Introduction: The astronauts’ headshrinker
As the astronauts’ psychologist, I have often been asked, “Do you read their minds?” My answer is, “I don’t have to, they speak their minds.” Working with these vigorous, intelligent and highly skilled men was an exciting experience, made all the more enjoyable by the fact that while they were selected for maturity and good judgment, they all had a fine sense of humor, running from puckish to ebullient merriment which was always close beneath the surface. For these men, the earth was their oyster, and one could see how they savored it as they swallowed it whole.
Anyone who worked with them had to take a good deal of kidding, particularly a headshrinker. The only defense was to give as good as you received, and it was all part of the special closeness those of us felt who were working with the astronauts in Project Mercury. Together we learned how to float through the air weightless, breathe while under seven times the normal pressure of gravity, and to walk about in the strait jacket called a pressure suit.
How did a myopic psychologist get involved in this sort of an adventure? Well, the process was a rather natural one, surprising as it may seem. Unfortunately, the only psychologist that most people can name is Sigmund Freud. While he made important contributions to the field of psychology, his popularity is primarily due to the fact that he was the only man of his era who could get books published on that most fascinating of all topics - sex. His practice was limited to those with neuroses and other emotional disorders. Since for the public he is the archetype of the psychologist (though he was not one - he was a psychiatrist) most people today believe that the psychologist deals only with the mentally disturbed.
Actually, psychologists are found in our schools helping to develop educational programs, and working with problem children. They are found in industry, participating in the design of equipment, helping to select employees, and evaluating candidates for promotion. They are found in the business world, evaluating the impact of singing commercials; in politics, assessing the reaction of the public to the speeches, the smiles, and the haircuts of our national leaders. They are found flying with the Air Force, marching with the Army, swimming with the Navy, helping to make peace with the Peace Corps, and helping to prepare for war with SAC. Nearly everywhere that man has found an occupation, the psychologist has found an area of study. This, of course, is appropriate, since the proper subject of psychological study is the behavior of man wherever he is found. Now man is beginning to travel in space. Having pursued his subject to the ends of the earth, it is not surprising to find the psychologist following the astronauts.
While my assignment to Project Mercury came as a complete surprise, it was one for which I had been preparing for a number of years. I received my doctor's degree in psychology from UCLA in January 1953, and left immediately for a draft-exempt job at the Navy Electronics Laboratory in San Diego, California. There I was involved in a number of studies, one of which involved attempting to help the Navy improve its helicopter-borne sonar system. After a year at San Diego, the project on which I was working was completed and my draft board began to get restless again, so I volunteered for the Navy aviation psychology program.
After two months at Officer Candidate School, during which I learned which end of the ship was called the bow, I reported to the Naval School of Aviation Medicine in Pensacola, Florida. Here a small group of psychologists were trying to improve the selection tests and training procedures used in the Navy aviation program. It was there that I first came in contact with the active young intelligent athletes who would eventually make up the population from which we selected the astronauts. At this time, we were dealing with them as young men ten years before they would have the experience and maturity to be considered for astronautics. Some of these young men whose reflexes were a fraction of a second slower, whose intelligence was a few points lower, or whose physical stamina was slightly less would not make the grade. They would fail or drop out of flight school at their own request. Even if they passed through the full flight training program, they would get transferred to desk jobs or be shuttled off to unimportant flight assignments. Only the very best would make it through training and operational flying and be selected for the best pilot training which would make them eligible for astronautics. During this time, I, together with other Navy and Air Force psychologists, were learning a good deal about what was required to make a good pilot, and many of these lessons were to be applied later in selecting astronauts.
After three years in Pensacola, I was transferred to the Navy Medical Research Institute at Bethesda, Maryland. There I was privileged to work for the grand old man of Navy space medicine, Captain Norman Lee Barr. Captain Barr had been flying for nearly thirty years. He had had Army and Air Force wings, and was a Navy flight surgeon. He was one of the first to become interested in recording the electrical responses of the heart and other measures of physical activity from pilots while they were actually piloting aircraft. He developed a radio telemetering system for making these recordings, and during the year and a half I worked with him in 1957 and 1958, he was involved in monitoring flights of jet aircraft and the manned balloon ascents of the Navy Stratolab program.
