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'Change in Velocity': Remembering Deke Slayton's Unrealized Mercury Mission (Part 1)
By Ben Evans, on March 11th, 2017


Deke Slayton, one of the “Original Seven” NASA astronauts, was grounded from his Mercury mission 55 years ago, this month. Photo Credit: NASA

Fifty-five years ago, America was a nation in euphoria. Astronaut John Glenn returned triumphantly to Earth on 20 February 1962, after orbiting Earth three times in his Mercury capsule—named “Friendship 7”—and further flights were on the horizon. In April 1962, fellow astronaut Donald “Deke” Slayton would repeat Glenn’s accomplishment, spending almost five hours in space. Although his mission would not perform any significantly “new” tasks, Slayton was excited as the opportunity to become the United States’ fourth spacefarer drew closer. Yet 55 years ago, this coming week, Slayton’s excitement evaporated, when a medical problem which he and others deemed a minor irritant returned to bite him. Little could he have known, but March 1962 would not only change his life, but also the future of America’s space program.

In keeping with the tradition of the “Mercury Seven”—which, in addition to Slayton and Glenn, also included Al Shepard, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra and Gordo Cooper as NASA’s first class of astronauts—the mission name was suffixed by default with the numeral “7”. Since it was also the fourth manned Mercury mission, Slayton opted to call it “Delta 7”. In his autobiography, Deke, he explained that the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet also represented “a nice engineering term that described a change in velocity”. Unfortunately for the 38-year-old Slayton, his own velocity in high-performance jets and spacecraft changed markedly, thanks to a minor, yet persistent heart conditions, known as “idiopathic atrial fibrillation”.


Launch of Friendship 7, the first American manned orbital space flight. Had Deke Slayton’s Delta 7 mission gone ahead, it would have followed a similar flight profile. Photo Credit: NASA

Shortly after his selection by NASA in April 1959, occasional irregularities would be detected in a muscle at the top of his heart. Shortly after his selection as an astronaut in April 1959, traces of sinus arrhythmia came to the attention of aerospace physicians at the centrifuge at the Naval Air Development Center (NADC) in Johnsville, Penn. In response to the finding, NASA flight surgeon Dr. Bill Douglas obtained a clinical electrocardiogram at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, which concluded that Slayton had a slight “flutter” in his heartbeat. Further tests at the School of Aviation Medicine at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, seemed to indicate that the condition should not adversely affect his duties as an astronaut.

Two years later, Slayton had been assigned as prime pilot for the second orbital Mercury mission, slated for launch atop an Atlas booster from Pad 14 at Cape Kennedy in Florida, no sooner than April 1962. Backing him up for the mission—due to last five hours and complete three orbits of Earth—was fellow astronaut Wally Schirra.

Then, in the days before John Glenn’s launch aboard Friendship 7, speculation arose that he had a heart problem. In his autobiography, Slayton noted that the call had come from U.S. Air Force physician Dr. George Knauf, detailed to NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., and originated from “a source higher than the Department of Defense”. Responding to Knauf, Bill Douglas denied that Glenn or his backup, Scott Carpenter, had such a problem, but raised awareness that Slayton had long been known to have a minor heart condition. He expected this admission to prove satisfactory and draw a line under the affair.

It didn’t.

One of the flight surgeons who examined Slayton in 1959, Dr. Larry Lamb, had become convinced that the condition should disqualify him from spaceflight. He had not said so at the time, but in early 1962 he returned his voice to the fore. “I don’t think it was anything personal,” Slayton wrote. “This was just his medical opinion.” However, Lamb was Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson’s cardiologist and within days NASA Administrator Jim Webb had reopened Slayton’s file. The astronaut and Douglas were summoned to the office of Air Force Surgeon-General Olivas Niess in Washington.

It came as something of a surprise for Slayton, who had been wrapping up a simulator session in Hangar S at Cape Canaveral with Schirra, when he received the summons. “I didn’t know what this was all about,” he wrote later in Deke, “but I got changed, went over to Patrick Air Force Base and jumped in a T-33.” On 13 March, a panel of “at least 20” military physicians signed him off as fit to fly and their decision was endorsed by Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay.

