Alan Shepard Interview (page: 3 / 4) First American in Space	Print Interview

Admiral Shepard, on the morning you got into Freedom VII, took off, and became the first American in space, what were you experiencing, what were you feeling?

Alan Shepard: I think I ran the whole gamut of emotions. I woke up an hour before I was supposed to, and started going over the mental checklist: where do I go from here, what do I do? I don't remember eating anything at all, just going through the physical, getting into the suit. We practiced that so much, it was all rote.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The excitement really didn't start to build until the trailer -- which was carrying me, with a space suit with ventilation and all that sort of stuff -- pulled up to the launch pad. I walked out, and looked at that huge rocket, the Redstone rocket, for the first time. Of course it's not huge by today's standards, but it seemed pretty big then. And I thought, well now, there is that little rascal, and I'm going to get up on top and fly that thing. And you know, pilots always go out to the airplanes and kick the tires before they fly. Nobody would let me get near the rocket to kick the fins, but I kind of walked around and thought, well, I'll take a good look at it, because I'll never see that part of the machine again. And then the excitement started building, I think, at that point.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

After I was strapped in and ready to go, we had to hold, because we had to change a generator in the Redstone rocket.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I had a chance to sit back and relax a little bit, and again go through the process of "what do I do" for the first few minutes and first few seconds of the flight. And so I was really pretty relaxed by the time that lift-off finally occurred. I guess my pulse really wasn't much over about 110 or so. I've forgotten exactly what it was, but everybody thought I was a pretty cool customer.

At that point, you are basically thinking about, "What do I do if this goes wrong? What do I do if that goes wrong?" You know what critical things have to happen in sequence. The fact that you are accelerating with the thrust of the rocket is good, it's very positive. You know that the rocket is doing its job and it's doing it correctly. You're just going over a checklist of one thing after the other. You've done it in the simulator so many times, you don't have a real sense of being excited when the flight is going on. You're excited before, but as soon as the liftoff occurs, you are busy doing what you have to do.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I remember just reaching the apex of the trajectory, when I was going to be in the middle of the weightlessness, and I was looking at the periscope, and all of a sudden I said, "You know, somebody is going to ask me how it feels to be weightless, so you better pay attention to how it feels to be weightless." So I was going through the motions of flying, but at the same time trying to assess physiologically how I felt. Was I dizzy, or confused? And so on. And then I thought, "Well, somebody is going to ask me how the earth looks." And so I looked down through the periscope -- which was all that we had at that point -- and made a few remarks, I think, on the tape, or perhaps on the radio.

Then I had to get ready for reentry, so enough of that subjective thinking and back to the objectivity required to get this baby oriented to come back in. So you see, you could really go through a whole gamut of feelings, of nervousness and elation. Obviously at that point I was delighted. The rocket had worked perfectly, and all I had to do was survive the reentry forces. You do it all, in a flight like that, in a rather short period of time, just 16 minutes as a matter of fact.

You talked at the time about this smooth easy ride. But Michael Collins said it got so bad at times that he couldn't read the instruments. What kind of a ride was it?

Alan Shepard: The Redstone was a relatively smooth rocket. There was a little buffeting when it went from subsonic to supersonic speed, but other than that it was a pretty smooth rocket. What Mike is talking about is what all of us experienced who flew the Saturn V, which was really a heck of a lot more powerful: seven and a half million pounds, as opposed to some 75 thousand pounds in the Redstone. There was a lot of vibration in the Saturn V.

How did that Mercury flight compare with flying an airplane?

Alan Shepard: It was similar only to the degree that we were able to design into the system that a certain movement of the stick was going to give you some kind of a familiar response in the instruments. Otherwise it didn't fly like an airplane. It didn't have any kind of a feedback of the faster you went the more difficult it was to move the stick, or that sort of thing. The pilot looked at his cues of attitude and speed and orientation and so on and responded as he would from the same cues in an airplane, but there was no way it flew the same. The simulators had showed us that. We just had to forget about wing tips and looking out through the nose of the airplane, and that sort of thing. It just wasn't like that.

What were you thinking when they finally got you back to the carrier, and the world was waiting for you?

