More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
In the era of jet fighters, ejection meant being exploded out of the cockpit by a nitroglycerine charge, like a human cannonball. The ejection itself was so hazardous—men lost knees, arms, and their lives on the rim of the cockpit or had the skin torn off their faces when they hit the “wall” of air outside—that many pilots chose to wrestle their aircraft to the ground rather than try it … and died that way instead.
Once the theorem and the corollary were understood, the Navy’s statistics about one in every four Navy aviators dying meant nothing. The figures were averages, and averages applied to those with average stuff.
More fighter pilots died in automobiles than in airplanes. Fortunately, there was always some kindly soul up the chain to certify the papers “line of duty,” so that the widow could get a better break on the insurance.
The commanding officer at Edwards passed the word around that he wanted his top boys, the test pilots in Fighter Ops, to avoid Project Mercury because it would be a ridiculous waste of talent; they would just become “Spam in a can.” This phrase “Spam in a can” became very popular at Edwards as the nickname for Project Mercury.
considerable attention had been given to a plan to anesthetize or tranquillize the astronauts, not to keep them from panicking, but just to make sure they would lie there peacefully with their sensors on and not do something that would ruin the flight.
A Soviet surface-to-air missile—no one even knew the Soviets had created such a weapon—shot down an American CIA “spy plane,” the U–2, flown by a former Air Force pilot named Francis Gary Powers.
As for Shepard, what was going through his mind at that moment, and through much of his body, from his brain to his pelvic saddle, was a steadily increasing desire to urinate.
He said he wanted to relieve his bladder. Finally they told him to go ahead and “do it in the suit.” And he did. Because his seat, or couch, was angled back slightly, the flood headed north, toward his head, carrying consternation with it.
Like most military people, including those in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, they didn’t really consider New York part of the United States. It was like a free port, a stateless city, an international protectorate, Danzig in the Polish corridor, Beirut the crossroads of the Middle East, Trieste, Zurich, Macao, Hong Kong. Whatever ideals the military stood for, New York City did not.
They stood there four and five deep at the curbs, sweating and staring. They sweated a river and they stared ropes.
The air conditioning hit them like a wall. Everybody’s bone marrow congealed. It made you feel like your teeth were loose.
