Rocket Men Read online

  It got worse. Though the spacecraft was functioning beautifully, the astronauts’ attitudes were breaking down. On day seven, Cunningham said to controllers, “I’d just like to go on record here as saying that people that dream up procedures like this after you lift off have somehow or another been dropping the ball for the last three years….It looks kind of Mickey Mouse.” On day eight, Schirra said, “I wish you would find out the idiot’s name who thought up this test….I want to talk to him personally when I get back down.”

  In Houston, Kraft and Slayton were seething. Not only were Schirra and his crew nearly insubordinate, they were doing it for the public to hear. At a press briefing, a reporter said, “I’ve covered sixteen flights, and I don’t recall ever finding a bunch of people up there growling the way these guys are. Now, you’re either doing a bad job down here, or they’re a bunch of malcontents. Which is it?”

  Apollo 7 splashed down eleven days after lift-off. Every mission objective had been achieved, and more. The spacecraft had worked beautifully. The SPS engine, so critical to a lunar journey, had performed well. By virtually every measure, the flight had been nearly perfect, and it would open the door to Apollo 8’s flight to the Moon.

  Many attributed the negative behavior by the crew of Apollo 7 to the constant discomfort from their head colds. Others wondered if Schirra had been terrified by the Apollo 1 fire. The commander of that mission, Gus Grissom, had been Schirra’s next-door neighbor. Schirra had been Grissom’s backup pilot for the flight. Long after the fire, Schirra had told people, “We all spent a year wearing black arm bands for three very good men. I’ll be damned if anybody’s going to spend the next year wearing one for me.”

  Despite the technical brilliance of the mission, Kraft wouldn’t abide insubordination, even if it was born of legitimate fear; he determined that none of Apollo 7’s crew would ever fly again for NASA. He felt differently about the crew of Apollo 8. Borman, Lovell, and Anders were consummate professionals, as rock steady as they came. He was certainly grateful for Lovell. Kraft had been ringside for Gemini 7, the grueling fourteen-day mission during which Lovell remained unflappable, even during problems that might have threatened the flight’s survival. Equally important, Lovell was as likable and optimistic a fellow as there was in the astronaut corps, and on man’s first journey away from his world, there could never be too much of that.

  EVERY SATURDAY WHEN HE WAS FIVE years old, James Arthur Lovell, Jr., went to the movies, always to see a Western. Sometimes he went with his father, but the best times were when he went alone. Walking untethered through Philadelphia as a little boy, he was free to discover new neighborhoods, invent new routes, pass strange faces, navigate a giant world by himself.

  Born in 1928, Jim grew up in the teeth of the Depression, but his father had work and the family didn’t want for much. All of that changed around the time Jim reached fifth grade; his parents separated, and not long after, his father died in an automobile accident. Needing to support herself and her young son, Blanch Lovell moved to be near her brother in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and took a job as a secretary for modest wages. By 1940, she and Jim were living in a tiny one-room apartment, their kitchen jammed into a closet, using a single toilet shared by everyone who lived on the floor.

  In 1940, an American kid could hardly walk into a drugstore without seeing a new kind of flying machine streaking across magazine covers: the rocket. Jim couldn’t get enough of the fins and flames and faraway planets painted in full color by the magazine’s visionary artists, or the stories of what these machines could do. Rockets didn’t just take a person from point to point, like airplanes. They flew into the future.

  Jim wanted to fly there, too. Soon he was reading books by the founding father of rocket engineering, Robert Goddard. The idea that these machines could reach beyond Earth’s atmosphere lit up Jim’s dreams. He read Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon, and its sequel, Around the Moon, which tell of three adventurers who build a nine-hundred-foot space cannon that launches them in a projectile around the Moon. During their journey, the men avert a deadly asteroid strike, jettison a dead dog out the window, and succumb to a mysterious force that causes them to dance and sing. They also glimpse the far side of the Moon, a view unavailable from Earth. Now, seventy-five years after Verne had penned his science fiction masterpieces, rocket engineers were saying that an actual trip to the Moon might be possible. Jim paid attention to that.

