The Last Man on the Moon Read online

  And who wouldn’t like to live in the Monterey-Carmel area, one of the most beautiful places in America? Barbara and I closed up the house at Del Mar, had a farewell bash with the squadron at Miramar and drove up the winding coast, the top down on the convertible, surrounded by California’s natural beauty.

  The summer of 1961 was exciting, particularly for a pilot with an itch to fly high and fast. Astronaut Gus Grissom rode his Liberty Bell 7 on a fifteen-minute suborbital flight that ended in near disaster when the hatch inexplicably blew off after he landed in the water. The Mercury spacecraft sank and Gus almost drowned. Naturally, the Soviets trumped us again, and Cosmonaut Gherman Titov orbited the Earth seventeen times in a day-long mission. Our answer was to send up another chimp, Enos, who made it into orbit.

  As I settled into schoolwork, the Cold War whirlwind intensified. The Communists built the Berlin Wall to divide Germany and American and Soviet tanks faced off at Checkpoint Charlie. In Asia, where the Hanna-Maru was heading, General Maxwell Taylor asked that America send a task force of 8,000 men to Vietnam. I felt a tug of guilt. I was still a Navy attack pilot, and things were really heating up. Where should I be? I concluded that the Navy would find use for a new and improved Cernan in the future.

  THE MONTEREY PENINSULA WAS God’s country, a place where tall redwoods, blue oceans, and cool summer breezes made life special. The school had the air of a college campus instead of a military base. In fact, the Naval Post Graduate School was in the old Del Monte Hotel, and we didn’t wear uniforms.

  There was some drab government housing available, but Barbara and I wanted something with more personality, and on a drive through a little tree-filled canyon on the highway to Salinas, we discovered a new development called Fisherman’s Flats. There we found a quaint little house with three bedrooms, a bath and a half, and a combination dining and kitchen area. It was only 1,206 square feet in total area and sat on a quarter-acre of land. I had stashed away 100 dollars in savings bonds every month for almost five years, so we put down 4,000 dollars and got a mortgage for about 15,000 dollars. The monthly payments were about 105 dollars.

  Throughout our marriage, we never lived on a military base, and cultivated neighbors and friends who were civilians. When Barbara took a job as the office manager at the Walter Colton Junior High School, she widened our circle of nonmilitary acquaintances, but I was pleased to find that an old shipmate had also been accepted at the school. Skip Furlong and his wife, Ry, soon became our closest friends.

  We were all in the same boat. Young, ambitious, and with not a hell of a lot of money. We had only about twenty dollars a month to spend on entertainment and used a lot of that for a nice dinner once a month at one of those cozy restaurants along Cannery Row. Every weekend there was a party at somebody’s house, and we all thought that drinking Beefeater gin on the rocks was the epitome of class, because we normally drank wine so cheap that we bought it by the gallon.

  The school turned out to be damned difficult, and I hit the books harder than I had ever studied in my life. I would go to class at eight A.M., stay there until five P.M., come home and have dinner with Barbara, then study until midnight or one o’clock in the morning. Aeronautical engineering, the Navy way, was a bitch.

  Still, it seemed as if we were living in the epicenter of paradise.

  LIKE MOST OF AMERICA, I was swept up by the excitement of the space race. Because of the three-hour time difference between Florida and California, an early morning launch at Cape Canaveral meant that I might study all night so I could watch the rockets go up on television in the predawn hours in Monterey.

  On February 20, 1962, I was on the sofa with Barbara as the third Mercury flight was launched and John Glenn became the first American to reach orbit. When he got into space and Mission Control said everything was fine, Barbara asked me, “Would you like to do something like that?”

  “Hell, yes, I would,” I replied, then reality set in. I was still too young, and not yet close to having the necessary experience. We thought little more about it.

