Slayton and the air force had very different approaches, however, to personal responsibility. When the group discussed something that a fellow astronaut had done wrong, especially when flying a jet, many embarrassing incidents were dealt with there and then and discussed nowhere else. There were dangerous moments in the air that were allowed to slide by because the astronaut office was a self-protecting fraternity.
I remember one guy—his name is not important, he’s just an example—who destroyed a Bell H-13 helicopter. He was heading back to Houston on a Sunday night after spending the weekend at a hunting ranch. He wasn’t even wearing a flight suit; he was still in his cowboy clothes, with a rifle and all his hunting gear in the cockpit, already a dumb situation. Then it got worse. This supposed hotshot test pilot, at the top of his game, ran out of gas just south of the airport. He crashed the helicopter into a fence surrounding an open field, walked away, and nothing was ever said about it except in the weekly meeting. If he’d still been with an air force squadron, he would have been in deep trouble. As far as I know, NASA never reprimanded him. This kind of attitude didn’t help me feel protected. If anything, it scared me.
At first, we new guys were clearly considered apprentices, not yet part of the group. When I joined the program, I thought, “Oh, man, this is great. I am now an astronaut.” It didn’t take me long to figure out that I wasn’t. The pilots who were already in the program didn’t really look on us as astronauts until we’d made a spaceflight.
I felt a little like a West Point plebe again, or a novice back at Moore Air Base. I was at the bottom and had to work my way up. The feeling was nothing new: it happened every time I started in a new direction or made a new step in my career.
My sense of being the “new kid” was particularly strong around the original seven astronauts, who had been selected back in 1959. By the time I joined the astronaut corps, six remained with NASA, and only four were on flight status. John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, had left in 1964. I also never really got to know Scott Carpenter, who flew the next mission after Glenn, since he left within my first year. The other five, however—Slayton, Shepard, Grissom, Schirra, and Cooper—were kings of the hill. A mystique surrounded them, which they happily cultivated. In their minds, we new guys hadn’t yet proved ourselves. That was fine by me, because it was true: we hadn’t.
This mystique, I learned, extended to generous car dealers. Many of the astronauts were friends with Jim Rathmann, a fun guy who had a Chevrolet dealership just down the coast from Cape Canaveral, Florida, where NASA launched its rockets. Jim, in turn, was a close friend of Ed Cole, the president of General Motors. Rathmann acted as the go-between for the astronauts and General Motors, leasing cars to us. General Motors would send the cars to Jim, he’d lease them to us on a six-month basis for a small amount, and at the end of the six months we’d turn them back in and get another one. General Motors would take the cars back and resell them as astronaut-driven vehicles. They didn’t lose any money, and it didn’t hurt their image for the astronauts to be seen driving shiny new Corvettes. It was smart business sense, and Ed and Jim also did it out of admiration and respect for the spacefarers.
I assumed the deal had also been okayed with the NASA administrators, or that they had decided it was out of their control. To be honest, I am not sure. I know that the first astronauts organized it back in the early days. Was there any official resistance behind the scenes? I don’t know. Certainly by the time I showed up, no one officially seemed to care about it.
My reaction, naturally, was to ask one of the original astronauts how I could also get a Corvette. He slapped me down so fast it shocked me. “You new guys won’t be part of that,” he barked at me. “You don’t deserve that.” I got the point: I was being put in my place and reminded that I didn’t yet count for jack. I later became friendly with this guy, eventually talked about the deal again, and discovered that General Motors didn’t restrict their offer to certain astronauts. This guy had no power over the choice. Yet, in my first few months on the job, I wasn’t supposed to know that.
Deke assigned all of us new guys to one of the more senior spacefarers while we found our feet and our place in the program. It was a good arrangement. He assigned me to Wally Schirra, a respected former navy test pilot who had commanded both Mercury and Gemini space missions, including the first-ever space rendezvous. As I shook his hand, Schirra looked me right in the eye. “You know, Worden,” he told me sternly, “you’ve got to understand something from the start. You don’t count for anything around here.”
I knew he was testing me. I remembered a flippant saying from West Point that the only people whom the students outranked were the superintendent’s pet cat and anyone serving in the navy. Taking a risk, I stared right back at him and said, “Sir, I realize I am only a captain in the air force, but I know for sure that I outrank a captain in the navy.”
Schirra paused for a split second, and I wondered if I had made a terrible mistake. Then he broke into a loud, booming laugh and clapped me on the shoulder. “You don’t have to report to me?” he continued. “Screw that—go and get me a cup of coffee!” I’d had my first experience with Wally the prankster; he never took himself too seriously. From then on we were great friends.
I was one of nineteen guys chosen for the fifth astronaut group, the largest ever selected at the time. NASA had told Deke Slayton that the forthcoming Apollo program could result in dozens of flights and that he should select enough people to fly them. He, therefore, took everyone he felt was qualified from the top group of finalists. It’s no wonder that some of the older astronauts didn’t warmly welcome us, and in fact resented us showing up. Once you were in the program, Deke often said, you were as qualified to fly into space as anyone else already there. More competition for seats meant fewer flights for the older guys, and for at least the first year they kept us a little isolated from the rest of the team.
NASA’s confident prediction of dozens of Apollo flights was wrong: eventually the budget was slashed, flights were canceled, and money siphoned into the development of the space shuttle. Some of the guys in my group had to wait two decades before their first flight into space. That’s a hell of a long time to wait until you are allowed to do the job you trained for, and I doubt I would have waited that long.
Amongst the nineteen were pilots I knew well from Edwards. Charlie Duke, Ken Mattingly, Stu Roosa, and Ed Mitchell had all been at the Aerospace Research Pilot School with me. Fred Haise had attended, too, although he had left to do other test pilot work by the time I arrived. While at Edwards, we used to have parties at Stu Roosa’s house every weekend, some of the craziest drunken parties I have ever been to. We’d wake up in the morning, find that we’d set fire to objects on his front lawn, and have no memory of doing so. The five of us already knew each other well, and our camaraderie continued when we moved to Houston. We socialized for a while before we were absorbed into the wider program, and we were bad boys—really bad. In the end, all of us flew to the moon during the Apollo program.
Then there was Joe Engle. He’d been at Edwards, too, but I didn’t know him too well because he’d been off flying the X-15 rocket plane. Unlike most of us, Joe already knew all of the senior astronauts before he arrived in Houston. He had even flown in space before he became a NASA astronaut. As an X-15 pilot, he’d taken that rocket plane higher than fifty miles three times, each considered a suborbital spaceflight by air force definitions, and had earned air force astronaut wings.