Spacecraft Anonymous

On to the moon — but no more names,
no more fun and games.
by Dora Jane Hamblin

About a year ago Major Donn F. Eisele, one of three astronauts who will orbit the earth in the Apollo spacecraft scheduled to be launched this week, suggested with cheerful irreverence that Rub a Dub Dub might be a nice name for the ship. Then 10-year-old Karin Stafford, the daughter of the flight’s backup commander, immediately sat down with a pencil and drew the fanciful suit patch design shown above: an old-fashioned bathtub with human feet, a rickety shower pipe and three heads peering over the tub top.

Eisele loved it. He brandished the drawing in one hand, banged himself on the knee with the other hand, and between fits of laughter assured the child that “It might do, it might do.” No doubt the public would have loved it; probably Eisele’s flight commander, Captain Walter M. Schirra Jr., would have loved it too, since Schirra has expressed the opinion that “a little levity is appropriate in a dangerous trade.” But Eisele knew that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) would not love it and he let the idea drop. The tub thus became one more casualty in a running battle between NASA, whose rulings tend to depersonalize both men and machines by labeling them with numbers, and the astronauts, who would like to retain some individuality.

The quarrel is about four years old, dating back to a NASA decision — surely one of the stuffiest orders ever to inhibit the spirit of adventure — which forbade levity in the design of suit patches and also decreed that there should be no more names for spacecraft. Therefore the ship flown by Schirra, Eisele and civilian astronaut R. Walter Cunningham will go into orbit — the next step in the U.S. program aimed at putting men on the moon — with an unhappy degree of anonymity. The astronauts will wear chaste, rather dull patches (right) showing an Apollo craft blazing around a conventional globe with conventionally blue oceans and green land.

This is all too bad, because things did not start out this way. Everybody remembers Freedom 7 and Friendship 7 and the stirring names of the early Mercury flights. But then, abruptly, the flights turned into Gemini III and Gemini IX and all of a sudden space-watchers had a hard time remembering just who or what was up there. No wonder. Could anyone remember the name of Lindbergh’s airplane if it had been Atlantic Mission 021 instead of Spirit of St. Louis? How many people ever asked for a ticket on Train No. 25 or 26 when they wanted to ride the plush 20th Century Limited? And who would sail on any Good Ship 543 if the Queen Elizabeth were in port?

Navy Captain Alan B. Shepard Jr., the first American into space, didn’t bother to ask anybody if he could name his Mercury capsule. He just named it — Freedom 7. “Pilots have always named their planes,” Shepard says. “It’s a tradition. It never occurred to me not to name the capsule. I checked with Dr. Gilruth [Robert Gilruth, now director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston], and I talked it over with my wife and with John Glenn, who was my backup pilot. We all liked it.”

In a gesture which was completely misunderstood at the time by both the press and the public, Shepard added the “7” because the capsule he flew was factory model No. 7. Everybody thought it represented the original seven astronauts, and that seemed such a good idea at the time that all the rest of the Mercury series names also carried the seven.

Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, who made the second suborbital flight, chose the name Liberty Bell because the capsule was shaped like a bell and because the name has stirring American connotations. He had the Liberty Bell painted on the side of his capsule and puckishly insisted that the illustration show the crack in the side which the real Liberty Bell acquired as a result of overzealous ringing in 1835. That was the capsule which sank when it splashed down in the Atlantic, and Gus took some ribbing about the crack in the bell. Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee were originally scheduled for the three-man ride now coming up, but they died in a fire on the Cape Kennedy pad Jan. 27, 1967.

Earnest John Glenn put “my wife Annie and the kids” to work studying dictionaries and a thesaurus to come up with a list of suitable names on which the family could vote. “We played around with Liberty, Independence, a lot of them. The more I thought about it, the more I leaned toward the name Friendship. Flying around the world, over all those countries, that was the message I wanted to convey. In the end that was the name the kids liked best, too. I was real proud of them.”

Rene Carpenter wanted her husband Scott to call his capsule Rampart, after the Rampart Range of mountains in his native Colorado. He now thinks she was right. “That probably would have been a better name than Aurora, the one I chose. It’s shorter and more positive, it would have come through the static better. But I liked Aurora 7. It has a celestial significance and it had a sentimental meaning to me because my address as a child back in Colorado was Aurora and Seventh.” Carpenter didn’t know it at the time, but his choice must have meant something to the Soviet Union’s cosmonauts. Aurora was the name of the cruiser which supposedly fired the first shot of the 1917 Revolution in Leningrad. When Carpenter discovered this while watching a TV documentary on Leningrad last year, he was so amazed that his feet slid off the table.