  By the time he began at Milwaukee’s Juneau High School, Jim had determined to learn all there was to know about rocketry. He discovered a report written by Goddard and published in 1919, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, and was fascinated by the vision in Goddard’s mathematical calculations and his thinking about rocket fuels. The New York Times had ridiculed Goddard for suggesting that a rocket could operate in the vacuum of space or carry payloads to the Moon. “He only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools,” the newspaper wrote. Goddard responded by saying, “Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace.” To fourteen-year-old Jim Lovell, Goddard had more than vision. He had courage.

  In June 1944, the summer after his sophomore year, Jim took a job baling hay on a farm in Plymouth, Wisconsin, an hour north of Milwaukee. The pay wasn’t much, about ten cents an hour, but after work, he and the other young farmhands piled into trucks for a ride to the local lake, where they swam late into the night. Lying on his back beneath crystalline Wisconsin skies, Jim could pick out the Big Dipper, the North Star, and Cassiopeia, all of which he’d learned to use for navigation. All through the summer, celestial bodies moved across Jim’s nights, calling to him from their black canvas.

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  —

  Working as a server of hot foods in the cafeteria during his junior year, Jim spotted Marilyn Gerlach, a pretty freshman he’d admired all year. He decided to ask her to the prom.

  “I don’t know how to dance,” she said.

  “I don’t either,” Jim replied. “We’ll learn together.”

  He went to Marilyn’s house, introduced himself to her parents, and played his record albums in her living room as they practiced their dance moves. Prom night came, the dance floor shook, and Jim and Marilyn became an item.

  Near the end of his junior year, Jim and some friends planned to build a rocket. Gathering cardboard mailing tubes for the body and #10 tin cans for fuel tanks was a cinch; finding rocket fuel was another matter. Jim got a formula from his chemistry teacher, then found a company in Chicago that sold the ingredients to make the fuel, but when he arrived something seemed amiss—the place, located in a tall building downtown, looked more like an attorney’s office than a hardware store. When Jim placed his order, the receptionist arched an eyebrow.

  “You want sulfur, potassium nitrate, and charcoal?”

  “Yes, ma’am, just a few pounds.”

  She asked for Jim’s name—his full name—then summoned a man from the back.

  “Do you know what those chemicals make when mixed together?” the man asked.

  “Yes, sir. Rocket fuel.”

  “No, son. That’s gunpowder.”

  No one looked more surprised than Jim. But he told the man he was still willing to buy it.

  The man, however, was not willing to sell. For one, he told Jim, the company sold its chemicals by the truckful. Second, Jim was seventeen. Third, fourth, fifth, and sixth, Jim was seventeen.

  Back in Milwaukee, Jim’s teacher got a kick out of the story, then helped him and his friends find the chemicals in appropriate quantities. A few days later, a three-foot rocket took shape, complete with wooden nose cone and fins, and a fuse made from a soda straw. Protected by a welder’s mask, Jim took the creation to an open field, lit the fuse, and ran with pals for cover behind rocks. Across the way, Marilyn watched from a safe distance. On ignition, the rocket screamed into
the sky, leaving a trail of crooked smoke as it climbed eighty feet before exploding and raining down blackened shards of cardboard tubing. Somewhere, Robert Goddard was smiling.

  * * *

  —

  Toward the end of Jim’s senior year of high school in 1946, he visited a Milwaukee fairground. There, he witnessed a wonder. On display, close enough to touch, was the spent engine of a captured V-2 German rocket, the one designed by Wernher von Braun and used by the Nazis to attack European cities at the end of World War II. The rocket could travel 200 miles, carry a ton of explosives, reach an altitude of 50 miles, and attain speeds of more than 3,300 miles per hour.

