1.
BORN TO FLY
SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT, John Glenn slipped on a bathrobe to eat filet mignon, scrambled eggs, and jellied toast under a doctor’s watchful eye. His blood pressure measured 120 over 80, about the same as when he was home reading a book.
Glenn was nearly six feet tall, with a dusting of freckles and receding, strawberry-blond hair. At forty, he was the oldest member of NASA’s first astronaut corps, and, as he said, “there wasn’t any closer brotherhood ever formed.” He had been plucked from the military and subjected to bowel probes and electrodes and various other assessments to determine his fitness for spaceflight. His high-nutrient, “low-residue” meal of filet mignon and eggs was designed to stop him up.
When he finished zipping up his suit he pulled on a pair of gloves fitted with flashlights in the fingertips to help him see around his six-by-seven-foot capsule in the dark. He rode an elevator nine stories, to the top of the gantry where a crew helped him into the capsule before bolting the hatch shut. He looked through a periscope over the marshlands surrounding Cape Canaveral. A phone line was patched to his wife.
“Don’t be scared,” he told her, as he squatted atop a 125-ton rocket. “I’m just going down to the corner store to get a pack of gum.”
Glenn’s folksy earnestness played well in postwar America, the dimpled paperboy who had bundled and sold rhubarb to afford his first bike, gone off and become a war hero, and was now preparing to ride the most powerful rocket NASA had ever built into space. At a press conference he and the other six astronauts had been asked about their family lives, and while the others oozed a certain insouciant masculinity (“What I do is pretty much my business”), Glenn charmed the room.
“I don’t think any of us could really go on with something like this if we didn’t have pretty good backing at home,” he said. And his motivation? “I got on this project because it’d probably be the nearest to heaven I’d ever get.”
Shortly before ten a.m., the countdown reached zero and Glenn’s rocket rumbled to life. “We’re underway,” he said. As the engines burned a ton of fuel every second and the vehicle became lighter and the air grew thinner, the spacecraft gathered speed. Glenn felt the g-forces pressing on his chest.
“Little bumpy along about here,” he said. He looked outside and saw the sunny Florida skies turning muddy. And then black.
“Zero g and I feel fine,” said Glenn.
Down below, where the air was dense and gravity was the law of the land, hundreds of millions of people were huddled around radio sets and tiny televisions and the giant screen unfurled in Grand Central Station. “He’s in the hands of the Lord now,” said one woman. It was February 1962. The Cold War was on and America was faring poorly. A wall divided Berlin. More than a hundred CIA-trained guerrillas had just been slaughtered on a beach in Cuba.
The Soviets were winning in space, too. First with Sputnik, in 1957, and four years later with Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space. These were massive technical accomplishments with huge national security implications for America: now the Soviet Union could spy on military bases or put a nuclear weapon on the tip of one of their rockets and fire it at the United States. American kids practiced hiding under their desks in case of a nuclear attack. With the fate of the free world hanging in the balance, John Glenn, the first American to try to orbit the Earth, offered a glimmer of salvation.
“Go, baby!” Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchor, cheered on air.
Mark Stucky sat alone, glued to the TV in the den of his parents’ home in Salina, Kansas. His mother was doing chores in another part of the house. His father, Paul, was working across the street at the Methodist liberal arts college where he taught physics and astronomy.
Paul had an exacting, scientific mind and a deep curiosity about the universe. He collected fossils and owned a ham radio that he used to send Morse code messages around the world. On clear nights, he would drive Mark and his sisters out among the wheat fields surrounding the city, where buffalo still roamed, so they could gaze up at the sky and call out the constellations.
Mark was just three. But he was old enough to know that something special was happening as Glenn orbited the Earth, all alone in his capsule, speeding more than seventeen thousand miles an hour. Glenn’s voice would periodically crackle over the radio, relaying his observations. Like when he sent the rocket booster toppling end over end in his wake. Or when he saw lightning bolts surging through a storm cloud below. Or when “thousands of small, luminous particles” appeared outside the craft.