The next astronaut up after Carpenter was Wally Schirra. He toyed for a while with the name Phoenix, and listened to his wife Jo push for Pioneer. In the end he rejected Phoenix “because Arizona might claim it, or something,” and selected Sigma 7 because it is the mathematical symbol for “the sum of things.” Schirra felt “The flight was the sum of the efforts and energies of a lot of people.”

By the time Gordon Cooper got set for the final Mercury flight, he was very name-conscious: “An awful lot of thought and symbolism had gone into all those earlier names. I felt a certain responsibility.” After long cogitation, he chose Faith. A churchgoing man who occasionally writes articles for Billy Graham’s magazine, Cooper wanted to affirm with his name his personal conviction that science and religion coexist: “The more you study, the more you know all the scientific stuff, it correlates. It confirms religious faith.”

Faith, it turned out, was the last name to be painted on a U.S. spacecraft. Then the hassle began. Gus Grissom, command pilot of the first manned Gemini flight, Gemini III, wanted to call his capsule the Molly Brown in wry reference to the very sinkable craft he had flown earlier. NASA was not amused. The order came down from NASA in Washington: “No more names.”

The astronauts chose up sides. No one look a poll, but nowadays the men think there were more on Gus’s side of the argument than on NASA’s. “Most of the guys wouldn’t have cared if Gus wanted to call the thing Grissom’s Outhouse,” says one astronaut. “He was going to fly it.”

John Glenn sides with NASA. “Maybe Molly Brown would have given a chuckle to Americans, but how could you explain the joke in, say, Thailand?” he asked. Gordon Cooper most emphatically sided with Gus Grissom. He served as Cap Com [capsule communicator at Cape Kennedy], and when Gemini III lifted off with Grissom and John Young aboard, Cooper sent it off with a whoop: “Molly Brown, you’re on your way!” From tracking stations all around the world other astronauts defiantly used the name Molly Brown. So did the newspapers.

Molly Brown thus took a proud place in public affection, along with Friendship and Freedom and even the magic name of Mercury itself, the project identification under which those first heart-stopping flights were made. Project names are customarily given purely as a tag to be used for handy reference by anyone who works on the project. One of the first names suggested for the U.S. manned satellite project, launched officially in 1958, was “Project Astronaut.” This was overruled, perhaps in a foretaste of what was to come, because it put too much emphasis upon the pilots.

Once that suggestion was disposed of, NASA decided the project needed an evocative name, something allegorical. “Mars” was rejected as being too warlike, and “Icarus” wouldn’t do because the fellow had come to a bad end. “Mercury” popped first into the mind of Dr. Abe Silverstein, a veteran of space work who had been appointed director of space flight development. Mercury had a lot of appeal: he was one of the familiar pagan gods, and one of the most colorful, with his helmet and his winged feet. He was also associated, in the minds of scholars, with unpleasant things like thievery and being usher to the dead, but most Americans don’t know the pantheon that intimately. Anyway, as project historians have pointed out, the pagan Mercury had been “denatured by chemistry, advertising and an automobile.” Mercury the project became. In one final burst of uncharacteristic symbolism, NASA announced the name on Wright Brothers Day, Dec. 17, 1958, 55 years after the famous flights at Kitty Hawk. (The Russians were even less emotional. “Sputnik,” though it has an exotic ring to Western ears, means “satellite.”)

Once Mercury had been chosen, NASA had to name the man-to-the-moon project designed to follow it. Apollo, Mercury’s colleague and god of sunlight and prophecy, was an almost instant choice. But before long it was clear there would have to be a middle testing and development stage with two-man spacecraft. The name came almost unbidden — Gemini, the twins of the Zodiac.

There ended NASA’s tolerance of allegory and whimsy. “Molly Brown,” says Gordon Cooper, “was what tore it.” The boom came down when the crew of Gemini IV, James McDivitt and Edward White, chose American Eagle for their spacecraft and even designed a medallion to carry as a souvenir. Some people thought American Eagle too nationalistic, but there was no debate: NASA simply issued the order: “No names.” McDivitt and White then asked permission to wear the American flag as a shoulder patch. This was, surprisingly, the first time an emblem of the flag had been worn. It looked so great in the photographs that all later Gemini astronauts wore it. No one dared call Gemini IV “Eagle” on the air, but she had a nickname anyway— “Little Eva.” That was the flight during which Ed White took the first American walk in space, a maneuver known technically as EVA, for extra-vehicular activity.

Confirmed name-man Gordon Cooper was to command the next flight, Gemini V, with Pete Conrad as his partner. Pete was as adamant as Gordon: “We were determined to have a name,” he recalls, “I wanted Lady Bird. I didn’t see how that could offend anyone.” But the old directive came back — negative.

