Read "Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today for Free Online

energy, vital messages, and electronic commands that would launch the astronauts. The Mercury Seven loved it. The persistent mosquitoes and sand fleas and other pests were under control. Air conditioning was here to stay, and island libations simply made the hot days and balmy nights a tropical paradise.
    It was other chores in the astronauts’ paradise that gave them heartache. Among their duties was playing tour guide for an assortment of VIPs. They came from all branches of government and the industrial world, with little or no knowledge of the technological challenges. Putting a man in space definitely would not be easy. It would take time, and America’s leaders were shocked when the first Mercury-Atlas was launched. The mighty rocket with an unmanned Mercury spacecraft on top rode a stack of fire into the Florida sky, where it promptly blew itself to hell and beyond.
    The leaders looked at the astronauts with genuine pity and offeredthem more congressional monies, assuring themselves the taxpayers’ dollars would buy success.
    The problem was not too little money, nor was it confined to Atlas. The next time the astronauts and congressional and industry leaders gathered, it would be a Mercury-Redstone rocket they would be watching. At the moment of ignition an electrical problem shut off its engine. The Redstone quickly settled back on its pad. Then, just as quickly, the escape-tower rocket fired, jerking itself free from the Mercury spacecraft it was suppose to lift out of danger. It raced into the sky, leaving spacecraft and rocket sitting on the launch pad.
    The sight of an out-of-control rocket painting the sky with fiery brush strokes brought loudspeakers blaring the warning, “Everyone on the Cape take cover.” It was an unprecedented picture in the new space age: astronauts and congressmen and business leaders and we reporters jumping beneath bleachers and under vehicles to gain cover from flames shooting over our heads. My feet came to a stop under the press-site platform, arms wrapping my body securely around a pylon. Instantly, I felt another set of arms clinging from the opposite side. A grinning Alan Shepard asked, “Are we having fun yet?”
    “Your first trip?”
    We both laughed as we watched the top of the Mercury capsule pop open and the parachutes unravel and spill down the side of the Redstone.
    At the same time, in a sky filled with twisting smoke trails, the escape tower’s rocket burned out and the tower tumbled back to Earth. It crashed about four hundred yards from the pad, and for those who care about such things, the tower rocket had scooted to a height of four thousand feet.
    “That’ll get your attention,” Shepard said.
    I nodded. “It’s your ass.”
    “You wouldn’t ride it?”
    “Not on the back of a flatbed truck to Cocoa.”
     
    D uring the Cape’s early days, humor lightened long workdays. Practical jokes were the in thing, and the astronauts quarterbacked most of them.
    About thirty miles south of the Cape’s launch-pad row, Jim Rathmann ran the local Chevrolet dealership. A world-class race-car driver who was the 1960 winner of the Indianapolis 500, he was really cut from the same cloth as the astronauts, the only difference being that Rathmann did his speed on the ground instead of in the air. He worked out a deal with General Motors to give the Mercury Seven new Corvettes. Of course, such an arrangement would not be tolerated today by NASA, but in 1960 Jim Rathmann sold General Motors on the fact that the public-relations and advertising benefits would more than offset the cost, and the guys happily hopped into a strong friendship with Rathmann and his hot ’Vettes.
    Competition was mother’s milk for the astronauts. They had to see who could get the most speed out of anything they flew, drove, sailed, or pedaled, and each astronaut’s personal Corvette was at the top of the list. After a full day of training, they would set up drag races on the long, deserted