However, Secretary of the Air Force Eugene Zuckert requested an examination by a panel of civilian physicians at NASA Headquarters, ahead of the granting of formal clearance for Slayton to fly his mission. Two days later, on 15 March, Dr. Proctor Harvey of Georgetown University, Dr. Thomas Mattingly of the Washington Hospital Center and Dr. Eugene Braunwell of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) measured the astronaut’s cardiac health. When they finished their tests, they asked Slayton to await their decision. A few minutes later, NASA Deputy Administrator Dr. Hugh Dryden entered the room and told Slayton, point-blank, that he was grounded.

“I hadn’t expected anything like this,” the astronaut later wrote. “I was devastated.” In his mind, the situation was worsened by the fact that Harvey, Mattingly and Braunwell had found no medical reason to keep him from flying Delta 7; rather, their consensus was that if NASA had astronauts without heart conditions, it would be advisable to fly them instead.

By now, the launch date for Slayton’s would-be mission had slipped into May 1962, leaving his replacement just eight weeks to prepare for flight. Many observers considered the decision to have been a political one, but Slayton—despite his justifiable frustration—was philosophical; at least, that is, in the pages of his autobiography, many years later. “NASA knew it would have to publicly disclose my heart condition prior to my flight,” he wrote, years later. “There would be medical monitors at tracking stations, all over the world, who wouldn’t know how to react otherwise. Everybody expected this to be a big deal. NASA would be opening itself up to a lot of medical second-guessing.”



The Mercury seven astronauts. Top row, from left: Al Shepard, Virgil “Gus” Grissom and Gordon Cooper. Lower level from left: Wally Schirra, Deke Slayton, John Glenn and Scott Carpenter. Photo Credit: NASA

If Slayton had fibrillated on the pad, inevitable questions would be raised; should the launch be aborted…or not? Still, many senior NASA personnel were confident that Slayton was the best person to follow John Glenn. They were prepared to take the heat for the decision, but Jim Webb was not.

The head of NASA feared that a disaster could trigger adverse headlines. “It didn’t matter that a whole lot of doctors thought I didn’t have a problem,” Slayton wrote of Webb’s judgement. “He was only going to listen to the few who did.” To be fair to Webb, a launch abort could subject the astronaut to gravitational loads as high as 21 G and, perhaps, with Slayton fibrillating and dehydrated, the mission could have fatal consequences. NASA itself was only four years old and President John F. Kennedy’s promise to land a man on the Moon before the end of the decade was far from certain. A dead astronaut threatened to destroy Kennedy’s plan and NASA would suffer as a result.

On 16 March 1962, the day after the decision, Deke Slayton sat through a lengthy press conference, during which the medical minutiae were examined. One journalist asked the astronaut if stress had caused the problem, to which Slayton responded—with a barbed hint of caustic irony—that the only stress in the space business was the press conference! Hugh Dryden explained that he might still be eligible for future assignments, although that seemed unlikely. Slayton gave up drinking, started working out more regularly—“quit doing everything that was fun, I guess,” he wrote—and even secured an appointment with Dr. Paul Dudley White, the cardiologist of former President Dwight Eisenhower.

White acknowledged that the astronaut did not seem to have a problem, but endorsed the judgement of Harvey, Mattingly and Braunwell: that other astronauts should fly in his stead. Poor Slayton had no chance of drawing another Mercury mission assignment, and he was told that his condition would make him a “hard sell” to NASA management for Gemini, too. The hammer blow came when the Air Force decided that Slayton no longer met the requirement for a Class I pilot’s licence—he could no longer fly solo—and in November 1963, with the rank of Major, he resigned from the service.

Yet in a true example of determination and grit, he never gave up on the space program, or on the possibility of someday flying into space. In tomorrow’s article, Slayton’s decade-long career at the helm of the Flight Crew Operations Directorate and his eventual return to flight status—and a long-awaited space mission—will be explored.


Source: https://www.americaspace.com/2017/03/11/change-in-velocity-remembering-deke-slaytons-unrealized-mercury-mission-part-1/

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'Worth Waiting 16 Years For': Remembering Deke Slayton's Unrealized Mercury Mission (Part 2)
By Ben Evans, on March 12th, 2017 [AS]


Savoring his first experience of weightlessness, Deke Slayton traverses through the Docking Module during his one and only space mission. Photo Credit: NASA

By the middle of March 1962, Donald “Deke” Slayton—decorated U.S. Air Force fighter pilot and test pilot and veteran of the grueling Project Mercury selection campaign, during which he had proven himself as a perfect specimen for astronaut training—was dealt perhaps the most devastating card of his career. With just eight weeks to go before he was due to ride an Atlas booster to become the United States’ fourth astronaut and its second man to orbit the Earth, Slayton was grounded by a minor, yet persistent heart murmur. As outlined in yesterday’s AmericaSpace history article, his condition had been detected in summer 1959, but had not been considered serious and had lain dormant for almost three years.

