Alan Shepard

Alan Shepard is largely famous for two things: being the first American in space; and being the guy who played golf on the Moon during the Apollo 14 mission.

Shepard was laid up for years with Meiniere's Syndrome, a collection of fluid in the middle ear that affects balance.  He was grounded from the Gemini program, where he was supposed to fly the first mission with Thomas Stafford as his co-pilot.  When he was grounded, Deke Slayton made him the head of the Astronaut Office, placing him in charge of all the other astronauts.

During this time, Shepard also pursued business interests in the Houston area, eventually becoming the first millionaire astronaut.  He owned part of a bank and a successful beer distributorship, among other investments.

Finally, towards the end of the decade, he underwent a radical operation that fixed his middle ear enough to be returned to flight status.  As Chief Astronaut, his last act before resigning was to select himself to command the next available Apollo mission.

This was a big breach of protocol.  For one thing, there was a cycle, that had been carefully worked out by Slayton and Shepard himself: first you worked a backup crew; then, three missions later, you flew the mission as prime crew.

Furthermore, Slayton didn't allow anyone to command an Apollo craft unless they had experience as a CM pilot on a previous mission. 

Shepard had, at this point, just a little over fifteen minutes of flight time in outer space, one suborbital shot almost ten years previously.  By contrast, the guy who was supposed to be commanding the next flight, according to the rotation schedule, was Jim Lovell, who at that point not only had more hours in space than any other human, but had already been to the Moon once on Apollo 8.

But Shepard put his name in anyway, and got shot down.

Which meant that it was Lovell's voice calling out, "Houston, we've had a problem," when the Apollo 13 service module blew up on the way to the Fra Mauro highlands.

Shepard went, on the next flight, throwing the whole crew rotation out of whack and costing Dick Gordon a chance at an Apollo command.  He played golf on the Moon, came back to great honors, and was eventually promoted to Rear Admiral, the only Mercury astro to reach flag rank.

Virgil I. Grissom

Gus Grissom, in my opinion, gets a raw deal, especially if you watch the film version of "The Right Stuff."  Fred Ward plays him as a barely-articulate, skirt-chasing yahoo idiot, fresh off the farm from Mitchell, Indiana.

Well, there's a reason that Shepard, Grissom, and Glenn were the first three astronauts chosen to fly Mercury missions.

There's a reason that Grissom wound up being the first Gemini command pilot.

There's a reason that Grissom wound up being the first Apollo commander.

That reason is, pure and simple, Gus Grissom was one of the finest test pilots that ever lived.

Let's see if I can sort of explain the difference between a pilot, a combat pilot  and a test pilot.  I probably can't.

A pilot knows his craft and its capabilities.  He can make it perform under a variety of circumstances and in a variety of conditions. He is familiar with the workings of the aircraft and its various systems.

A combat pilot knows all these things, but does them ten times faster while people in the air and on the ground are trying to kill him or her.  A good combat pilot takes in information from dozens of different sources at once and can process them immediately, coming to a decision so quickly that years of high-level training appear to be instinct.

A test pilot knows all this stuff, and can explain it all to you while the craft is in a pancake spin hurtling towards the ground from seventy thousand feet with the engines stalled and the electrical system cutting in and out.

Gus Grissom was all this, but for an experimental spacecraft (actually three spacecraft systems working together) which had never been flown before.

Then it caught on fire and killed him.

You might say that Grissom's final act as a test pilot was the complete redesign of the Apollo spacecraft.  A complete.  Redesign. 

Which was accomplished in just under eighteen months.

John Glenn

John Glenn.  Wow.  First American to orbit the Earth, then took a few decades off, then came back and did it again.

Glenn and Slayton were the only two Mercury astros with WWII air combat experience.  (Schirra was in the Navy, but he wasn't an aviator at the time.)

Glenn was already a bit of a celebrity when named to the Mercury program. As project manager for the F8U Crusader, he set a transcontinental speed record, becoming the first person to average supersonic speeds.  This led to a stint on the TV show "Name That Tune,"

They made a big deal out of the Mercury astronauts being college-educated, but guess who didn't have a degree?  Glenn left university during WWII to join the Marine Corps.  He was awarded his degree much later.

After his flight, his good friend John Kennedy grounded him, saying that the program could not survive such a loss.  Glenn went into business, working for Royal Crown Cola, for about ten years, until he became a very popular Senator from Ohio.

And if you think your life is going nowhere and you're too old to do anything about it, consider this:

When he made his flight in 1962, Glenn was already forty-one years old.

Scott Carpenter

Scott Carpenter.  I'm going to be as charitable as I can here.

