End of the beginning

Abstract

Alan Bartlett Shepard Ir was not a man to mince words. As America’s first man in space and head of its astronaut team, he rarely had to. Yet even his old friend Deke Slayton was shocked one morning in the spring of 1969, when Shepard strode into his Houston office and told him that he wanted a flight to the Moon. It wasn’t a request; it was an announcement. For any other astronaut, such an outburst would have been utterly objectionable and Slayton - the man in charge of picking crews for space missions - would ordinarily have delivered a severe verbal roasting and most likely ensured that no flight assignment came his way for some considerable time. Shepard, though, was different. It wasn’t just that they were old friends or that they had both been chosen as members of the very first group of American astronauts. It was because they shared a bond which few others would have wanted: Shepard and Slayton had been astronauts for longer than almost anyone else at NASA and yet both had been barred from flying into space. In fact, for the last five years, neither of them could even fly a jet aircraft on their own.