Alan Shepard: Of course I was delighted the flight was over, but I still had to worry about cleaning up inside the cabin, I had to worry about the hatch, how to get in the sling, and so on.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. In the helicopter, flying back to the carrier, and seeing thousands of sailors on the deck of the carrier, being a Navy pilot, having made hundreds of carrier landings already, it was sort of like coming home. Except that there they were cheering for me. And that was probably the first moment of the flight when I felt the emotion of success -- perhaps pride -- in what I had done. And that was probably the first emotional moment in that whole flight.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

Clearly one wasn't enough. Did you know then that you wanted to do it again?

Alan Shepard: Oh, absolutely. I was delighted when I was assigned command of the first Gemini flight with Tom Stafford as my co-pilot, but it was shortly after that I developed a disorientation problem in my ear, and NASA grounded me. I was grounded for almost six years.

How did you feel about that?

Alan Shepard: I didn't like it at all. This problem is called Meniere's Disease It causes dizziness, nausea, lack of balance and so on. The prediction was that in some cases it was correctable. I said, "In my case it is going to be correctable." A NASA guy said "We like you Shepard, you can be in charge of all the astronauts. You can't fly obviously, but you can fly with somebody else." Whenever I flew, I always had to have somebody in the back seat of the airplane. So I was in administrative charge of the astronaut group, their training and so on. I could set them down, pat them on the head, and watch them fly. That was a little tough.

I understand you met your old hero Charles Lindbergh at the time of the first moon landing. Is that so?

Alan Shepard: I had the opportunity to be with him on several occasions before he died. A couple of times at the White House, at state dinner type functions, and then perhaps the most memorable visit with him was really spontaneous. It was prior to the launch of Apollo XI, the first lunar landing. I was there with my family, in the VIP section. I was standing off by myself, just sort of reflecting on what was happening, and this gentleman came up in rough clothes, with a sailor hat turned upside down, and introduced himself. Of course, I knew right away who he was. We had about 30 minutes of recollecting what he had done and what that had meant to early aviation.

What did he tell you?

Alan Shepard: We talked in terms of his pioneering efforts. Nowadays we call it research, pushing out the frontiers. We were recognizing what the contributions of those early days of aviation -- and, like with me, the early days of space -- meant to the general public. These innovative new airplanes and innovative new space craft, and the science that is developed from that filtered into everyday life. It was about at that point he became interested in the interaction between technology and the environment. That was the thrust of the later years of his life. We talked about that a little bit too. It was a really a very exciting thing for me to be with him, one on one like that, talking about our favorite subjects. Fortunately my girls were there and they had a chance to meet him also. So it was a very memorable day for us, as well as for Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins.

Did you share any philosophical thoughts? You were one pioneer talking to another about that kind of adventure, that going off into the unknown, that making of history.

Alan Shepard: No. Except in moments like this -- when it's obvious in retrospect -- I have never really felt that I made some historical contributions.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. During the actual process of flying spacecraft, or flying the Spirit of St. Louis, one doesn't think of one's self as being a hero or a historical figure. One does it because the challenge is there and one feels reasonably qualified to accomplish it. And it's later on I suppose, perhaps at the suggestion of other people, that you say, "Well yes, maybe." I must admit, maybe I am a piece of history after all.

But even at the time, you must give some thought to what you are about to do when you stepped into that space craft.

Alan Shepard: Absolutely. But not from the standpoint of the contribution to history, from the standpoint of an individual response to a challenge which was, in our case, a highly technical challenge. In the early days particularly, we didn't envision ourselves receiving the attention and publicity which we did, because there were a lot of skeptics in the early days of the space business. Half the people thought it was exciting and rather positive, and the other half thought we were crazy to be doing that sort of thing. There is probably a lesson there. If a person shows up to fly an airplane, or a spacecraft, or to perform some surgery, or to be the greatest lawyer in a certain field, then he has to be there because it's a challenge to him personally. He knows he can do a good job. He can't be thinking of whether he is going to be a hero or whether he is going to be a bum as a result of what he is doing. In other words, a person -- to be successful -- has to be there because he knows he is equipped to do a job, he is challenged by the job, and that's really the reason why he is there.

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