  Electrified by the encounter, Jim wrote to the American Rocket Society, which had already existed for twenty years, and asked for advice on careers. They replied with a friendly letter telling him that universities didn’t yet offer majors in rocket technology, but that he’d be well served to take college courses in thermodynamics, aerodynamics, and mathematics. To that end, the society advised, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the California Institute of Technology would make excellent choices.

  Jim had no money for college. His mother encouraged him to apply to the Naval Academy at Annapolis, from which his uncle had graduated in 1913, and Jim did that, but the best the Navy could offer was a position as a third alternate on the admissions waitlist. The Navy, however, did need pilots. To get them, they were willing to pay for a student to go to college. If that student did well, the Navy would make him a military aviator. All of it would be paid for by Uncle Sam.

  The idea of being in command of his own aircraft thrilled Jim. He signed up for the Navy program and enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he loaded up on mechanical engineering courses and saved most of his fifty-dollar-a-month stipend for weekends when Marilyn came to visit.

  After two years in Madison, Lovell moved to Pensacola for flight training. Halfway through the preflight segment, he received orders to report to the Naval Academy; a few days later, Lovell was just another plebe at Annapolis. None of his credits from Wisconsin was eligible for transfer. He was starting from scratch.

  In November, Lovell invited Marilyn to the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia. By that time, he knew he wanted to marry Marilyn, and he asked her to move out east near the Naval Academy. At the time, Marilyn was attending a teacher’s college at home in Milwaukee, but she pulled up stakes and moved to Washington, D.C., where she enrolled at George Washington University and took a job at Garfinckel’s Department Store. And started dating a medical student.

  Lovell could hardly blame her. He was so busy at Annapolis he hardly had a chance to call, let alone take out, his girl, and even when midshipmen got liberty for a night on the town, there were curfews and other style-cramping rules. Still, the med student didn’t last long; he didn’t like it when Marilyn wore Lovell’s class crest on her sweater one night.

  Things got easier for Lovell and Marilyn in his third year, when the Academy allowed him more liberty. After dinner one night, he walked her to a jewelry store, where they admired a selection of engagement rings.

  “Do you like that one?” Lovell asked.

  “Do you want me to have one of those?” she replied.

  “After seven years, I don’t want anything else,” he said.

  Lovell tore into his final year at Annapolis. Only fifty in the class of nearly eight hundred would be assigned to flight school right away, and finishing strong depended in part on the quality of one’s senior thesis. Most played it safe, writing on naval history or tactics, but Lovell took a leap into the theoretical. Working long into the nights, and with Marilyn as his typist, he put together a study of the development of the liquid-fuel rocket engine, a paper that didn’t just analyze the state of the art but made predictions that sounded more Jules Verne than midshipman.

  “The big day for rockets is still coming,” he wrote, “the day when science will have advanced to the stage when flight into space is reality and not a dream. That will be the day when the advantage of rocket power—simplicity, high thrust, and the ability to operate in a vacuum—will be used to best advantage.”

  Even in 1952, talking about combustion in a vacuum could seem ridiculous to the uninformed. But Lovell’s vision never wavered. When the paper came back it was marked A minus. Lovell graduated at the top of the class on June 6, 1952. Later that day, he and Marilyn were married at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Annapolis.

  As he’d long hoped, Lovell was chosen to attend the Navy’s flight training program. He returned to Pensacola, this time as an officer (ensign), not a midshipman. A year after they arrived, Marilyn gave birth to the couple’s first child, Barbara. Two months later, in February 1954, Lovell earned his wings and was ordered to the Naval Air Station at Moffett Field in California, a few miles from Palo Alto.

  He was assigned to VC-3, a squadron that supplied fighter pilots trained in night operations to aircraft carriers in the Pacific. Few assignments tightened a flier’s throat like landing a jet on a darkened deck just a few hundred yards long in the dead of night—a tiny moving runway on roiling seas. Small errors could become deadly mistakes.