Carpenter would probably have made a better scientist than a pilot.  In fact, I could really see him working on one of the later Skylab missions.  He was the first man to hold both astronaut and aquanaut titles, working with the Navy on Sealab after leaving NASA.

But man alive, if you want to see a guy get torn apart in print, read Chris Kraft's book, Flight: My Life In Mission Control.  Kraft never had a very high opinion of Carpenter's skills or dedication to the mission.  Carpenter blew his fuel chasing down sparkly lights and looking out the window, ignored commands from Mission Control, and completely fubared his re-entry and overshot his landing site by a couple hundred miles.

"That man never flies for me again," swore Kraft, who was one of the few people at NASA with the actual power to make that sentence true.

Walter Schirra

Wally Schirra strikes me as being the one of the Mercury Seven that you could actually just hang out with and have a beer.  Shepard was too icy, Grissom and Cooper had too much of that Air Force fighter-pilot thing going on (which I had more than enough of when I was in the Air Force), Glenn was too straitlaced, Slayton was too unapproachable, and Carpenter seemed like he'd rather be talking to whales or something.

But Schirra was just a guy doing a job, and by all accounts having fun at it.  He played a lot of practical jokes (one favorite: back in the days when everyone smoked, including Our Heroes, it was positively hilarious to spritz a fine mist of gasoline onto the surface of a co-worker's ashtray, causing it to erupt in a fireball when someone tapped a butt in there).

He eschewed the cheap Corvetttes offered to all astronauts at dealer cost, instead preferring to drive a Maserati.

Towards the end of his career with NASA, and shaken pretty badly by the death of his great friend Gus Grissom, he got a little snarky.

But here's the Wally Schirra story I love:

Commanding Gemini VI, with Tom Stafford as co-pilot.  The mission was to rendezvous with Gemini VII with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell.  This would be the very first rendezvous in space, an important first step towards eventual docking in orbit.

Schirra and Stafford are sitting on top of the Titan II, a then-dodgy rocket not known for its reliability.  As the countdown proceeds, Schirra has both hands on one thing: the yellow T-handle that, if pulled, will blow the doors off the Gemini craft and eject the two pilots in a near-horizontal trajectory, hopefully well away from the exploding craft.  Schirra's only job: if anything goes wrong, punch out.

But nobody really likes the ejector system.  For one thing, if you're a little bit on the tall side, you might accidentally catch your helmet ring on the door frame as your pass by it at a significant percentage of Mach 1.  This might cause your head to accidentally come off. 

Also, the system hasn't really been tested with actual, you know, people.  Not as such.

The countdown continues.  Five... Four,,, Three... Two... One...

Ignition!

And we have liftoff!

For three-tenths of a second.

And then the engines shut down.

What this generally means is that the craft is about to perform an action that seasoned NASA veterans refer to as "exploding like a big canister of fiery death."

But Schirra, perhaps using extra sensory organs located somewhere in his enormous testicles, didn't detect any vertical motion, and so refused to eject.  He and Stafford calmly went through the shut down procedures, the crane was brought back out, and they got out of the craft.

Let's be clear here.  If the ship had moved so much as an inch, LITERALLY ONE INCH, it would have exploded.

Schirra didn't detect an inch of motion, sitting on top of a big rocket, and so didn't eject.

And then three days later got back into the same spacecraft and launched it into orbit.

Leroy Gordon Cooper

L. Gordon Cooper.  Yee-HAW!

The last man to travel into space alone.

The first man to sleep in space.

At the end of his Mercury mission, virtually every system on his spacecraft had failed, he later commented that "NASA was sure glad they had a pilot on board then." 

Cooper also claimed to have seen some UFOs while he was up there, but you know those Oklahoma guys and their tall tales.

Donald K Slayton. The K stands for "Kickass."

Deke Slayton got hosed. 

Of course, that was the general consensus of the other Mercury astros, who felt that Slayton's "heart condition" was a political ploy to show them who was really in charge.

They got their own back, though, by placing Slayton in the job of Head of the Astronaut Office, and Slayton, a former bomber pilot and then fighter and test pilot with no previous personnel management skills whatsoever, surprised everyone by being absolutely kickass at the job.

He finally got to fly the Apollo-Soyuz test project, but then almost died after splashdown when toxic vapors filled the capsule and almost choked Slayton, Vance Brand, and Thomas Stafford (there he is again) to the point of asphyxiation.  Scary.

Later in life, Slayton restored and raced little single-engine racer planes, which is not, as it happens, a hobby for the weak of heart.

Ironically, his heart condition never affected him too badly; he instead died of a brain tumor in 1993.

Oh, and he only had nine fingers.