WISEGUY

“That’s a vagina,’’ quipped Charles ‘Pete’ Conrad Jr. “Definitely a vagina.’’ The psychiatrist noted his response without a word, perhaps realising, perhaps not, that he was the victim of yet another wisecrack from the gap-toothed, balding Navy lieutenant. Yet, despite his comments about each of the Rorschach cards shown to him, Conrad was not entirely obsessive about the female genitalia. He had actually been tipped-off the night before by another astronaut candidate, Al Shepard: what the NASA psychiatrists were really looking for was male virility. ‘‘I got the dope on the psych test,’’ Shepard had assured him. ‘‘No matter what it looks like, make sure you see something sexual.’’ So Conrad did.

His key concern, though, that spring in 1959, had been the impact that this crazy ‘Project Mercury’ idea might have on his career. Instead of logging hours in the Navy’s new F-4 Phantom fighter, he spent a week at the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, much of his time focused on the provision of stool,

semen and blood samples and the collection of 24-hour bagfuls of urine. On the evening before a major stomach X-ray, told not to drink alcohol after midnight, Conrad had sat up until 11:57 pm draining a bottle with Shepard and another naval aviator called Wally Schirra to loosen themselves up for the next day. Conrad doubted that Lovelace’s invasive tests had anything remotely to do with spaceflight: the physicians, he told Shepard, seemed far more interested in “what’s up our ass’’ than in their flying abilities. Shepard had warned him to be careful – to give the right answers to questions and to remember that Lovelace’s staff were watching their every move.

In spite of his frustration, Conrad persevered. He followed Shepard’s advice, saw the female anatomy in every Rorschach card, deadpanned to a psychologist that one blank card was upside down, pedalled a stationary bicycle for hours, sat in a hot room for an age, then dunked his feet into ice-cold water and argued with one of the physicians that he considered it pointless to have electricity zapped into his hand through a needle. However, all this torture, Conrad felt, would at least give him the opportunity to lay his entire naval career on the line for just one chance to fly something even faster: to ride a rocket, outside Earth’s atmosphere, “at a hell of a lot more Machs than anything he was flying right now’’. Flying higher and faster, and pushing his own boundaries, had been the story of Conrad’s life.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 2 June 1930, the offspring of a wealthy family which made its fortune in real estate and investment banking, Conrad’s father insisted that he be named ‘Charles Jr’ – “no middle name’’ – although his strong – willed mother, Frances, felt that this tradition of Charleses should be broken. Frances liked the name ‘Peter’, wrote Nancy Conrad in her 2005 biography of her late husband, and although it never became his official middle name, Charles Conrad Jr would become known as ‘Peter’ or ‘Pete’ for the rest of his life. His fascination with anything mechanical reared its head at the age of four, when he found the ignition key to his father’s Chrysler and reversed it off the drive. Later, in his teens, he worked summers at Paoli Airfield, mowing lawns, sweeping and doing odd jobs for free flights. Aged 16, he even repaired a small aircraft single-handedly. Conrad was an engineer and tinkerer at heart.

Education-wise, he would partly follow in his father’s footsteps: the private Haverford School, from which he was expelled, then the Darrow School in New York, where Conrad’s dyslexia was identified and where he shone. Although his father intended him to attend Yale University, he actually enrolled in 1949 at Princeton, with a Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship from the Navy to pay for his studies in aeronautical engineering. Graduation in 1953 brought him not only his bachelor’s degree, but also a pilot’s licence with an instrument rating, marriage (to Jane DuBose) and entrance into naval service.

He breezed through flight training, earning the callsign ‘Squarewave’ as a carrier pilot. In ‘Rocketman’, his widow wrote that Al Teddeo, executive officer of Fighter Squadron VF-43 at Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Florida, had his doubts when he first met the young, seemingly-wet-behind-the-ears ensign one day in 1955. Those doubts were soon laid to rest when Teddeo discovered that Conrad could handle with ease any manoeuvre asked of him. Tactical runs, strafing runs, spin-recovery tests; Ensign Conrad did it all. “Hell, we refuelled three times till I just had to get back to my desk,” Teddeo recalled years later. “It was like telling a kid at the fair that it was time to go home.”

Next came gunnery training at El Centro, California, and transition from jet trainers to the F-9 Cougar fighter, before reporting to Pax River in 1958 to qualify as a test pilot. Later that same year, he received, along with over a hundred others, classified instructions to attend a briefing in Washington, DC. Conrad was told to check into the Rice Hotel under the cover name of ‘Max Peck’. Only when he got there did he find that another 35 ‘Max Pecks’ were also there – including an old naval buddy, Jim Lovell. Neither Conrad nor Lovell would make the final cut for the Mercury selection, but their day would come three years later.

Whereas Lovell was cast aside for a minor liver ailment, however, Conrad’s cause for failure proved a little ironic. “Unsuitable for long-duration flight,’’ read the explanatory note. He had, it seemed, shown a little too much cockiness and independence during testing; characteristics which were at loggerheads with the panel’s notion of a good, all-rounded, level-headed astronaut. Six years after reading those words, Conrad and his Gemini V command pilot, Gordo Cooper, would rocket into space and set a new record… for long-duration spaceflight!