“Oh! That view is tremendous,” Glenn said, at the sight of the Earth’s gentle blue radiance.
Mark sat there for hours in front of that wooden TV to see that Glenn made it home. He almost didn’t. Chunks of the ship broke off during reentry, and the heat so marred and discolored the outside of the capsule that it nearly burned the painted American flag right off. But there was no denying that Glenn did his country proud: he got dinner at the White House and a ticker-tape parade.
Mark couldn’t put his finger on what made Glenn so special—whether it was bravery or patriotism or fame. But when Paul came home that day, Mark told his father that he had made up his mind: he, too, was going to one day become an astronaut.
Paul stared impassively down at Mark. Glenn may have been devoted to his family and faith and country, and been an unimpeachable role model to many. But in Paul’s eyes he was a man of unforgivable flaws. Paul saw Glenn’s military credentials—the dozens of combat missions he flew over the South Pacific during World War II, the three MiGs he shot down over Korea—not as a testament to his heroism but rather as evidence of his crimes.
Paul had grown up a Mennonite, embracing radical pacifism. Congregants of his church had come to America in the late eighteenth century from central Europe, and still conducted services in German. When World War I broke out, they refused to serve and claimed that war was “a denial of the Christian faith,” for which they were ostracized and accused of sympathizing with the enemy; one Mennonite farmer was mobbed and doused in yellow paint while being led to a tree in the town center to be hanged. (He was rescued in time.)
Twenty years later, Paul was a graduate student when Hitler invaded France and Congress implemented another draft. Paul filled out his papers but scrawled “Conscientious Objector” across the form. He spent months in a “civilian public service” camp in Colorado, conducting soil studies and pulling night watchman duty. Later, after Pearl Harbor, he was sent to another camp, in the highlands of central Puerto Rico, where he was interned for more than two years and where he met Mark’s mother. “There was never any doubt as to my decision,” he said.
Nor had Paul wavered in his convictions since. In the fifties, he moved to Minnesota to work on xenon flashtubes at Honeywell, but left soon thereafter in protest of the company’s Pentagon work.
He was now looking down at Mark, as though his son had just proposed some experiment that defied the laws of physics. Paul was dismissive and defiant.
Impossible, he told Mark.
Astronauts came from the military, every one of them, and no son of his was going to serve.
* * *
MARK DIDN’T BRING up his astronaut dream again for years, though he privately went on obsessing about it. He perused back issues of National Geographic like other boys flipped through nudie mags.
One day, he found an article by an Air Force test pilot titled, “I Fly the X-15, Half Plane, Half Missile.” The X-15 was an experimental, air-launched single-seat rocket plane flown by the military and NASA. It was sleek and black, with wings and a tail, and looked like a normal airplane but had a liquid-fuel rocket engine in the back and could go more than six times the speed of sound. “Acceleration from that inferno in the tail pipe pinned me back in my seat,” the author wrote.
The X-15 wasn’t just fast; the ship summoned enough power to punch through the atmosphere, into space. The author went on, “I was weightless immediately, and it felt pleasant, a welcome relief. The ends of checklist pages on my clipboard rose eerily, and a little cloud of dirt particles drifted up from the floor.” Mark was enthralled.
Mark’s parents split up when he was eight. One morning, his mom was slicing fruit for his breakfast when she walked out and never came back. Paul remarried, but Mark and his three sisters did not get along with their new stepmother. One time she punished Mark by striking him in the head with a frozen chicken. She did not get along with Paul, either: she once punched him in the nose and broke his glasses; he simply turned and walked away.
Paul opposed the war in Vietnam and brought Mark and his sisters to peace marches. At age twelve, Mark went to see Abbie Hoffman when Hoffman came to Kansas, blowing his nose with an American flag and asking why the “West Point schmuck who plots the Song My massacre” wasn’t in jail. An outraged spectator sitting a few seats away from Mark threw eggs at the stage, narrowly missing Hoffman.