  My feelings of not yet being qualified for such an assignment were confirmed in September 1962, when the second bunch of astronauts was chosen—civilians Neil Armstrong and Elliot See, Air Force pilots Frank Borman, Jim McDivitt, Tom Stafford and Ed White, and Naval aviators Pete Conrad, Jim Lovell and John Young. I noticed the selection criteria had changed slightly, and that NASA now wanted fliers who were under thirty-five years of age, held at least a bachelor’s degree in a physical or biological science or engineering, had test pilot experience, graduated from a military test pilot school or had equivalent credentials. I was okay on age and education, but still years away from that coveted test pilot certificate.

  The new group, collectively known as the Next Nine, would fly into the history books. Meanwhile, I was still just another anonymous student studying for difficult examinations, and joining the rest of America in watching space stuff on TV.

  Scott Carpenter went up on Aurora 7, but didn’t pay close enough attention to business and overshot his landing area, a mistake that cost him any future ride in space. Then the Soviets flew Andrian Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich on Vostoks 3 and 4, and Wally Schirra orbited for us aboard Sigma 7. The race was definitely on and the launches were huge events, but spaceflight didn’t seem to be in my future.

  Fatherhood, however, was. Barbara delivered a beautiful baby girl on March 4, 1963, a child with huge blue eyes the size of silver dollars, eyes that darted around the room, taking in everything, as if she were asking, “Where am I? What am I? Who am I?” We took Teresa Dawn Cernan home from the hospital right after I persuaded the Bank of America to approve a 200-dollar short-term loan to help cover the 207-dollar bill. Not long after Tracy was born, Gordon Cooper flew the final Mercury mission, a twenty-two-orbit marathon.

  The end of my two years of school at Monterey was nearing, and my grades had earned the option for a third year of advanced study at Princeton, which could add an Ivy League degree to my resume. But first, there was an intern’s job with Aerojet General in Sacramento in the summer of 1963, where I worked on advanced liquid rocket propulsion systems. Rockets meant spaceflight, and that seemed to be a growing field.

  I was at work one Friday afternoon while Barbara was in Texas visiting her mother, who had moved back there from California, when a telephone call came in from a Commander Shepard, with the Navy’s Special Projects Office in Washington. Shepard? Commander Alan Shepard, the astronaut? No, he replied, somewhat testily, “Not that Commander Shepard. Everybody asks me that.” Then he got down to business.

  The commander explained, in wonderfully vague Potomac River bureaucratic terms, that he and the Navy had spent more than six months combing through the files to collect the names of certain officers who just might, perhaps under proper circumstances, be qualified to participate in a special project, and that my name had been among those selected. “Well,” he concluded, “do you volunteer?”

  I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. My warning antenna went up. What kind of special project? Why me? This was awfully murky stuff and the unspoken rule in the military was to never volunteer until you knew the facts. “Volunteer for what?” I asked.

  Commander Shepard sighed, apparently aggravated. It was clear that he was talking to a moron. “Well, for the Apollo program, of course! We want to recommend you to NASA for further evaluation.” NASA had asked the military services for a new list of prospective astronaut candidates, and the Navy selection board had included my name.

  There was a moment of silence on my end while my heart jumped into my throat. I hadn’t even applied. Last time I looked, I wasn’t qualified. But this guy was saying the Navy was recommending me to NASA for astronaut training. Was he talking to the right Lieutenant Cernan? It took a moment for the meaning of his question to sink in, then I came out of my fog and shot back with snappy military enthusiasm, “Well, yes sir! Not only that, sir, but hell, yes! Sir!”

  Shepard brusquely informed me that my verbal reply was not good enough. “We have to know in writing by Monday morning at nine o’clock.” He hung up.

  Stunned, but thrilled at the proposal, I hustled over to the nearest Western Union office and sent the busy man a telegram. Then I called Barbara with the news. I had made this potentially life-changing decision without asking her, and as I dialed, I wondered what her response might be to a such a large step that had already been taken. She was excited, although I could detect some deep apprehension. After getting over her initial surprise, she told me just what I wanted to hear: “My God, Gene, we’ve got to try for this.”

  An astronaut? Me?

  7

  Max and Deke

  A HURRICANE OF NASA paperwork enshrouded me. It ranged from highly technical details to questions so personal that before anyone from that agency had even met me, they would know my life’s story. It turned out this was only a preliminary culling of more than 400 military and civilian candidates.