  One moonless night in early 1955, after launching from the deck of the USS Shangri-La in an F2H Banshee jet fighter off the coast of Japan, Lovell embarked on his first combat exercise over foreign waters. Bad weather had prevented takeoff for the last of the four fliers in Lovell’s patrol. The jets that had already launched were ordered to circle the ship until they burned down their fuel, then land. Cloud cover forced the Banshees to stay just 1,500 feet above the choppy seas.

  Lovell banked to join his teammates in formation, but when he reached the rendezvous point he was alone. His automatic direction finder (ADF) indicated he was heading straight for the carrier, but the ship wasn’t there. The other pilots reported that they were already circling the Shangri-La. Something in Lovell’s navigation had gone wrong.

  He checked his ADF and confirmed he was locked on to the ship’s frequency. But he was not, in fact, locked on to the ship. His instrument had instead picked up a Japanese tracking station broadcasting on the same frequency. Without knowing it, he was following that signal, in total darkness, to the coast.

  Sensing that something was wrong, Lovell banked 180 degrees to look for his wingmen. All he found were empty skies. He reached for the flight plan to make sure his radio numbers were correct, but it was too dark to read the small print by the jet’s ambient light. Lovell had a solution for that. He’d designed and built a small light, which he’d carried along and now plugged in.

  Circuits blew. Every light in the cockpit died. The airplane turned as dark as the night.

  Lovell had to make a choice. He could ask the carrier to turn on its lights, an embarrassment from which he might never recover. Or he could continue following the signal, hoping to find the ship—or Japan—before he ran out of fuel.

  In the end, he chose neither. And it was all because of green.

  Lovell saw the color barely glowing in the water below him. He knew that algae could be made luminous when churned by the spinning propellers of a powerful ship, so he decided to follow the faint flare in the water. Several minutes later, he located his wingmen, who set down, first one and then the other, on the deck of the Shangri-La. Next it was Lovell’s turn to land, and even though he’d found home, his cockpit was still without lights. He couldn’t tell his airspeed and altitude without being able to read his instruments.

  But he still had a penlight, and he flipped it on, then put it in his mouth to cast its tiny beam on the instrument panel before him. Believing himself to be about 250 feet above the water, he descended toward the carrier, only to see his wingtip’s red light reflect on the water no more than twenty feet below, a split second from impact. Lovell cranked back on the stick and jammed forward the throttle, sending the Banshee howling skyward and just clear of t
he side of the Shangri-La’s deck.

  Heart pounding and mouth dry, Lovell now had to turn back and try again. This time, he came in high but, despite frantic don’t-do-it signals from the landing officer, figured he’d never get a better chance to make the flight deck, given his limited ability to read his instruments. Plummeting downward, he thudded onto the deck and skidded forward, one of his tires blowing before the carrier’s last arresting wire grabbed the jet’s tailhook and jerked the plane to a halt.

  Lovell’s legs shook so badly he could barely climb from the cockpit. But that experience only confirmed how he felt about death. To him, the only thing guaranteed to a person was the moment. It was the only time one knew he would be there to take in the trees and the sun and the stars, to meet people, make friends, fall in love. But a person couldn’t be in the moment if he worried too much about the future. That meant in order to live, he couldn’t worry about dying. The day after Lovell’s wild flight, he climbed back into the cockpit and took off again. This time, he put the airplane back down just where it belonged.

  While Lovell was training, Marilyn gave birth to their second child, James Jr. A few weeks later, Lovell watched transfixed as America’s lead rocket designer, Wernher von Braun, appeared on a nationally televised Disney special, Man in Space. Von Braun showed viewers a prototype space suit like the one Americans would wear “when we make the trip to the Moon,” and he revealed his model for a four-stage orbital rocket ship—about the coolest thing any of the 42 million people watching the program had ever seen.

  For the next two years, Lovell flew jets at sea and trained pilots while Marilyn raised the children in California. In 1957, he applied to the test pilot school at the Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent River, Maryland. The job of testing experimental aircraft built with the most advanced technology seemed a natural fit. Marilyn backed his decision and packed the Lovells to go.