Image: Gagarin (left), the first ... and Muszaphar, the 458th
TOM Wolfe used the phrase “the right stuff” to describe what it took to be an astronaut.
The seven individuals selected for the United States’ Mercury programme in 1959 were all experienced aviators with exemplary backgrounds, academic records and service careers. All were paragons of physical fitness and moral rectitude. And all could transfer their cool heads and steely nerves to proper conduct before the world media.
Indeed, that was the point of their existence: not just to boldly go where no one had gone before, but for the world to watch them going. America’s Mercury, Gemini and Apollo were not so much about “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth", as John F. Kennedy pledged in 1961, but to beat the Russians to it.
Not that the Russians had designs on the Moon. Their interests lay in Earth orbit. Sputnik’s pioneering flight 50 years ago this month had opened the heavens above America to Russian hardware. Just a dozen years after the end of World War Two, a basketball-sized satellite traversing the continental United States 223km overhead had boosted the Cold War to its final frontier.
When Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space in 1961, the die was cast. The US girded its collective loins for one mighty thrust. The first seven American astronauts were selected, based on whatever criteria combined to give each of them the Right Stuff.
They would become among the most famous individuals of their time; their subsequent successes (and failures) the stuff of modern legend.
In those turbulent times, America’s space programme provided spectacular diversions from its conflicts in East Asia and the tensions of the Cold War. The space race offered accomplishment and high drama, culminating in Neil Armstrong’s first words from the lunar surface on July 20, 1969: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” (Doomed by momentary transmission drop-out to forever contain those square brackets.)
No such glitch marred Dr Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor’s paraphrasing of Armstrong’s words on behalf of Malaysians last week. In the circumstances, it was as good a line as any and better than most. Our Sheikh was probably right to stick to the tried-and-tested on this momentous occasion. The Right Stuff does not generally include a tongue for poetry. (Space Shuttle astronaut Bruce McCandless, who in 1984 became the first to fly untethered in space, uttered for posterity: “Hey, this is neat!")
By the time of McCandless’ neat feat, though, the deification of space travellers was past. Space travel was no longer for daring heroes but technocrats and professionals. The focus was on the much more utilitarian expansion of human industry to Earth orbit.
The richest irony of mankind’s history in space, however, is that the Mercury and Vostok spacemen were not the first to fly there. That distinction went to Robert White and Joe Walker. Never world-famous, they were among the test pilots of the US Air Force’s experimental X-15 rocket plane programme.
Both men flew the X-15 above the 100km “Karman Line", accepted as the boundary of space. They achieved this in total secrecy, as befit such endeavours at the height of the Cold War.
What truly set the X-15 pilots apart was that they actually piloted their aircraft to space and back.
While all the attention was on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, test pilots at the edge of space above USAF bases in the remote deserts of Nevada and New Mexico were pointing their aircraft’s needle noses straight up and firing liquid-oxygen rocket engines to break free of gravity and punch out of Earth’s atmosphere into the black void beyond, then turn around for re-entry and the long glide home.
The X-15 — not the massive rockets of the American and Russian space efforts — was the true precursor to the Space Shuttle.
Once safely back on the ground, the X-15 pilots would go off to write up detailed flight reports and later share beers and cheers with peers out among the Joshua trees and tumbleweed in the middle of nowhere; unknown, unsung, uncelebrated — and completely uncaring of that. No ticker-tape parades. No live telecasts. No presidential handshakes. No problem.
Passed over for the honour of becoming the first astronauts in favour of those whose Right Stuff included being mediagenic, the X-15 pilots grumbled a little about how astronauts didn’t actually do anything: the rockets shot them up, telemetry controlled their capsules and parachutes brought them back.
There was nothing to it; the first higher life-form in space had been a Russian dog named Laika. A chimpanzee could have done it. Sending humans up had been a PR decision. This rankled with the Mercury Seven so badly, by the time of John Glenn’s first orbital flight in 1962, they’d insisted on having some pilot control designed into their capsules.
All the way to the lunar missions of Apollos 11 through 17, much was made of the astronauts actually flying their lunar modules in the final descent to the Moon’s surface. It was the pride of pilots; the egos had landed.
Such is the myth and mystique of space exploration. Dr Sheikh Muszaphar, the 458th human in space, is an orthopaedist, not a Sukhoi pilot. He inherits the legacy of the Mercury Seven, not the X-15. And as it was for the Mercury Seven, his real mission will begin upon his safe arrival back on terra firma.
The celebrity that awaits him will be overwhelming. The demands on his time and person will be relentless. His transition from male model to role model will be complete. He will be a one-man institution; perhaps even an industry.
He’d better have the right staff.
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