  Three of my classmates, Dick Gordon, Bob Schumacher, and Ron Evans, had also been volunteered. Bob was a good friend, but I didn’t know the other two guys very well, having shared only a few classes with them. That would change in the future, in ways none of us could ever have imagined. Finally, I finished the last sheet and returned the whole pile to Houston.

  Barbara and I left on a vacation that was originally planned as a visit to her mother in Texas and my mom and dad in Chicago over the Fourth of July. Accompanied by Tracy, who was just beginning to stand up on her own, and Venus, our cocker spaniel, Barbara took a cheapie National Airlines night flight from San Francisco to Houston. I tied up some loose ends in California and hit the highway in our new 1963 Chevrolet, the sensible, family-style sedan that replaced my 1956 bachelor ragtop. As the
miles clicked by, I listened to “Puff, the Magic Dragon” and “Rhythm of the Rain” on the radio while I thought about this possible new assignment. Since I would be meeting Barbara and her mother in Baytown, I thought I should swing through the outskirts of Houston and take a look at the new Manned Spaceflight Center under construction in Clear Lake.

  Cape Canaveral in Florida was our gate to the heavens, Langley Field in Virginia was the home of the Space Task Group and convenient to Washington, and major contractors were located in California, Missouri, and New York. Twenty-three cities had competed to be the home of the MSC, a prize federal project if ever there was one, but only one of them had Lyndon Johnson of Texas, who just happened to be the vice president of the United States of America and chairman of the President’s National Space Council. So LBJ twisted the appropriate arms and came up with a thousand acres of scrubland two dozen miles southeast of Houston. NASA got a new home and Texas got 60 million dollars worth of Moon money.

  The concrete, steel, and glass were being planted fast: instant buildings and test facilities that gleamed in the hot Texas sun when I rolled through, looking at where I might someday work. A couple of years in scenic Monterey had spoiled me. Where we only had to open our windows to stay cool on the hottest summer days in California, this Texas heat felt like a blast furnace. The sun was a hammer, Houston was its anvil, and my car didn’t have air conditioning. To say I was overwhelmed would be an understatement. I cruised slowly down the Old Galveston Highway and through the new developments being built to house the hundreds of engineers and technicians swarming to the MSC. The subdivisions bore chic names such as Timber Cove, El Lago, and Nassau Bay, but were really just converted mud flats sweltering in that awful heat, with cows still grazing on future expensive residential lots. How could I ask my family to endure this barren land of old pastures and distant horizons? Barbara was a Texan, so I thought she might be used to this kind of weather, but when I reached her mother’s house, which was cooled only by an ineffective attic fan that rearranged the hot air, I found that my wife was as miserable as I. Visions of our pleasant home in Monterey swam in the heat like a mirage, and I thought that not making the cut as an astronaut, and having to live around here, might not be so bad after all. We couldn’t get out of Texas fast enough.

  We drove to Chicago to introduce my parents to their newest granddaughter, then set out for California, again beneath a merciless sun. Temperatures topped 100 degrees across Iowa. All we could do was roll the windows down, drive like hell, and pray that we could reach the cool shelter of the Rocky Mountains before we melted into the asphalt beside some Nebraska cornfield.

  SOMETIME LATER, A LETTER from NASA arrived in Monterey, inviting me to fly down to Houston for an interview, and I learned the original list of hundreds of candidates had been cut by more than half. Somewhat surprised to still be in the running, I set out on a Secret Agent mission that seems awfully naïve today.

  To keep the press off the scent of who might be astronaut candidates, Dick, Ron, Bob, and I all flew out of San Francisco on separate planes, wearing civilian clothes and using assumed identities, pretending not to know each other. Strange people met us in Houston, using the utmost stealth, and hustled us to private rooms at the Rice Hotel, where we were all signed in using the name of Max Peck, the hotel’s general manager. Naturally, as soon as I walked into the hotel bar, I recognized friends, settled in for a drink, and easily guessed that some of those other slim, crew-cut young men nearby—all of whom were also named Max Peck—were also pilot types. Some secret.