Cooper and Conrad then fell back to a prepared position: they would design a personalized suit patch just for Gemini V, which they would wear on the flight and save as a souvenir. Because their seven-day mission was the longest up to that time in the U.S. (it later became eight days), they came up with a design for a white covered wagon and the slogan “Eight days or bust.” But, Cooper says, “Even then we had a knock-down dragout. Pete and I flew up from the Cape to have dinner with James Webb, head of NASA. We told him about our patch. We told him they’d taken our names away and we didn’t like it. And every flying outfit in the world has a patch.

“You know what happened? We won. We had to write a memo to Washington and submit our design, all that stuff. But we won.”

NASA approved the covered wagon but objected to the slogan: it would be embarrassing if the flight didn’t last the full eight days. Cooper and Conrad muttered bitterly that “some of the covered wagons didn’t make it, either, but California is there.” They persuaded a parachute rigger to sew a little piece of silk over the words on their patches during the flight. Once back on the ground, they simply removed the camouflage to expose the slogan.

The wedge they drove into NASA’s resistance has stuck ever since, but nobody has dared to be really daring. James Lovell and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, whose Gemini XII was originally scheduled for around Halloween in 1966, toyed with the idea of a patch showing two astronauts on a broomstick. In the end they settled for orange and black as their major patch colors.

One patch, designed by Wally Schirra for Gemini VI, turned out to be eerily prophetic. Gemini VI was assigned to make the first rendezvous with another spacecraft out among the stars, and Schirra and his crew partner Thomas Stafford designed a patch showing their own capsule and the rendezvous vehicle itself up in the sky. They wanted to incorporate in the design the figure six, for their Gemini flight number, so they chose what he calls the “northern six” stars, a location aid navigators have used for centuries. Capella is at the top, above the twins Castor and Pollux, Procyon, Sirius and the constellation Orion. It was a handsome patch, but it was more than that. Stafford’s voice still sounds awed when he tells the story: “We were up there, aiming for the rendezvous, and when we first saw our rendezvous vehicle, Gemini VII, glittering in the reflected light of the sunset, it was right between Sirius and the twins, just exactly where we had placed it on the patch.”

Riding in the rendezvous vehicle, Gemini VII, were Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, wearing a patch built around the flaming torch of the Olympic Games. They chose the torch because to them it symbolized the marathon, and it was their task to stay in orbit for nearly two weeks. Lovell has since remarked that a more appropriate symbol for that particular flight might have been the growth of a week-old beard.

All the rest of the Gemini patches were designed, with varying success, to indicate just which particular tasks the flight was designed to perform. Neil Armstrong and David Scott, assigned on Gemini VIII to accomplish virtually every objective of the entire program, designed a patch in which the light of a twin-starred Gemini symbol entered a prism and emerged as seven bands of color, to symbolize the spectrum of tasks they were supposed to perform. They were chagrined when TV’s David Brinkley, filling in an awkward air-time gap, described the spectrum as “a piece of cake, perhaps to indicate how easy docking is in space.”

Tom Stafford and Eugene Cernan on Gemini IX designed the first oblong patch, showing a spacecraft and a docking vehicle with an astronaut floating free on a tether — for Cernan’s walk in space. John Young got his wife, a former commercial artist, to design the handsome red X which dominates the patch he and Michael Collins wore on Gemini X, and Pete Conrad and Richard Gordon underlined the fact that Gemini XI was an all-Navy crew by making their colors Navy blue and gold. They put them into a tall triangle, to indicate the fact that they were to achieve a particularly high apogee in this particular orbit.

One patch never flew. It was the symbol for the first manned Apollo flight — by the craft in which Grissom, White and Chaffee lost their lives. The patch had an outer rim of stars and stripes. Inside the rim were the names of the pilots, along with the profile of a light-blue globe, a white Apollo spacecraft and a silver moon.

Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham, stepping forward to take the places of Grissom, White and Chaffee on that first manned flight, toyed for a while with the idea of a phoenix for their patch. In the end they abandoned the idea, partly because its symbolism seemed almost cruelly evocative and partly because nobody knew for sure what a phoenix bird was supposed to look like.

To dedicated space-watchers, amateur or professional, the languages of the patches can be as eloquent as the names they have come to replace. Each patch in the program is a step forward, one reach beyond what has been done before and what man has known up to now. And each reflects the perfectionist instincts of its crew. Apollo VII, for example, omits the moon from its flight patch even though it is the first in the moon series. “Our mission is not to the moon, but around the earth,” its crewmen say. “Leave the moon for the guys who are going there.”

This article was originally published in the October 8, 1968 issue of Life magazine. It appeared on pages 109-119, and is reproduced here by permission of the University of Iowa, to which Ms Hamblin’s sister and executor, Mary H. Ovrom, has donated Ms Hamblin’s papers. It is Copyright © 1968 University of Iowa.