THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 5, 1996 TAG: 9605030065
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 232 lines
HE STEPPED from the van with dawn still hours away, a spindly, alien creature shimmering in the glare of a dozen floodlights.
Across the pad, beyond the gantry's latticework, a Redstone missile waited, six stories tall and aimed for the heavens. Vapor jetted from its skin.
Back home in Virginia Beach, he knew, his wife would be up. Friends would be arriving to keep her company. TV crews would be encamped in the yard.
He tilted his helmet back to gaze up to a tiny, blunt capsule wedged into the rocket's nose, all but invisible against the dark sky. His house, his family, the tranquility of Hampton Roads seemed so, so far from this otherworldly scene.
He whispered to himself that he'd never again see the rocket - confidence talking, not dread. Then Alan B. Shepard strode to the gantry. Rode an elevator to the capsule. Folded himself into its seat.
And became a cork afloat in the vast sea of space.
It was 35 years ago today that a Navy commander living at the Oceanfront became America's first astronaut.
His Redstone rocket lifted Alan Shepard 115 miles into space, a distance so eclipsed by odysseys since that today it seems almost quaint. He spent all of 15 minutes in flight. He was back on solid ground in time for lunch.
But the passage of the years has made it easy to forget that the first Mercury flight was terrifying. Shepard was strapped into a plug of an aircraft smaller than a Volkswagen, and the booster that shot him skyward was designed to carry military payloads, not people. His survival depended on computers dwarfed by modern home desktops.
All but forgotten, too, is that no Mission Control guided his flight, no amphitheater of skinny-tied experts studied his progress on computer screens.
The nation's manned space center, such as it was, lay right here: in Hampton, at NASA's Langley Research Center.
Mercury was designed and managed in the center's labs, wind tunnels and offices. Its capsules were dunk-tested in Hampton's Back River. Its seven astronauts - men whose names remain instantly recognizable to Americans over 35 - worked out of a crowded, junky office on Langley's grounds.
Shepard knew the lay of the local land when he and six fellow astronauts reported to Langley in 1959.
He had been a Navy aviator for 12 years, for part of that time flying prop-driven, gull-winged F4U Corsairs from carriers based in Norfolk.
His performance had earned him two stints at the Navy's Patuxent River Naval Air Station, up the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, and an assignment with a night-fighter squadron on the West Coast. Then it was back to Norfolk, this time as a member of the Atlantic Fleet staff.
``We decided to rent in Virginia Beach, because we liked that area,'' Shepard recalled last month. ``Rented a place in Bay Colony, a nice house. We had three girls, a lot younger back then, and it was nice having the beach so close by.
``And it was there that I was notified that I had been invited to apply for a job as an astronaut.''
The invitation from the fledgling National Aeronautics and Space Administration tersely listed the standards a successful applicant would meet: at least 1,500 hours of logged flight time. Jet-pilot experience. A college degree. He had to be in excellent shape, under 40, and no taller than 5-foot-11. Of 508 test pilots in the military, 110 met the criteria.
``There had been some press about the fact that they were selecting astronauts, so I wasn't totally surprised by the request to come out,'' Shepard said. ``I knew they were looking for people of a certain type.
``My wife was pleased, because she knew that basically I was a test pilot, and that I was somewhat disgruntled about having to fly a desk.''
Six months later, at a press conference in Washington, NASA's Space Task Group introduced the chosen seven: Lt. Col. John Glenn of the Marines; Air Force captains Virgil ``Gus'' Grissom, L. Gordon Cooper Jr. and Donald ``Deke'' Slayton; and from the Navy, Lt. Cmdr. Walter M. Shirra Jr., Lt. M. Scott Carpenter and Shepard.
The press pounced on the new celebrities, hungry for every detail about their families, habits, fears. On Bay Colony's Brandon Road, Louise Shepard bundled the kids into the car and headed for the Oceanfront, where they strolled the Boardwalk in a brisk April wind, waiting for the excitement to pass.