All that changed in the spring of 1962, when speculation arose that Slayton’s fellow Mercury astronaut John Glenn might have a heart condition. Although this was proven to be untrue, a metaphorical can of worms was opened and NASA revealed that Slayton—who was by this point deep into training for a five-hour and three-orbit mission, dubbed “Delta 7”—suffered from a condition known as “idiopathic atrial fibrillation”. Every so often, irregularities were detectable in a muscle at the top of his heart. “I realized that every couple of weeks, I would go through a period of a day or two when when my pulse would act up,” Slayton wrote in his memoir, Deke. “I had no other symptoms. It certainly didn’t stop me from working. And I found that if I did some heavy exercise, like running a couple of miles, the thing just went away.”

Unfortunately, in a whirlwind couple of days, from 13 through 15 March, Slayton was poked and prodded by military and civilian doctors…and told, point-blank, that he was grounded. Next day, Slayton was forced to sit through a press conference, where the minutiae of the incident were played out in depth. “It was awful the way it happened,” wrote Project Mercury Operations Director Walt Williams, years later. “I don’t remember Deke being angry, as much as he was hurt—partly for the way it was handled.”



John Young, Gus Grissom and Tom Stafford, together with Deke Slayton (second from left) study orbital-track charts before the launch of Gemini 3 in March 1965. Photo Credit: NASA

Indeed, Slayton had committed months of training to the flight, which he had dubbed “Delta 7”. The name created a link between the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet with the fourth U.S. manned space mission and the numeral paid tribute to NASA’s “Original Seven” Mercury astronauts, of whom Slayton was one. By his own admission, though, Slayton had preferred his flight to focus on engineering objectives, with lesser emphasis on science. “There was a hell of a lot we still hadn’t demonstrated with Mercury,” he wrote Deke, “such as a reliable flight control system.”

In Slayton’s mind, science should take a figurative backseat to the engineering realities of a new spacecraft in a unknown and hostile environment. However, the success of John Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission in February 1962—during which he became the first American citizen to orbit the globe—caused the scientific community to increase their focus on science for Slayton’s flight in May. “Everybody and his brother came out of the woodwork with some experiment,” Slayton wrote. “One guy wanted me to release a balloon to measure air drag. Another guy had some ground observations I was supposed to make. One damn thing after another. I had my hands full trying to resist it.”

Effectively grounded from spaceflight in March 1962, Slayton found himself heading up the astronaut corps from the summer of that year as “Co-ordinator of Astronaut Activities”. A lesser man might have thrown in the towl, but not Slayton. The other astronauts loathed the idea of an outside manager or a military superior to serve as their boss. “We wanted someone who knew us,” wrote Wally Schirra in his memoir, Schirra’s Space, “who trained with us. Deke was the one and only choice.”

In this position, he became a virtual father figure to many of them. He was a man labeled “the best” by Mike Collins and described as a dependable colleague who could be trusted “to get the job done, no matter what the job was” by John Glenn. In the words of a Los Angeles Times reviewer—writing on the flyleaf of Slayton’s autobiography—it was indeed “one of the great fortunes of Apollo that [he] was grounded…for in “Father Slayton”, NASA had the man who could set the rotations, pick the teams and make the decisions the astronauts wouldn’t have accepted from a bureaucrat or a scientist.”

Even in the early 1970s, Slayton’s chances of ever regaining a pilot’s licence, let alone securing the opportunity to ride a rocket, seemed infinitesimally small. Then, one day in the summer of 1970, during an antelope hunt in Wyoming, Slayton experienced his first heart fibrillation in several months; he had not suffered one ever since flight surgeon Dr. Chuck Berry loaded him up on vitamins following a cold. As a personal experiment, he started taking the vitamins again and the fibrillations went away.

