Francis French - In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969

For Dee O'Hara

Spacefarers need more than engineers to support them.

Over the mountains of the moon,
Down the valley of the shadow,
Ride, boldly ride.

Edgar Allen Poe,

Eldorado

Illustrations

What else was different in those days? Todays astronauts may seem a bit underpaid for the job they do and the impressive way they do it, but their salaries look pretty good to me. When I went to work as an astronaut, in 1963, I earned a little over $13,000 a year. I once calculated that, during my Apollo 7 mission, I had earned the great sum of $660. But we werent doing it for the moneynobody does a job like that for money. Any one of us would have paid NASA to have the job!

I do recall being just a little chagrined when I first learned what I was going to be paid, and thinking, You know, if it was so hard to get this job and so many people wanted it, wasn't it worth maybe a bit more than $13,000 a year?

Something else we did not have and were unable to obtain in those days was life insurance. The second year I was there, we thought we might get coverage when nasa went out for quotes to renew the agencys health and accident policy. They actually solicited two quotes. Insurers had to submit one bid with the thirty astronauts included for death benefits and another bid if we were not covered. The difference was, apparently, quite significant because NASA, bless its sweet little heart, accepted the bid with astronauts not included!

None of us planned to collect any life insurance, even though we did not always deserve our reputations as impeccable aviators. It turns out we had just about the same kind of safety record as active-duty military pilots. Most of our accidents were pilot errorthat is just the way it is with military flying. We lost a lot more astronauts in t-38s back then than we ever did in spacecraft.

By 1965 our program was beginning to roll, but the Soviet Union had already laid claim to many space firsts. In four short years they had launched the first human, Yuri Gagarin, followed by Gherman Titov, the first person to spend a full day in orbit. They also became the first nation to launch simultaneous flights: Vostok 3, with Andrian Nikolayev on board, followed a day later by Vostok 4, carrying Pavel Popovich into space. The following year Valery Bykovsky and Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, repeated that successful tandem mission.

NASA was hard on their heels. We launched Alan Shepard three weeks after Yuri Gagarin's epic journey, and although Shepards flight and the following one by Gus Grissom were short, suborbital missions, they got us in the game. It wasn't until John Glenns flight in February 1962 that the United States began to match the Russians by orbiting humans. The Mercury flights of Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, and Gordon Cooper narrowed the gap in what was being called the space race, before the Soviets once again surprised the world with the first three-person flight. A full four years before the first flight of the three-man Apollo spacecraft, which I would fly, Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov, and Boris Yegorov orbited the Earth together aboard the first Voskhod spacecraft.

Americans seem to rise to the occasion when they find themselves in a race; we just naturally want to win. However, this was not just a race. It was a clash of cultures, systems of government, and a challenge to our way of life. We felt threatened! For the first time in a hundred years, we faced the fact that not only were we not the best at everything in the world, we were not even as good at some things. We were suddenly shocked into doing something.

As 1965 got under way the Soviet Union achieved another notable milestone: a flight featuring the first spacewalk. With the successful conclusion of this mission by Alexei Leonov and Pavel Belyayev, the Russians appeared to be well ahead. However, we were about to launch the first Gemini mission. This impressive and relatively cheap program soon narrowed the gap. As we launched Gemini missions, the Russians were busy creating a whole new generation of spacecraft known as Soyuz. Its birth would not be an easy one.

Sadly, along the way, each nation lost some of its best spacefarers. In my first five years at NASA, we lost seven of the thirty people in our group in aircraft and spacecraft accidents. In the thirty-eight years since, we have only lost five more members of that group. Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died aboard their Apollo 1 spacecraft during a launch-pad fire in January 1967, and the Soviets grieved the loss of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov when