edgar-mitchell

Sea of Grass 35
were required to push the state-of-the art in surveillance. But a manned
orbiting laboratory was still just a wild idea in the public consciousness.
After a year and a half of hard work, I realized that mere management
skills would not take me any closer to that chalky white world in the heavens.
Astronaut candidates for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL)
had been picked mostly from the ranks of Air Force test pilots. The only
two Navy men selected were hot fighter pilots considerably younger than
myself. 1 I knew that if my training was lacking in any one element to a
degree that could keep me from going to the moon, it was the lack of time
I had spent in recent years flying operational jet aircraft. I prevailed upon
Jack Van Ness to help me get assigned to the Aerospace Research Pilots
School at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, which was then
headed up by none other than the legendary Chuck Yeager.
Here there was an endless list of exotic flight programs. This was the
place where the most audacious aircraft in the world were flown to their
very limits every day, and to be invited into the astronaut corps, it didn’t
hurt to be a part of this exclusive fraternity of pilots. Even better, my
family could remain in Los Angeles, while I commuted to and from the
base on weekends. My children could stay in the same schools for a change,
and Louise could make herself more of a home.
The test pilot school at Edwards had recently added a space training
curriculum. These were transitional days for those in the testing fraternity,
as there had been words between the older stick-and-rudder pilots and
those of the new technological hybrid that would be needed not only for
computer-aided flight in aircraft, but also for missions into deep space.
Old-school pilots, great as they were, clung to the integrity of aircraft with
mechanical aerodynamic controls that performed by reacting to the forces
of nature within the atmosphere. Now here came these new pilots who
aspired to one day “fly” beyond the atmosphere altogether. They would
one day command wingless machines with computerized controls designed
to move through regions where there was no air, no up or down, machines
that would fall like a manhole cover in the Earth’s atmosphere. Though
Yeager commanded and taught these aspiring astronauts the fundamentals
of experimental flight, he himself didn’t want anything to do with the
space program directly. The traditional culture at Edwards was a most
romantic and masculine one centered around flying faster and higher,
drinking more and longer, and carousing; being the best by getting the job
done right no matter what—and of course, surviving. The myth that astronauts
were little more than trained chimpanzees had swept through the
base a few years before, but by the time I arrived, all this was beginning to
change.