Wolfe’s caricature did both history and the memory of Gus Grissom a terrible disservice. Thus the best thing to be said about George Leopold’s book Calculated Risk is that it corrects Wolfe’s numerous historical errors and, in doing so, restores Grissom to where he belongs: in the first rank of the pantheon of heroes of manned space exploration.
After an unexceptional boyhood in Mitchell, Indiana, Virgil I. Grissom took off, as a man and a pilot, when his adolescent fascination with aviation led him into the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II and then to Purdue University, one of the great engineering schools in the world (and to this day one of the institutions of higher education that produces the most astronauts). As a junior officer in the newly created U.S. Air Force, Grissom flew a hundred combat missions in Korea before graduating in 1957 from the Air Force’s Test Pilot School and testing one new aircraft design after another at Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.Grissom excelled as a test pilot and later, after his two missions into space, reflected in an indirect way on just how competent an engineer he had become through his flight-test experience: “They don’t hand out PhDs in test piloting,” he wrote, “but you pick up a tremendous amount of scientific and engineering knowledge along the way. After all, when you take up a brand new plane and put it through its paces to see if it will hang together, you are really flying somebody’s theory. You have to understand that theory pretty well to check it out fully. Every new plane, every test flight, is a brand new challenge.”
Which, among other things, gives the lie to Wolfe’s suggestion, in The Right Stuff, that the Mercury Seven astronauts were somehow second-stringers in the flight-test fraternity — “Spam in a can” who wouldn’t be doing any real flying. On the contrary, and notwithstanding the invaluable contributions made to the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs by a diverse group of scientists and engineers, Calculated Risk makes it clear that the astronaut corps played a significant role in the development of spaceflight. From the beginning, they were most certainly not just passengers, chosen merely because they could take the pressures of high-G flight environments.
After volunteering and making it through the screening process, Grissom accepted NASA’s invitation to join the Mercury program because he understood that this was “where the future of test piloting lay.” He had always wanted to go higher and faster, and Project Mercury and its follow-ons, Gemini and Apollo, were the tickets to achieve that ambition. That Gus Grissom made the first cut in a contest involving some of the most competitive men on the planet suggests that his Hoosier grit was wedded to professional competence of a high order.
George Leopold, a technology journalist and science writer, is at his best in vindicating Grissom’s conduct during the mission of Liberty Bell 7, the second human suborbital spaceflight by an American, in July 1961. As Leopold puts it pungently (and accurately), Tom Wolfe “fictionalized” Grissom’s mission, suggesting that a panicky astronaut had “screwed the pooch” by inadvertently firing the mechanism that blew open the capsule’s hatch while the spacecraft bobbed in the Atlantic Ocean — an emergency in which Liberty Bell 7 was lost and Grissom almost drowned. Leopold demonstrates that the blown hatch was the result of a faulty design and an electrostatic discharge from the recovery helicopter; that Grissom maintained his cool throughout the ordeal, risking his life to try to save the sinking spacecraft; and that the incident did not do permanent damage to Grissom’s reputation for either courage or competence within NASA — as evidenced by his commanding the first two-man Gemini mission (making him the first human being to be in space twice) and then getting the command pilot assignment on the first Apollo flight.
In fact, if Grissom had been listened to more carefully, the Apollo 1 launch-pad fire disaster that cost Grissom his life and killed crewmates Ed White and Roger Chafee might not have happened. Grissom, the highly competent engineer and veteran test pilot, strongly suspected that the Block 1 Apollo spacecraft designed by North American Aviation was a lemon: a death-trap in which various engineering tradeoffs involving a pure-oxygen internal spacecraft atmosphere had created a tinder box in which a single spark from faulty and exposed wiring would cause an instant and catastrophic conflagration. Moreover, North American was ill-organized to build the Apollo spacecraft, its management structure so diffuse that there was no one to respond to the astronauts’ concerns about the machine they were to take into Earth’s orbit and beyond. Thus Grissom was not sardonically joking, Yeager-style, when he said, at a pre-flight press conference, that a “successful flight” of Apollo 1 would be one in which “all three of us get back.” The press completely missed the point, but Grissom was signaling his deep concern that the Block 1 Apollo spacecraft was unfit to fly.
by George Weigel, New Atlantis | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia
