Joe Engle is the best formation pilot I have ever seen. He’d chosen a different career specialty than me, flying in close combat formation in a tactical fighter squadron. He could do a tight barrel roll around me from one wing to another, and then gently drop right back into position right off my wingtip. The first time he performed that maneuver with me, on a flight out to Edwards, I was in awe—I had no idea airplanes could do that.
By far the most experienced aviator in our group, Joe was kind of the big man on campus. When he narrowly missed out on flying during Apollo, many people were surprised. He served on an Apollo backup crew, but then had to wait until a space shuttle flight in 1981. It went to show, no one could assume anything when it came to getting a spaceflight assignment.
In the end, fewer than half of my group would fly to the moon. Most of the others trained to fly there, but budget cuts meant that they would fly in later programs instead. In addition to my Edwards friends, fellow group members Ron Evans, Jim Irwin, and Jack Swigert made it onto missions to the moon. PJ Weitz, Jack Lousma, Jerry Carr, and Bill Pogue missed out on lunar flights but did fly to the Skylab space station. Pogue was the officer who had greeted me when I arrived in England a few years before, and I knew by reputation that he was an exceptional pilot.
Vance Brand ended up with a seat on the last Apollo mission in 1975, Apollo-Soyuz, the first joint mission with the Russians. Others had to wait even longer. Along with Joe Engle, both Bruce McCandless and Don Lind did not make their first flights until the space shuttle was operating. Don ended up flying his first, and only, mission in 1985, a full nineteen years after he became an astronaut.
I guess, for some, the lure of flying in space kept them in the program for so long. Many of my group of nineteen stuck around for a long time even after making a first flight. Fred Haise did some shuttle test flying. Ken Mattingly, PJ Weitz, and Jack Lousma all stayed to fly the shuttle into orbit. And Vance Brand flew until 1990, making his fourth spaceflight that year. In fact, until his retirement in early 2008, he still worked for NASA, albeit in a management role. He was the last of our group still on the roster.
Two of my group never had the chance to fly in space. John Bull was quiet and modest, yet highly skilled. He had been a navy test pilot before joining the program. I believe Deke considered him one of the top guys in our group. However, in 1968 the doctors discovered that he had a rare pulmonary medical condition. He had to leave the astronaut corps, and there was also no place for him back in the navy. He found a job as a flight test researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. Years later, when I had to leave the astronaut group and wound up at Ames as well, John was still there. It was a strange irony.
The other person in my group who never flew was a very talented air force test pilot named Ed Givens. When NASA picked him, he was working on a backpack that astronauts could use to maneuver during spacewalks. Ed was an interesting guy, but he was dead and gone before any of us got to know him. He died in an automobile accident near Houston a little more than a year after our group arrived. Because he was killed in a car instead of an airplane or spacecraft, he is perhaps the least remembered of the astronauts who died while in the program, which is a damn shame. He deserved better.
Overall, our group did well to get as many flights as we did. We’d been picked in the general hope that, after the first lunar landing, the purse strings would open and we’d keep flying there for a long time. I fully expected to make a couple of flights and to command a landing on the moon.
Once we arrived in Houston, it didn’t mean much that we had been selected as a group. We were pretty much on our own, and it was every man for himself. And some of those pilots saw this situation as a competition: a race to get selected for the best missions. Considering we were looked on as the new guys with everything to prove, that attitude was understandable.
However, that was not my style. I figured if I did the best job I could and didn’t worry about the office politics, senior management would reward me. It isn’t part of my personality to play politics. I don’t think I could do it if I tried.
It could be that the senior astronauts found me more acceptable because I’d been a test pilot instructor, but I also didn’t play any games to make friends. I did my best, and that effort seemed to elevate me to a position of respect, far more than any office politics ever could. The experienced astronauts accepted me quickly because they learned they could rely on me to do the job well. Competence was a qualification expected by those who might fly in space with you one day. They preferred to return alive.
Not everybody in my group took that route. Some guys tried to play the favorites game. They identified Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton as the two bosses to impress. Both were members of the original group of seven astronauts and both were temporarily grounded by medical conditions. Deke Slayton was the director of Flight Crew Operations, and his primary job was to select astronauts and assign them to flights. Working under him was the chief of the astronaut office, Alan Shepard, the first American to fly into space. My colleagues believed that these two made all of the important crew selection decisions. However, Deke and Al both held their cards close to their chests. Those looking for clues about how to impress them and make a spaceflight had little to go on.
I liked Deke a lot and thought he did a superb job. Even though people all around him gossiped about how to get on a flight, whom to impress, whom to flatter, Deke stayed above it all and played things straight. He’d select new groups of astronauts, put them through a training program, and then ask them to privately rate each other. Using that list, and his own observations, he’d assign people to missions. There was nothing magic about it; Deke was a straight guy—gruff, no-nonsense—but fair. He didn’t play games.
There was one pilot in my group who thought he could influence Deke by relentlessly sucking up to him, even taking on his favorite social pastimes. Deke seemed to enjoy his friendship, and they’d go off on hunting trips together, but when it came time to assign astronauts to missions, this guy didn’t fly in Apollo. I heard he hadn’t been training hard enough. With dozens of ambitious astronauts looking to impress him, I admired Deke for his unwavering professionalism. In the end, the astronauts with talent who didn’t make a big deal out of it did better than those who tried to suck up to the boss.
Al Shepard may have officially been named the chief of the astronaut office, but he was never there. Shepard had many outside business interests. He’d come to work in the morning for an hour or two, then he’d take off to do non-NASA business, and we wouldn’t see him again. He worked his way into being a millionaire, and it seemed to happen on government time, which was supposed to be against the rules. Yet I don’t think anyone ever dared question Al because of his stature at NASA. He was the first American in space and, as such, was immune to scolding.
He wasn’t the only astronaut with outside interests who skated through his NASA years without a reprimand. One astronaut was on the board of a bank when a review board slammed them for incorrect banking practices. It blew up into a huge scandal in the press, especially since the whole affair involved some of the same people who had offered the original astronauts free homes. Luckily for that astronaut, his name was generally kept out of the papers—and I won’t repeat it here. It was a good lesson for all of us: sitting on a board of directors was lucrative, but we ran the risk that our names and reputations might be used for shady business practices.