  This was somewhat like my early days at Miramar, when I had my wings, but had not yet landed on a carrier. I marveled at the backgrounds of many of the other candidates. What am I doing in this group?

  Dick Gordon, for instance, was more than just a student at post graduate school. A well-known test pilot, he already had substantial pull inside the program and had just missed the cut for the second group of astronauts. His ex-roomie aboard the Ranger had been Pete Conrad, one of the Next Nine, and his instructor at the Navy’s test pilot school had been none other than Al Shepard. When Dick won the coveted Bendix Trophy for setting a transcontinental speed record of two hours, forty-seven minutes, he received a telegram of congratulations from the pilot whose record he broke, Marine Colonel John Glenn.

  There were other fliers among the current candidates who also held altitude records and speed records, some test pilots with impeccable credentials like Mike Collins, who also had just missed on the earlier cuts, and guys like Buzz Aldrin, who held a Ph.D. from MIT in space rendezvous theory. And most of the Air Force guys had gone through Chuck Yeager’s astronaut charm school at Edwards AFB. It was easy to feel somewhat insecure in this group of pilots. What could I say: I’d had two WestPac tours and was now studying in Monterey? I felt my chances of being chosen were pretty slim.

  They hit us with another blizzard of paperwork, which now included questions about space travel and orbital mechanics. Although I didn’t know much about those subjects, I wrote essay-length answers in longhand to every query. If they were looking at how a candidate handled the unknown, I must have rated pretty high, for I didn’t know much at all.

  Then came the personal interviews, and for the first time I met real astronauts, the men from the headlines. At a long table with a couple of civilians sat Deke Slayton, Wally Schirra, and Alan Shepard, and I felt like I was in the middle of history. These guys were our heroes of the space age, and I basked at being admitted to their presence, although I felt like a prisoner before the parole board. They were all quite pleasant, except for Shepard, whose cold eyes seemed to look right through me.

  What did they want? Was it how I dressed, how I looked, how I spoke? Was this a trick question? Everything I said was going to be evaluated and I didn’t know what they wanted. There was no use trying to bullshit about my record, because they had it all right there before them. My best shot was to answer the questions as honestly as I could and hope that was good enough. For instance, someone asked how many times had I flown over 50,000 feet. Hell, for an attack pilot like me, who spent his life below 500 feet, that was halfway into space! So I flipped the question and answered, “I’ve flown real low, and if you’re going to land on the Moon, you gotta get close sometime.” I remember they smiled a lot. Except for Shepard, who seemed to have ice water in his veins.

  A few cocktail parties later, after a chance to meet some of the other astronauts and shake hands with the famous John Glenn, I returned to Monterey.

  Another letter came, advising me that I had made another cut. We were down to thirty-six candidates now, a couple of those “can’t miss” dudes were out, and I was still in.

  Exhaustive medical tests followed at Brooks AFB in San Antonio, and NASA scratched off four more names, including Bob Schumacher, my friend from Monterey, who was found to have some minor heart defect. Such a totally unfair and illogical decision demonstrated why pilots don’t trust doctors. He was cleared to fly Navy jets in combat, but wasn’t up to the mark for astronaut training? However, the incident also showed just how thorough the screening had become. Receiving a B instead of a B+ in some college course years earlier might be reason enough to pick the other guy. It was said that the odds of anyone becoming an astronaut were about 3 million to one and I believed it. But, damn it, my odds were getting better.

  After the physicals, the field was down to only thirty-two, and for the first time, I began to feel that I just might have a chance. Still, Barbara and I didn’t get our hopes up, because too many variables were involved. Hey, Cernan, you’re close, but don’t start counting any chickens yet. Instead, we revised our plans for Princeton. If I started classes there and got called to be an astronaut, we would have moved all the way to New Jersey for nothing. So we chose to stay in Monterey, where I could take my third year at the Naval Post Graduate School and finish my thesis on using hydrogen as propulsion for high energy rockets. We kept our fingers crossed on the astronaut front, but were comfortable knowing that if I wasn’t selected, the worst that could happen would be that I would earn my master’s degree.