It took years to happen. ``There was so much publicity,'' Shepard said. ``Magazine articles. TV. Newspaper stories. It kept the seven of us in the limelight.
``Over time, NASA was able to protect us, pretty much, and we decided just to stay right at the beach. We were able to continue our lease on the house, and we socialized with just the close circle of friends we had there, mostly Navy friends.''
Five of the others moved their families into the region, Carpenter and Cooper living just across Back River from Langley, Grissom, Schirra and Slayton buying new ranchers in the Stoneybrook Estates subdivision of Newport News.
Every weekday, Shepard would climb into his white convertible and floor it up Shore Drive - ``There wasn't much traffic in those days'' - across the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel and into Hampton, a city by now calling itself ``Spacetown USA.''
The Langley that waited had the look of a war-era skunk works: a campus of brick office buildings and barracks, ringed by utilitarian laboratories and hangars. Mammoth wind tunnels of corrugated aluminum, the testing ground for virtually every American fighter used in World War II, rose from the swampy ground at the water's edge.
It seemed a peaceful place, measured in pace, studious. Behind this facade, the center bustled and churned. America was in a race. Langley's work would decide whether it beat the Soviets into space.
Considering their celebrity, the astronauts led an uncoddled existence. ``We had seven of us in one office - seven desks and one secretary,'' Shepard said. ``Unless we scheduled meetings, which we did periodically to brief each other, we usually weren't there at the same time, which was probably a good thing.''
Between physical training and sometimes-torturous medical testing, the team took frequent trips to St. Louis to study capsule prototypes - a move aimed at ensuring that McDonnell-Douglas incorporated pilot controls in the aircraft, that its occupants be more than ``Spam in a can.''
They split up to follow Langley's efforts to answer vexing questions. Among them: Which of America's unreliable military rockets would carry them aloft? ``One guy followed the Atlas missile, one guy followed the Redstone,'' Shepard said. ``I was assigned to follow the recovery function, so I worked pretty closely with the Navy troops.''
They looked on as NASA adapted Langley's aging equipment to simulate problems in space, at one point dismantling the roof of the center's half-mile-long, water-filled hydrodynamics tank so that a capsule prototype could be lowered inside.
``We used that tank to develop procedures for how you would climb out of the spacecraft if you had trouble, that sort of stuff,'' he said. ``We tested them later at sea, but the first work was in the tank.
``You literally plan for things to go wrong. At least half the time in the simulator you're coping with emergencies - maybe even more than half.
``It assures you that your contingencies are good, and unless something really catastrophic happens, you're going to be able to get home.''
The seven became close, but something short of friends, through 1959 and 1960. Only one would be chosen to be the First Up. Each wanted the honor. Competition was keen.
``We were not buddies,'' Shepard said.
Then came Jan. 19, 1961, a Monday, the day before JFK was sworn in as president - and a message from their boss, Space Task Group leader Robert Gilruth: Stick around after you knock off.
``So we hung around the office,'' Shepard recalled, ``and he walked in and said, `Gentlemen, it's time to make a crew assignment.
`` `Shepard's gonna make the first flight. Grissom's gonna make the second flight. Glenn will be back-up.'
``Of course, I was elated. I was in orbit immediately. After about three milliseconds I looked up and there were six faces looking at me. Of course, they all walked over and congratulated me, but they wanted the job. There was some disappointment.
``I asked Bob Gilruth several times, `Why me?' All he'd say is, `You were just the right one for the job.' ''
So it was that on May 5, 1961, Shepard found himself on his back in a tiny Mercury capsule dubbed Freedom 7, surrounded by an array of primitive gauges, a crescent of blue visible through one slender window, urging his bosses to ``light this candle!''
They came through at 9:34 a.m. While Louise and the country watched breathlessly on television, smoke and flame erupted from the Redstone's tail. The big rocket swayed on the pad. Then slowly, so slowly at first, it thundered from the ground.
