_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [0]
(Jo Barbree)
“Live from CAPE CANAVERAL”
Jay Barbree
This book is for…
The damnedest aviation and space writer I’ve ever seen…
MARTIN CAIDIN
SEPTEMBER 14, 1927—MARCH 24, 1997
(Caidin Collection)
Contents
PREFACE BY TOM BROKAW
ONE Sputnik
TWO The Early Days
THREE The Astronauts
FOUR First in Space
FIVE John Glenn
SIX On Orbit
PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT
SEVEN The Worst of Times
EIGHT Gemini
NINE “I’ve got a fire in the cockpit!”
TEN A Christmas Moon
ELEVEN The Secret Side of Space
TWELVE Highway to the Moon
THIRTEEN The Landing
FOURTEEN Moon Walk
FIFTEEN The Successful Failure
SIXTEEN On the Moon
SEVENTEEN After the Moon
EIGHTEEN A Handshake in Space
NINETEEN Down Home with Jimmy Carter
TWENTY The Space Shuttle Era
TWENTY-ONE Challenger: A Disaster
TWENTY-TWO What Happened?
TWENTY-THREE An Eternity of Descent
TWENTY-FOUR Sudden Death
TWENTY-FIVE How High Is Up?
TWENTY-SIX As the Century Turned
TWENTY-SEVEN Columbia: Had They Only Looked
TWENTY-EIGHT That’s a Wrap!
SEARCHABLE TERMS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Preface
Jay Barbree was present at the creation of the space age. As he likes to tell it, he was on a date in his home state of Georgia the night the Russian satellite Sputnik 1 passed over the United States.
I don’t know what happened to his date, but I do know Jay decided at that moment to make the space age his life’s work. He moved to Cape Canaveral, Florida, and began a lifelong love affair with the space program, quickly developing a reputation as the reporter who knew the personalities, the technology, the politics, the triumphs, and the tragedies of this daring enterprise better than any other.
Now, fifty years after Sputnik 1, Barbree gives us a vivid, first-hand account of how the race into space changed the world. It is a monumentally important story, and no one is better equipped to tell it from the ground up.
Barbree is the only reporter to have covered every mission flown by astronauts. He was there the day Apollo 1 burned, the day Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff, the day Columbia broke up in the skies over Texas.
In his own way, Jay Barbree has been to the moon and back, the space station and back. He’s also been on the verge of death and brought back to life. Training for the Journalist in Space Project, Jay suffered “sudden death” while jogging on the sands of Cocoa Beach. He made a heroic recovery and returned to what he loved best: reporting on the space program.
Live from Cape Canaveral is his up-close and personal account of a half-century of space exploration. It tells the stories of the courage and genius of the pioneers. But it also describes the mistakes, the feuds, the wild times, and the indelible impression left by these men and women who allowed us to escape the bonds of Earth and fly into the unknown.
A thousand years from now, historians will mark this time as the beginning of the greatest age of exploration ever. Jay Barbree takes you on that first giant step for mankind.
TOM BROKAW
August 24, 2006
ONE
Sputnik
In 1957, Cape Canaveral was the most vital and most intensely exciting place in the country. It offered cutting-edge technology in a time of nineteen-cent-a-gallon gasoline, nickel Cokes, two-bit drive-in movies, and the hit of the television season Leave It To Beaver. It was a time when doors went unlocked, when virgins married, when divorce ruined your social standing, and when folks spent their lives working for the same company with the promise of lifelong retirement checks.
In 1957 few that walked this planet reflected on the fact they were actually inhabitants of a mortal spaceship eight thousand miles in diameter, circling one of the universe’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (ten to the twenty-fourth) stars at 67,062 miles per hour.
However, two groups of men and women—given the era, it was mostly men—were actually consumed, day and night, by the realities that we were all astronauts living