There’s a picture in my book of me standing on the tarmac at Langley Field, Va., talking with a young, svelte Carpenter, as he was training to become our third astronaut to orbit the Earth.
Four decades later, he’s the first speaker on the Omega panel, a gray and slightly portly 83 with the humor lines intact, especially while the audience was being thanked “for coming out on a Saturday afternoon to hear three old fogies talking about something that happened yesterday.”
At the risk of sounding redundant, this old fogy would like to add a few splotches of color to the times in which this all began. When a young Russian pilot named Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the earth in 1961, Russia owned outer space.
And when President Kennedy challenged us to pass the Russians and be the first to set foot on the moon, it seemed a near impossibility — especially at a time when we were deeply divided over a war in Vietnam and struggling to preserve the balance of power in conventional armaments.
That was the situation on a steamy April day in 1959 in Washington, D.C., when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration introduced the seven test pilots who had been selected to put us back in the race for the moon and serve as point men in turning public attention away from our troubles and onto our mission in space. Their introduction caught this tone. The NASA press chief waved a hand at these seven remarkably at-ease young men dressed in business suits and said to the assembled reporters: “Gentlemen, these are the astronaut volunteers.”
Almost overnight they became public heroes. And although they were pilots and technicians, not the stuff of public relations, they took naturally to that role by being themselves.
