The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Early in 1958 Glenn voluntered for part-time work on an experimental programme based at the NACA research centre at Langley. When NASA was formed from NACA, Glenn was well placed to learn that he fitted the profile for manned space flight. His age, weight, height, education and experience were suitable although he had to lose 30 lb. On 17 December 1958 NASA announced the name of the project: Mercury.

NASA was looking for test pilots on active duty, preferably with combat experience and clean records. Glenn reported for tests at the Lovelace Clinic, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Glenn:

Lovelace was a diagnostic hospital specializing in aerospace medicine. It had been founded by Dr W. Randolph Lovelace II, a prominent space scientist and chairman of the NASA life sciences committee, who had conducted high-altitude and pressure suit experimental work at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The clinic was private, but there was a strong military flavor to its administration, which was directed by Dr A.H. Schwichtenberg, a retired Air Force general. The doctors, led by Lovelace, were a hard-nosed group, or so it seemed to those of us they were poking, probing, and evaluating.

For over a week they made every kind of measurement and did every kind of test on the human body, inside and out, that medical science knew of or could imagine. Nobody really knew what that body would go through in space, so Lovelace and his team tried everything. They drew blood, took urine and stool samples, scraped our throats, measured the contents of our stomachs, gave us barium enemas, and submerged us in water tanks to record our total body volume. They shone lights into our eyes, ears, noses, and everywhere else. They measured our heart and pulse rates, blood pressure, brain waves, and muscular reactions to electric current. Their examination of the lower bowel was the most uncomfortable procedure I had ever experienced, a sigmoidal probe with a device those of us who were tested nicknamed the “Steel Eel.” Wires and tubes dangled from us like tentacles from jellyfish. Nobody wanted to tell us what some of the stranger tests were for.

Doctors are the natural enemies of pilots. Pilots like to fly; and doctors frequently turn up reasons why they can’t. I didn’t find the tests as humiliating or infuriating as some of the other candidates did. Pete Conrad was so incensed by having to rush through the hospital’s public hallways “in distress” that he told General Schwichtenberg he wasn’t giving himself any more enemas – and deposited his enema bag on the general’s desk for emphasis. He didn’t get chosen for the space program until later. But I thought the tests, obnoxious as they were, were fascinating for the most part. It was all in the interests of science, and going into space was going to be one of the greatest scientific adventures of all time.

After eight days at Lovelace, one candidate washed out for medical reasons and the rest of us, again in small groups, received orders sending us to Wright-Patterson and the Wright Air Development Center’s Aeromedical Laboratories. We traveled separately, as we had to Lovelace, to preserve secrecy.