Two years later Mark picked up another issue of National Geographic; it featured a spread of stunning photographs shot by the Apollo 15 astronauts from the barren, boot-printed surface of the moon.
But Mark was captivated by another article, this one about hang gliding. The author described leaping from the cliffs over Newport Beach, California. “What can I tell you about this first step that encounters nothing solid?” he wrote. “There’s nothing to it. This upward stride causes the jaw to drop and the mind to cease its disciplined churning.”
Mark convinced Paul to help him buy his first glider. It didn’t weigh much but Mark was scrawny, barely a hundred pounds, stumbling around under that eighteen-foot Rogallo-wing kite.
Mark Stucky hang gliding, in 1974.
His stepmom thought he was going to break his neck, but Mark didn’t trust her or her risk calculations. He refused to live in fear of death. Life was random and full of accidents: the man who sold Mark his glider was killed on a motorcycle a week later by a drunk driver; two years after John Glenn’s big mission Glenn lost his footing in a hotel bathroom, conked his head on the side of the tub, was knocked out and hospitalized.
This was not to say that Mark promptly conquered the sport. He got blown backward and sent cartwheeling down hillsides. But he studied books about flight dynamics and kept marching up that hill overlooking the reservoir west of Salina to try again. Finally, around the time of his sixteenth birthday, he waited for a steady breeze and ran down the hill and felt the kite wanting to lift and took that first step that encounters nothing solid. He was airborne. “I was a pilot,” he said.
Mark finished high school and enrolled at Kansas State University, in Manhattan, sixty miles east. He majored in physical science but spent most of his time learning to fly. He often skipped lectures and went to the library to study topographical maps of the nearby flint hills. He got really good, constantly exploring ways to go higher and faster. He once mounted a two-stroke engine on his hang glider, buzzing the KSU stadium during halftime of a football game.
One day he convinced some friends to take him skydiving. Mark had recently persuaded Paul to buy him a parachute and, feeling suffused with that unique strain of stupidity that flows from camaraderie, he was eager to try it out.
It was a frigid winter morning when Mark and three friends piled into a single-engine Cessna and took off. Mark sat in the rear right seat and gazed out the window at endless fields of snow, the grain silos like candles on a sheet cake. He was wearing two pairs of long johns under his bell-bottom jeans with a puffy green parka and goggles he stole from the chemistry lab. His floppy brown hair curled around the edges of his helmet.
They flew west toward Salina.
Mark had made arrangements for Paul to pick up his friends and him at the airport and bring them all home for lunch.
As they reached the eastern edge of town, Mark inspected his parachute one last time. It was a backup chute, ill-designed for skydiving with its long suspension lines, small canopy, and no rip cord. But it would have to do.
The pilot, Ralph Fisch, pulled back on the stick and dropped the flaps to slow down.
Mark climbed over the front seat and shimmied out onto the wheel and wing struts. His jacket rippled into the wind. He lowered himself down so his legs dangled like squid tentacles.
Then he let go.
He was free-falling, listening to the whirring sound of the Cessna’s propeller fade to nothing and counting a few seconds to himself. He reached for the chute and threw it over his head. Poof. The orange-and-white canopy blossomed, easing him down in a snowbank.
Paul was waiting at the airport as planned. He looked confused when he saw the airplane but not Mark. He asked what happened.
“He jumped out,” said Fisch.
They piled into Paul’s Plymouth Valiant. Fisch led Paul to Mark’s prearranged landing spot. Mark was standing on the side of the road, Fisch recalled, “this massive billowing orange thing blowing in the wind and this big, shit-eating grin on his face. He looked like D. B. Cooper or something.”
Paul scolded Mark and said he bought him the parachute to be safe, not stupid. They never spoke of it again.
