Flying to the Moon Read Free Page A

never thought about that before. By the time I had gotten my hands on an airplane, the test pilots had already wrung it out and had made sure that it was safe for me to fly. Now I had that responsibility, to check everything from A to Z, so that when a new airplane entered squadron service, there would be no surprises waiting for the new boy, the inexperienced second lieutenant. At the Test Pilot School I learned how to get as much information as possible from a new airplane in the shortest possible time. When I graduated, I stayed on at Edwards Air Force Base, and was assigned to the Fighter Test section. This was exactly what I wanted, but I was a little disappointed because at that time there weren’t any new fighters to test.
Instead, I spent my time flying older planes which were being modified in various ways. It was interesting flying, and I got a chance to fly such airplanes as the North American F-100 Super Sabre, the Convair F-102 Delta Dagger, the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, and quite a few others.
    I really liked my job as a test pilot; in fact, I thought it was the best possible job I could have, except for one thing. There were other people going a lot higher and faster than I was. They were called astronauts, and they had been picked from the ranks of test pilots. There were only seven of them, and I didn’t know any of them, but some of my test pilot friends did, and told me stories about them. I was surprised to hear that they weren’t supermen at all, but just test pilots (admittedly, a bit older and more experienced), who made mistakes just like the rest of us. I wondered what it would take to become an astronaut. The Air Force must have been wondering the same thing too, because at this time they renamed the Test Pilot School and started calling it by a much more fancy name—the Aerospace Research Pilot School. They also began teaching “space” courses, and they invited me to come back to the school to take some of them. So I became a student once again, and learned about what keeps satellites in orbit, and about how weightlessness affects the human body, and about how to fly machines without wings. After graduating I went back to my old job in Fighter Test, and waited until the Space Agency decided they needed some more astronauts. I only had a couple of months to wait before NASA announced it was going to hire a third group of astronauts. I had tried the year before to become a NASA astronaut, and had been rejected, but this time I was hopeful—
because of the space courses I had taken—that I knew more than before, and that NASA would take me.
    The first thing I had to do was pass a physical exam that took a whole week. It was not a pleasant week, because I worried the entire time that they would find something wrong with me. Also, some of the tests were not pleasant. They took what seemed like a quart of blood, poured cold water in my ears (that makes you dizzy), and performed a lot of other tests which I didn’t even understand. They checked the condition of my heart by making me walk on a treadmill that they adjusted to get steeper and steeper as the minutes went by. They stopped the treadmill when my heartbeat got up to 180 beats per minute, which is pretty fast. I also took written mental tests and had interviews with psychiatrists. Some of the questions seemed strange, like: “Are you a slob or a snob?” You had to pick one or the other. I picked “snob,” although I don’t think I am one. Somehow I didn’t want to pick “slob.”
    After a week in San Antonio, Texas, where the physical exam took place, I went to Houston for an interview. It was conducted by Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard, two of the original seven astronauts, and some other technical experts. The questions were designed to see how much we knew about NASA’s plans for flying in space, and to determine what (if anything) we might contribute, based on our