"Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today Read Online Free PDF

and took a new course toward coastal towns.
    Suddenly, a panicked voice began screaming over the Cape’s squawk box, “All personnel on the Cape take cover!”
    No member of the press moved. We stood staring into the sky. ThePolaris’s unlit second stage appeared like a huge white barrel tumbling over and over, heading directly toward us.
    The squawk box kept screaming for us to take cover, and our escort, Major Ken Grine, kept yelling, “Get the hell off this roof!”
    At that very moment, a naval commander was bringing a tray of sandwiches up the stairs, unaware of what was happening.
    “Come on, you guys,” Grine yelled again. “It’s my ass if you don’t get off this roof.”
    Again, no one moved, and the major stamped his foot and took off running down the stairs, sending tray and sandwiches and naval commander tumbling to the ground. I quickly refocused my attention skyward to see the Polaris’s second stage breaking apart. It was now in several pieces. A large chunk plunged into the roof of a car parked next to our building; it smashed the vehicle flat, including its tires. Other debris, most of it now burning, showered an area around us the size of a football field. One piece smacked into the roof in front of my feet.
    The instant smell of burning tar got our attention, but we still didn’t move. Associated Press photographer Jimmy Kerlin had his legs and arms wrapped around his tripod, shooting pictures of everything in sight.
    The Polaris’s first stage continued burning its way toward land. God, it could even hit Cocoa! Hundreds could soon be killed. Then, I moved. I ran down the stairs, demanding that Major Grine take us off the Cape so we could get to the impact site and report whatever happened.
    Grine agreed. We quickly got on the bus and as we moved through the guarded gate, I jumped off to the safety of civilian soil. I ran for the same public phone booth where I had covered the Vanguard blowup. I was on the air within a minute, telling NBC network listeners what I knew; and when I completed my report I ran onto the highway, waving down the first car coming my way. The driver gave me a ride to the Hitching Post Trailer Park, where the crowd was still growing. The steaming first stage of the Polaris was in the Banana River, only a couple of hundred feet behind rows of house trailers.
    “We get all the tornadoes, God,” someone yelled. “Why us? Why stray missiles too?”
    “Anyone hurt?” I yelled back, and voices from among the crowd reported, “No!”
    I stopped long enough to catch my breath before I started checking the place out, interviewing eyewitnesses.
    There were no apparent injuries or damages, but what had the crowd buzzing, of more interest even than the wayward missile, was the woman who had been taking a shower in her trailer. When the Polaris thundered into the river, she ran out to see what was going on. Yep, she had forgotten one important item—her clothes. The Lady Godiva of Cape Canaveral’s Hitching Post Trailer Park received as much print in the local paper the next day as did the runaway Polaris. Go figure.

THREE
The Astronauts
    N ASA could not have gone looking for astronauts in a more inhospitable place, a barren, snake-infested high desert where sand and sun had whitened the bones of the long-forgotten foolhardy, where winds sliced through the snarled Joshua trees which stood like sentries, and where a flat, dry lake bed offered America’s most skilled test pilots the longest runways in any direction: California’s Edwards Air Force Base.
    It was from this high-tech flight center, as well as from the homes of the country’s best naval and marine aviators, that NASA gathered its future astronauts. Each candidate had to have at least fifteen hundred hours’ flight time in America’s fastest, most unforgiving jets. Fifty-eight air force, forty-seven navy, and five from the marine corps applied.
    Early in 1959, these applicants were undergoing extreme