where you could solve a problem by just drawing another picture,” White says. “We got caught up in the fact we had to go into the laboratory and work the problem, with the idea being that you didn’t want to be the guy whose problem was the showstopper” to putting a man in space.

There would be no showstopper. Engineers and doctors and physicists and pilots made it work. They created a mesmerizing aura of national unity that seems long, long ago.

“The whole world came to a stop,” Hessberg says, recalling moments such as John Glenn’s first orbital flight. “Traffic was stopped in Washington, D.C., people rolled down their car windows, listening to car radios, saying, ‘Did you hear that?’ ”

White says he remembers people standing on the beach at Cape Canaveral, “with tears streaming down their face.”

The two mingled their Air Force careers with stints at NASA. Each credits the other with significant breakthroughs in research, with Hessberg instrumental in the program that eventually sent a chimpanzee into space and White involved in the pre-NASA planning for manned space flights.

What about now? I ask.

“We’ve been forgotten,” Hessberg says.

“The interesting thing is that time has passed us by,” White adds.

Hessberg motions to the convention in progress and says, “I walk out there and anybody from a lieutenant colonel on down didn’t even know who the hell he (White) was or who the hell I was.”

Their observations don’t come across as laments, just statements of fact.

And they’re right, of course, because the country has a hard time getting excited by anything anymore. It makes you wonder if anything could come along that could rekindle a sense of national purpose, as the space program did.

“We were working with visionaries,” Hessberg says. “And it was great.”

Canaveral, “with tears streaming down their face.”

The two mingled their Air Force careers with stints at NASA. Each credits the other with significant breakthroughs in research, with Hessberg instrumental in the progrm that eventually sent a chimpanzee into space and White involved in the pre-NASA planning for manned space flights.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.