When Mark was about to graduate, the alumni magazine profiled him and put him on the cover. BORN TO FLY, read the headline. He was asked about his plans and admitted that he dreamed of becoming an astronaut but, “I hate to tell people that, because it seems like such a kiddie dream.”
Still, he took his first step by signing up to join the Marines—just like his hero, John Glenn.
Paul treated Mark’s decision as a startling act of defiance. It didn’t matter that Mark insisted he was joining just so he could learn to fly. Paul sniffed. He said recruiters made their living by making empty promises and lying to young men.
Mark my words, he added: “In two weeks, you’ll be peeling potatoes.”
2.
FORGER
STUCKY SURVIVED OFFICER candidate school in Quantico but not the medical exams that followed: his heartbeat was testing lower than the doctors liked. Stucky insisted that it was always slow, but the medics wanted to wait before clearing him for flight school.
Stucky took advantage of the downtime. He flew his hang glider and read a lot of books, including one by Michael Collins, the third and often forgotten member of the Apollo 11 crew. Stucky appreciated Collins’s sense of humor; when asked how he felt on the dark side of the moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were making cosmic history, Collins joked, “I just kept reminding myself that every single component in this spacecraft was provided by the guy who submitted the cheapest tender.” The book convinced Stucky that it was possible to be an astronaut without becoming insufferable.
Eventually the doctors agreed that Stucky’s heart just beat slow. He reported to Quantico for what the Marines called the Basic School in April 1980. He and some friends drove to DC one night to drink cheap booze at a notorious singles bar with “a meat-market reputation,” as a bartender said.
Stucky made eyes with an attractive woman across the room and asked her to dance. Her name was Joan. She was six years older than he was, with a car and a condo in the city. She didn’t normally go in for fresh-faced marines. Her father was a JAG officer in the Coast Guard; her mother was close with a rising Army officer, Colin Powell, and his family. She bragged about growing up in the seat of power.
Stucky told her there on the dance floor that he was going to become an astronaut, which she thought was cute. She gave him her phone number and they met for dinner the next weekend. They were married three months later. The wedding was a big deal because she was Black and interracial marriages were extremely rare among Marine aviators, the overwhelming majority of whom were white. Other pilots made comments behind his back. “There was some bigotry in our squadron,” said Mark Jean, one of Stucky’s squadron mates.
(Frank Petersen Jr., the first Black aviator in the Marines, had been falsely accused of cheating on his entrance exam, kicked off a public bus in training, and arrested for allegedly impersonating a marine officer [himself]; he would describe prevalent and pervasive racism in the Corps after he retired, in 1988, as a three-star general.)
The Marine Corps was a clubby organization, impatient with outliers. When Stucky told another officer about his astronaut dream, the officer advised him not to mention it again: marines were warriors, and the Corps hated yanking its best pilots from combat squadrons. If word got out that Stucky was eyeing the exits, it would harm his prospects for promotion, and he’d never go to test pilot school and he’d never stand a chance of becoming an astronaut.
After flight school he got orders to report to a training squadron in Yuma, Arizona, a hardscrabble town on the Mexican border. Tom Wolfe used to say that flying was “not a craft but a fraternity.” Yuma was a fighter pilot’s town. They flew and drank and fought together. At a bar one night Stucky was mud-wrestling with a woman in a bikini who cried foul about a frisky hand. The bouncer was threatening to punch Stucky in the nose when the bouncer suddenly found himself surrounded by marines, prepared to defend their own.
Some of the pilots wanted to assign Stucky the call sign “Sumo” after that, but there was a better one in contention. When Stucky got to the squadron he had volunteered to take the visitor badges home because the lamination was peeling and needed some attention. He returned with a stack of newly laminated badges, stiff as credit cards. He knew he didn’t strike others as the home ec type; he shared his secret, about how he and a college friend once ran a sophisticated forging operation out of his dorm room closet. “Fake IDs, parking passes, football tickets—you name it,” said Tom Berry, the friend.
Copyright © 2021 by Nicholas Schmidle