The Token Hippie

Since I marked Bill Anders' birthday last week, it seems only fitting to do so for one of his fellow astronauts from Group 3 (aka The Fourteen), the often-overlooked Rusty Schweickart:

Gradually Anders understood that he was different from the other pilots, and that it wasn’t helping him. The most obvious difference was on his résumé: He wasn’t a test pilot. 

There were five others like him among the Fourteen, including including a wiry marine named Walt Cunningham and a tall, red-headed air force pilot named Rusty Schweickart. Like Anders, they were highly educated, but they didn’t have diplomas from ARPS or Pax River. Now that they were here, the seven of them, the unspoken question in the minds of the Old Heads—Anders could sense it—was, What the hell are they doing here? 

The answer was that the astronaut corps was evolving. NASA no longer deemed test pilot experience essential to flying in space. Personally, Anders felt the test pilot distinction was overrated. Besides, he and Cunningham and Schweickart had been selected because they had scientific expertise that made them valuable players in their own right, or so Anders had thought. In reality, it was a liability. 

Most of the Old Heads seemed to regard the scientists who developed experiments for flights as nuisances who thought the program revolved around them and who simply didn’t understand the demands of flying in space. The fact that Cunningham had done doctorate-level research in upper atmospheric physics and Schweickart had studied astronomy at MIT didn’t boost their standing in the Astronaut Office. Schweickart’s assignment was to coordinate the scientific experiments, and Anders wondered if someone put him there to get him out of the way. 

It was easy to see why Schweickart irritated a few of the Old Heads. Some detected an air of intellectual superiority. Not all of them appreciated his barbed wit. Schweickart didn’t defer to them on technical matters; he didn’t hesitate to offer his opinions, even when the Old Heads weren’t interested. 

Rusty Schweickart was an unusual commodity in the Astronaut Office; he was a free spirit. He shared an office with Walt Cunningham, and despite some superficial similarities—Cunningham was also very bright, even more outspoken, and just as superior in his attitude—the two could not have been more different. While Cunningham was decidedly right of center, Schweickart had left-wing leanings on most of the day’s social issues. It would be years before Schweickart would let his hair grow and sport a beard, prompting Pete Conrad to label him the Astronaut Office’s “token hippie.” 

But even now, under that orange crew cut, there was enough about him to break the fighter pilot mold. A few years younger than most of his colleagues, Schweickart seemed curious about everything that was going on in the world. He and his wife, Claire, hosted a literary discussion group. He showed an openness to new things, and listened in fascination to the stories of a friend who had witnessed San Francisco’s drug culture. In short, there was much more to him than flying.

As LMP on Apollo 9, Rusty got to do an important EVA:

Apollo 9 was a test pilot’s feast. In truth it was far more difficult, more ambitious, and in some ways more dangerous than Apollo 8. For the engineers, the demands of getting two manned spacecraft ready for flight were headache enough. The simulators kept breaking down. There were days, during training, when McDivitt would go home and tell his wife it couldn’t be done, it would never all come together in time. Miraculously, it did, and McDivitt’s crew was launched on March 3. They figured that if they accomplished half of what was in the flight plan, they’d call the mission a success. 

By March 7, the mission’s fifth day, they’d already come close to doing it all. Besides a complete shakedown of their command module Gumdrop, they’d activated the docked lunar module Spider and test-fired its descent engine. Schweickart had suffered a debilitating bout with motion sickness that almost canceled his space walk, but he recovered in time to go outside, wearing the lunar space suit and backpack, for thirty-eight minutes. 

And today came the climax. While Scott remained in Gumdrop, McDivitt and Schweickart climbed into Spider and undocked. For six hours the two men flew a craft with no heat shield, venturing up to 111 miles from the safety of their command ship. Then they fired their engine and headed back to Scott, beginning the long and intricate dance called space rendezvous.

Now it's just Rusty, Dave Scott (Apollo 9 CMP), and cantankerous Buzz left from their astronaut class.  Anywayz, Happy 90th!