Gus Grissom: The Lost Astronaut (Indiana Biography Series)
by Ray E. Boomhower
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ray E. BoomhowerEditor: Kathleen M. Breen
Editor: Paula J. Corpuz
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2004-09
ISBN: 0871951762
Number of pages: 393
Publisher: Indiana Historical Society
Book Reviews of Gus Grissom: The Lost Astronaut (Indiana Biography Series)
Book Review: Finally, A Step In The Right Direction
Summary: 4 Stars
The Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom saga was long overdue for a retelling. For too many years the only thing resembling a biography was the dreadful "Starfall," a superficial patchwork. This work comes from the Indiana Historical Society Press, and while not exhaustive, it is a vast improvement over Grissom's first biography and puts a respectable current biography in schools and libraries.
I have to remind myself over and over that it is nearly fifty years ago since Grissom and six other career military fighter pilots were selected by the fledgling NASA for Project Mercury, the United States' program to put a single astronaut in earth orbit. Many Americans have little or no idea of who this man was, let alone the success and controversy that swirled around his life and into the literature of nearly every retired astronaut's autobiography. If he is remembered by today's younger generations, it may be as a dim reference to "the fire" of 1967, in which Grissom and two other astronauts were killed during rehearsal for the maiden Project Apollo flight.
Author Ray E. Boomhower presents Grissom's life in a rather factual way. The reader does not get unduly bogged down in technology, the Cold War, or in the jocular astronaut life, aside from a few Wally Schirra stories. There is insightful and tasteful observation from Grissom's family and friends in Indiana, including Mrs. Betty Grissom. By rooting this work in Grissom's native community, the author conveys a sense that the hometown boy from the Midwest went off to school, war, and outer space, bringing pride to the folks back home. Boomhower has given us the story of Grissom's life, not Grissom's programs; Neal Thompson's recent biography of Alan B. Shepard has many of the same characteristics.
Grissom devoted much of his career to both flying and engineering, and Boomhower attends to both. Grissom became the second U.S. astronaut to venture into space, a fifteen-minute suborbital flight aboard the "Liberty Bell" in 1961. The flight itself is now long-forgotten, but memory of the events of splashdown may linger for more generations. On live TV the hatch of Grissom's spaceship blew open prematurely, flooding the craft and rendering it too heavy for the helicopter attempting to retrieve it. The craft sank to the bottom of the Atlantic, a major embarrassment more than a scientific loss per se. At the time there was muted criticism of Grissom's performance and a reluctance to accept the astronaut's explanation that "the hatch just blew." Boomhower records that even Mrs. Grissom gingerly asked her husband if he had erred while talking to him by phone after the flight [209] and the astronaut's two sons were harassed in school over the incident.
Grissom would have other reasons for career concerns. He quickly surmised that there would be no more Mercury flights for him as it became clear Mercury would end once earth orbit had been securely achieved. NASA had brought another larger team of astronauts on board. Alan Shepard and later John Glenn would be "made men" in the NASA pecking order. After his Liberty Bell flight, Grissom would speak of himself as not having a job, but anxious to prove himself, he alone of the original astronauts went to work on the design of the next generation Gemini spacecraft. Gradually other astronauts came to deeply appreciate Grissom's efforts to make Gemini a true pilot's spacecraft, and his stock among the brethren rose considerably. He became so identified with the new craft that the interior specifications were crafted to his short stature, no favor to the gangly astronaut Tom Stafford down the road. And yet it took Alan Shepard's misfortune [Meniere's disease] and John Glenn's new horizon [the U.S. Senate] to boost Grissom to the head of the line for the maiden launch of Gemini in March 1965. Grissom and John Young navigated a perfect three orbit test run marred only by later discovery of a contraband corned beef sandwich on board.
His first ride with Gemini would be his last. While colleagues like Jim Lovell, Pete Conrad, and Neil Armstrong were racking up frequent space miles, Grissom began to have doubts about the space program. He considered retirement, and even contemplated flying combat missions in Viet Nam [286] or a run for Congress from Indiana. He speculated to his wife privately that he thought his chances of accidental death in the space program were high if he remained. On the other hand, his auto buddy Jim Rathmann recalled for the author that Grissom hoped to be the first man on the moon.
Boomhower believes that much of Grissom's confusion and pessimism stemmed from his engineering work on the Apollo space craft itself. Gemini had been the product of McDonnell Aircraft, a company widely respected and trusted by the astronaut community. The Apollo contract, on the other hand, was awarded to North American Aviation, perhaps as Schirra surmised, to spread jobs and political good will to California. The author agrees with other researchers that the North American operation was lacking in many respects, particularly quality control. One telling example: changes on the punch list came so frequently that simulators were never adequately programmed for astronauts in training.
Despite months of investigation, no one cause was definitively isolated in the tragic fire of January 27, 1967 that killed Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chafee during a ground test prior to actual flight. NASA and North American came in for harsh criticism. Boomhower tends to agree with the official investigation results which attributed the fire to a zeitgeist of speed, recklessness, poor management, and general faulty design. Grissom's involvement in the design of Apollo, and his dissatisfaction with North American, probably deserved more thorough treatment, not to mention the sometimes bizarre relations between the Grissoms, NASA, and the press. Boomhower's text is probably not the last word on America's second astronaut, but it will be adequate through the foreseeable future.
Summary of Gus Grissom: The Lost Astronaut (Indiana Biography Series)
In the late 1950s the Soviet Union shocked the world by placing a small satellite-Sputnik-in orbit around the earth. Treated as a technological Pearl Harbor in the United States, the Russian achievement prompted the federal government to create a civilian organization, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to manage the American space program. By April 1959, NASA had selected seven military test pilots to serve as the country's first astronauts in the race with the Soviets to see who could put the first human in space. One of the seven Americans picked for this ambitious effort came from the small southern Indiana community of Mitchell. Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom would go on to become the first man to fly in space twice and to give his life in NASA's attempt to meet President John F. Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely home by the end of the 1960s.In this second volume in the Indiana Historical Society Press's Indiana Biography Series, Hoosier historian and writer Ray E. Boomhower explores Grissom's life, from his days as a child playing in the forests of nearby Spring Mill State Park to his service as a combat pilot flying missions against Communist opponents in the skies over Korea. He also delves into the process by which NASA selected its original seven Mercury astronauts, the jostling for position to be the first American in space, and Grissom's near-fatal Liberty Bell 7 flight that haunted his subsequent space career.
After almost drowning when the hatch malfunctioned on his Mercury flight, Grissom resurrected his reputation through determination and his careful work with the space agency's Gemini program. The Hoosier astronaut made such a mark on the program that fellow astronauts nicknamed the Gemini spacecraft the Gusmobile. Grissom continued to be the astronaut NASA turned to when testing new spacecraft for the Apollo moon program. On January 27, 1967, Grissom, along with crew members Ed White and Roger Chaffee, died when a fire swept through their Apollo command module during a supposedly safe test on the ground at Cape Kennedy's Launch Complex 34. The astronaut's story continues after his death, however, most recently with the discovery and raising of the Liberty Bell 7 from its resting place on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
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