It was during this period that I first came into contact with space flight. In the fall of 1957 the Army and Navy decided to work together on a biological flight program. On some of the Jupiter IRBM test flights, there were small spaces available which could be used for packages containing animals. Dr. Barr learned of this and was instrumental in setting up a cooperative program between the Army laboratory headed by Dr. von Braun at Huntsville and the Naval School of Aviation Medicine at Pensacola, Florida. During the fall of 1957 we studied a number of animals as prospects for a space flight, and in this process I performed my first space selection job by choosing the squirrel monkey as the first astro-animal over the cotton-top marmoset, mice, turtles, frogs, and various other candidates. A year and a half later, in the spring of 1959, the monkeys Able and Baker rode the Jupiter 1500 miles down range and were successfully recovered. The squirrel monkey Baker performed well and came back to live happily with her friends at Pensacola. Here was proof of the success of this first space flight selection program.
Early in October 1958 as one of the first acts in getting under way with the Mercury program, the new NASA invited Dr. Randolph Lovelace to form a committee of aerospace medical specialists to assist in the manned space program. The initial action of this committee was to call for the assignment by the three services of aeromedical specialists to the Space Task Group at Langley Field, Virginia. The morning after the first meeting of the Lovelace Committee, I received a call from Captain Barr. He told me of the new Space Task Group forming at Langley and asked that I go down there immediately. That night I took a bus to Newport News and the next morning the adventure about which this book will be written began.
I arrived at Langley to find the old NACA insignia being painted over and new NASA labelling being put on the buildings. Approximately two dozen men were assembling in the upper story of the unitary wind tunnel building to begin what was to become Project Mercury, but at that time what was still a nameless plan to put a man in space. Shortly after I arrived, Dr. Stanley White from the Air Force and Dr. Bill Augerson from the Army came aboard and the three of us acted as general advisors to the new director of the Space Task Group, Dr. Robert R. Gilruth. One of my first assignments was to work on the astronaut selection program, and by Christmas time the main outlines of the program were agreed upon and approved not only by NASA but also by the White House. Early in January the selection program got under way and from that time until early April I was primarily concerned with coordinating the program and insuring that all the data was collected and catalogued.
Early in April seven men reported to the Space Task Group for astronaut training. From then on my assignment changed. I was now in charge of the astronauts’ preparation for space flight. For two years I coordinated the group training program by which all seven men worked together to become highly proficient in operating the Mercury spacecraft.
Beginning in the spring 1961, Project Mercury entered its operational phase. Three months prior to each flight the pilot and his back-up moved to the Cape to begin intensive preparation. I went with them, helping to set up their training activities and to assist them in preparing for the flight. During the flight itself, I was in the control center recording the pilot's activities. Afterwards I would fly to the debriefing site at Grand Turk or Grand Bahama Island in the Caribbean. On these trips I carried with me several hundred questions which each astronaut attempted to answer in order to provide as much information as possible for the project team. After each flight I would spend two to three weeks helping to prepare the flight report.
This activity continued until the end of the Mercury program, when, with the announcement of the new Apollo program to land a man on the moon, the Space Task Group became the Manned Spacecraft Center, and was given a new home in Houston, Texas. At this time I moved up to the Director’s staff as his Assistant for Human Factors. At the end of my four years with the astronauts, not one of their heads was as much as a fraction of an inch smaller than in April 1959. But all of our heads were filled with much new knowledge of space flight and what it takes for a man to venture alone outside the protective cocoon this earth provides. If I had failed as a head shrinker, perhaps I had yet enjoyed some success as a selector and trainer of the first pioneers who were truly “out of this world.”