``It didn't throw you back in your seat, or anything like that, because it had just enough thrust to get off the pad,'' Shepard remembered. ``The first thing you feel is a little nudge when it lifts off.
``There was less vibration than I thought. I was really braced, thinking, `Man, there's gonna be some shake, rattle and roll.'
``There wasn't. And the noise wasn't too bad. Of course, I had a helmet on, and it was padded in case of any sudden stop.'' He laughed. ``Between the padding and the helmet, there really wasn't much noise.
``But you're aware that you're moving. You've got a tenth of a G, something like that. Then, obviously, you're aware that it's building.''
Accelerating, the Redstone jetted six miles into the air, vibrated wildly before punching through the sound barrier, then settled into smooth flight.
``I was nervous,'' Shepard said. ``Scared is not the right word. You know that you're the backup system, and you don't want to make a mistake.''
The rockets burned for six or seven minutes, then fell away from the capsule. Weightless, Shepard flipped off the capsule's automatic pitch setting and adjusted it manually. Flipped it back to auto, did the same with the settings for yaw and roll. The capsule answered his commands.
``Our main thrust,'' he explained, ``was to show that pilots had a place in space.''
Then, as he relayed instrument readings back to Cape Canaveral, Shepard took a moment to look out the window. The capsule was arcing over the Bahamas. ``I was looking down on the Caribbean, and you could see the chain of the islands, you could see the coral reefs,'' he said. ``It was just a beautiful sight.''
Minutes later, it was over: The capsule drifted to sea on a parachute and splashed down off Grand Bahama Island. Helicopters lifted it from the water within minutes. Once airborne, Shepard opened the hatch, and the chopper's crew hoisted him aboard on a horse collar. The carrier Lake Champlain came into view.
``I'd made hundreds of carrier landings, but this was one of the best,'' he said. ``The whole flight deck was nothing but people waiting for me, and that really was a pretty emotional moment, looking down from the chopper and seeing that. There was a little emotion there.
``An Air Force guy wouldn't have felt that way.''
Alan Shepard is 72 years old. His hair is thinning, and a bit longer than the crewcut he's remembered by, but his toothy, hot dog grin remains, virtually unchanged from the expression he wore on magazine covers in 1961.
He and his family moved to Houston a year after his flight. Their Beach house, in the 500 block of Brandon Road, still looks much as it did 35 years ago.
Langley, too, has changed little: Even before Gordon Cooper made the last Mercury flight in May 1963, NASA had moved its manned space operation to a new campus south of Houston, and the Hampton center had returned to its quiet, thoughtful ways.
The old hydrodynamics tank, now used only sporadically, still stands, as does the mammoth wind tunnel in which the Mercury spacecraft was tested. A few leftovers of the Gemini and Apollo programs stud the grounds, as well.
But outside the gates, few clues remain that here was born America's space program. That here began the work that took men to the moon a scant eight years after Shepard's flight. That here, scientists helped engineer NASA's greatest triumphs.
Virginia Beach leaders named the city's new civic and convention center for Shepard, but it's gone now: Better known as ``the Dome,'' it stood on the Oceanfront until another set of city leaders voted to tear it down a few years ago.
The most apparent reminders might be Cmdr. Alan B. Shepard Boulevard, which carries traffic toward Langley, and seven Hampton bridges named for the original astronauts.
Tiny signs commemorating them, easily overlooked, still sprout from the bridge abutments in Spacetown USA. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Strapped into a capsule smaller than a Volkswagen, Shepard urged his
bosses to ``light this candle!''
MERCURY 7 FOUNDATION
``I was nervous,'' says Shepard, now 72. ``You know that you're the
backup system, and you don't want to make a mistake.''
NASA LANGLEY
The Mercury space capsule is tested in the full-scale wind tunnel at
NASA's Langley Research Center.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY ASTRONAUT by CNB