“It wasn’t the kind of thing you could use as hard medical evidence,” Slayton wrote in his memoir, “but it got me thinking that I might still have a more realistic chance.” More than a year later, Berry happened to attend a medical conference in Istanbul and broached Slayton’s case with Dr. Hal Mankin, a specialist who agreed to run tests. In December 1971, Slayton flew to Rochester, Minn., and checked into the Mayo Clinic under the false name of “Dick K. King.” Whilst there, Mankin put him through a battery of tests, hanging him upside down on a treadmill, poking holes in him, pumping dye into his system, and examining “parts of my body I didn’t even know I had.”



Deke Slayton works inside a mockup of the Apollo Docking Module (DM) in September 1974. Photo Credit: NASA

At last, an angiogram yielded the final judgement. “Your man,” Mankin told Berry, “is as good as gold!” Slayton had passed with flying colors, requalified for a Class I pilot’s licence, and in March 1972— now aged 48 and a full decade after being grounded from Project Mercury—he was restored to active astronaut status.

His problem now was getting a flight, and the list of options was short. Two more lunar landing missions were scheduled for April and December, both of whose crews had already been immersed in training for several months. So too had the crews for three flights to the Skylab space station in 1973. For Slayton, the Apollo-Soyuz venture with the Soviets was his last chance. As head of flight crew operations, it was nominally Slayton who oversaw the astronaut selection process, but since he now considered himself a candidate, he asked Dr. Chris Kraft—then-head of the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), later the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas—to handle the assignment on his behalf.

Despite having never flown in space, Slayton was convinced that his seniority would be more than enough to carry him through and recommended himself for command of the mission. For his crewmates, he identified a pair of astronauts whom he held in extreme high regard: Jack Swigert, a veteran of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, and Vance Brand, who was at the time training for the backup command of two Skylab flights.

Swigert’s name was quickly removed from consideration and veteran astronaut Tom Stafford entered the story as a real candidate for command. In January 1973, Kraft called Stafford, Brand and Slayton into his office to formally name them as the crew for the U.S. half of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP). Stafford would command the mission, with Brand as Command Module Pilot (CMP) and Slayton in the new role of Docking Module Pilot (DMP).

Slayton’s euphoria at finally receiving a flight assignment after such a long wait was tempered by the disappointing news that Stafford would be in command. He remembered that the bittersweet news was “a little deflating”, but understood the reasons behind it. For his part, Stafford remembered that Slayton was eternally gracious in his new role and there was “never a moment’s tension” over the issue of command. “I told him I knew we had a good crew,” Stafford wrote, “and a good mission to fly and that was as close as we got to talking about the issue.”

Yet the fact that on Earth, at least, Slayton remained Stafford’s boss prompted a journalist in Houston to ask the obvious question: How did he feel about taking orders from a deputy?

“I see absolutely no problem with that at all,” Slayton replied. “I think there’s a lot of precedence in the country on this particular subject. Anytime you have a guy flying an airplane in the military service, he’s a second lieutenant and you got the highest general in the Air Force. The commander is the commander, and there’s no doubt in this flight who’s going to be the commander. It’s Tom Stafford. Now, when we’re on the ground, working the other programs and the other problems, then obviously we’ve got a normal and working relationship. But I see absolutely no problems at all and I’m responsible to Tom to be ready to fly this flight and he’s responsible to me to see the crew’s ready to go!”

At this irony, Slayton’s eyes twinkled and the auditorium broke into laughter.

Yet the fear of further medical problems had not disappeared. NASA’s medical staff insisted on a new flight ruling: If Slayton developed a heart fibrillation during the countdown, the clock would be held at T-4 minutes and he would be extracted from the command module. “Chris Kraft was just livid at this idea,” wrote Chuck Berry in Slayton’s autobiography. “He called me and asked me what this was all about—[because] he thought Deke was fully qualified to fly.” The rule was unnecessary, he explained, and even if anything untoward did occur, he was a slow fibrillator and would not be adversely affected.

When Deke Slayton returned to Earth in the second half of July 1975, after a mission he admitted was “worth waiting 16 years for”, he gave Berry a gift of thanks. It was the cardiac monitor from his medical harness in the command module, mounted onto a piece of tracing paper, on which was printed the readout of his heartbeat. The beat was steady, with no fibrillations, throughout the entire nine-day flight…


Source: https://www.americaspace.com/2017/03/12/worth-waiting-16-years-for-remembering-deke-slaytons-unrealized-mercury-mission-part-2/

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