Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman Read Free

taped a note on the front door:
There are no reporters inside. I
will have a statement for the press after the flight.
    When her husband called, Louise had a dozen things to tell him—about their girls, the house, the pesky press, her golf game—but she forgot them all. None of it seemed important now. She knew it could be the last time they spoke. Ever. “We’ll be watching you on TV,” she said. “Be sure to wave when you lift off.”
    “Right,” he said, and laughed. “I’ll open the hatch and stick my arm out.”
    Shepard, uncharacteristically, didn’t have much else to say that morning, either. Finally, Louise told him to “hurry home.”
    “I will,” he said.
    “I love you.”
    Shepard hung up, then walked into the suit-up room. Technicians and engineers avoided any conversation with him. If he wanted to talk, he’d have to be the one to start. Suit technician Joe Schmitt barely shared a dozen words with Shepard as Schmitt worked himself into a sweat squeezing Shepard into the tight, silvery space suit.
    Just before leaving the hangar that housed the astronauts’ quarters and exam rooms, Shepard winked at Dee O’Hara, the astronauts’ kewpie-doll-cute and devoted nurse, who stood near the exit clutching her rosary beads. “Well, here I go, Dee,” he said, and Dee just waved, fighting back tears.
    Shepard climbed into a transport van, leaned back in a reclining chair, and placed a portable oxygen tank on the floor beside him. He looked and acted like a space-alien businessman riding a commuter bus, with his silvery briefcase by his side.
    The van pulled up at the foot of the Redstone rocket, bathed in floodlights, plumes of blue and white oxygen fumes venting from its wafer-thin sides. At eighty-three feet, the rocket was no taller than a mature birch tree. It would take nearly seven of them stacked end to end to reach the height of the Washington Monument. But Shepard was proud of his little capsule-topped rocket and called her “that little rascal.” As he approached the rocket, he asked Mission Control for permission to exit the transport van ahead of schedule. He knew he’d never see the “bird” again, so he stopped to symbolically kick the tires.
    She’s got an air of expectancy,
he thought.
A lovely sight . . . long
and slender.
    Suddenly the crewmen behind him broke into applause, and for a moment the emotions of the day caught up with Shepard.
Life
magazine photographer Ralph Morse, the scrappy little New Yorker who had become a good friend, began snapping away, and one of his shots would occupy half a page in the
New
York Times.
Shepard turned to speak to the crew but his throat choked up and he just waved.
    On the elevator ride to the top, Douglas gave him a box of crayons—“So you’ll have something to do up there.” Shepard laughed loudly, almost fogging his visor, but grateful for the tension breaker. He handed the box to Douglas, telling him he was going to be a little busy. At the top of the gantry—in an antechamber whose translucent green walls, like those of a beach-side motel, earned it the nickname Surfside 5—stood Glenn.
    Glenn wore sterile white coveralls and a paper cap like a butcher’s. He greeted Shepard as he exited the elevator, thenhelped him squeeze through the two-foot-square opening of the capsule Shepard had named
Freedom 7.
As Shepard settled into the couch that had been contoured to his body, he looked up at the instrument panel and laughed into his visor. Taped there was a sign that read No Handball Playing in This Area. Beside that was a centerfold ripped from a girlie magazine. Shepard took one look at Glenn’s giggling face, impressed that the Boy Scout was capable of such a crafty gotcha.

    Right from the start—in 1959, when NASA had chosen seven test pilots to train to become the first astronauts—it was clear the two front-runners and competing leaders of the group would be Shepard and Glenn. The bad boy and the altar boy.
    Glenn, the