Q&A with John Norberg

October 16th, 2019

We talked with celebrated writer, author, and humorist John Norberg about the second edition of Wings of Their Dreams: Purdue in Flight, his second book with Purdue University Press this year.

The second edition of Wings of Their Dreams continues and updates the story of an aeronautic odyssey of imagination, science, engineering, technology, adventure, courage, danger, and promise. It is the ever-evolving story of the human spirit taking flight, expanding Purdue’s legacy in aviation’s history.

Q: What originally inspired you to write Wings of Their Dreams?

John Norberg: I started working on it in 1999 as the 2003 centennial of flight approached. Purdue has a great history in flight and space and I thought the centennial of flight would be the perfect time to highlight it. There was no book where the stories of all our historical figures in flight and our astronauts were brought together in one place. As with several of the books I’ve written I talked about the idea with Joe Bennett, then vice president for university relation. This was before I started at Purdue in October of 2000. Joe liked the idea and took it to President Steve Beering who authorized it with financial support from the Purdue Research Foundation.

Q: Purdue is often referred to as the “cradle of astronauts”, what do you think are some of the main reasons Purdue has been so successful in producing astronauts?

Norberg: I have researched this and talked with all our astronauts about it. I’ve concluded there are five specific reasons we have so many astronauts.

• Large and world class schools of engineering and science that attract people who want to become astronauts. NASA has a history of selecting people with engineering and science backgrounds as astronauts. In the early days being an engineer was required.
• A university airport on the campus. Going back to our earliest astronauts, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Neil Armstrong, Eugene Cernan and Roger Chaffee, they had no idea about the future that awaited them. But they knew they liked to fly and the airport was a plus in attracting people interested first in aviation and later space flight. Many of our shuttle astronauts have also been pilots and they were interested in the University airport.
• A large and outstanding ROTC program. Many astronauts used a military career path to be selected by NASA for space flight. A number of them become military test pilots. Some received ROTC scholarships or came to Purdue on Navy scholarships. The excellence of Purdue’s ROTC programs and the fact that the military was a good career track for become an astronaut attracted people to Purdue who were interested in flight and later space.
• A master’s degree program in association with the Air Force Academy. In the 1960s one of the most selective programs at the Air Force Academy was a master’s degree program with Purdue. Only the top students were selected. They took some advanced courses at the Academy and upon graduation they came immediately to Purdue and began taking course during summer terms, and there were three of them. With a heavy course load in the fall semester they were able to complete their master’s degree work in January. Seven men who went through this program became astronauts and credit Purdue with helping them succeed. One of the people who came to Purdue on the program became the Hero of the Hudson, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger.
• When Cernan and Chaffee became NASA astronauts in 1963, Purdue had four alumni selected for space missions and the total number of people in the space program was not large. Young people interested in space began to see Purdue as a great place to study to accomplish their goals. Purdue’s reputation as a school of astronauts became even stronger as more and more Boilermakers were selected for the program by NASA.

Q: What’s something you think that people may not know about Purdue’s history in flight?

Norberg: People are always interested in stories about Neil Armstrong and the first landing on the moon. It’s in the book. I also wanted to give readers surprises, stories they didn’t know about. Most people don’t know that a Purdue alumnus worked with the Wright Brothers in the earliest days of flight. They don’t know Purdue graduates taught flight to Billy Mitchell and Hap Arnold – icons in U.S. military. They don’t know one of the nation’s first test pilots was a Purdue graduate, that a Purdue graduate and Charles Lindbergh were involved in a mid-air crash, an incident that marked the first time two pilots parachuted to safety. They don’t know about a Purdue graduate who flew beneath a balloon to the stratosphere. The first pilot to be called “Mr. Space” when there were no astronauts was a Purdue alumnus. The second person to break the sound barrier studied at Purdue (and some say he was the first). There is much more. Wings tells the history of flight and space through the stories of Purdue graduates. I think people will also be surprised that some astronauts apply four or five times before being selected. It is very competitive. The man who assigned astronauts to flights says Grissom would probably have been the first person on the moon, had he survived.

Q: What was the thing that surprised you most when you did the research for this book?

Norberg: If I tell all the surprises they won’t be surprises. The most pleasant surprise was that Neil Armstrong agreed to let me interview him for the book, something he rarely did. It was before Jim Hansen released his excellent biography of Neil, First Man but they were working on it. When I finished Neil’s chapters I sent them to him for accuracy review. He responded that the chapters were good, but he thought they were “about one-third too much me.” I wasn’t sure what that meant. So, I took quotation marks off some of his statements and paraphrased them. I sent it back and he said it was perfect. Shortly after Wings was published, Purdue held an event at the Air and Space Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Neil was there and spoke. He started telling stories about pilots in Purdue’s history. The first one I recognized as someone in the book. Then there was a second and third. It finally dawned on me that he was repeating the stories from the book. I sent him a copy of the book and he had read it. That surprised me. At the end of his talk he said “All these stories are from John Norberg’s book Wings of Their Dreams that I heartily recommend.” I thanked Neil after he spoke. Someone came up to me and told me I needed to go to the table we were using to sell and sign books. There was a line of people waiting that stretched down the first floor of the museum. Neil wrote a statement for the cover of another book, Spacewalker, I wrote with Purdue astronaut Jerry Ross: “Spacewalker is the book for anyone who ever dreamed of flying in space.” There are many surprises in the stories about the people I wrote about in the book. I hope people enjoy them.

Q: What is new about the second edition of Wings of Their Dreams?

Norberg: Much has changed from 2003 to 2019. All the profiles and stories that were in the first book are in the second edition, but many of them have been updated. I interviewed all our living astronauts again (there are 24 associated with NASA and one commercial astronaut) and updated their information and thoughts. In addition to Grissom and Chaffee, who died in 1967, four other Purdue astronauts have died since 2003 – Janice Voss, Armstrong, Cernan, and Don Williams. I updated those stories. I added profiles on two additional astronauts since 2003. I also added a chapter on Sullenberger’s 2009 landing of a commercial airplane on the Hudson River, saving all the souls onboard.

You can get 30% off of Wings of Their Dreams by entering the discount code PURDUE30 when ordering from our website.

Q&A with Author George Leopold, Biographer of Gus Grissom

September 14th, 2018

A revised and expanded paperback edition of Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Time of Gus Grissom by George Leopold will be released on September 15th. In preparation for the release, the press interviewed Leopold to find out more behind his inspiration in writing the book, some thoughts on the book’s subject, and more.

Q: What inspired you to write a book? How did you come across Gus Grissom as a subject?

Leopold: The standard narrative of the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union is divided into two parts: before and after what came to be known simply as The Fire, the catastrophe that killed Gus Grissom and his Apollo 1 crew. After NASA recovered, the contributions of Gus Grissom were mostly forgotten—misremembered, really, when Tom Wolfe published The Right Stuff. Wolfe’s depiction of Grissom in his book and especially in the film version is a cartoon character. Wolfe got it wrong.

This struck me and many others as unjust. I determined to correct the record by writing a biography of Gus Grissom that places his life and career in the context of history of manned spaceflight.

I resolved to write his biography while standing before Gus Grissom’s grave in a lonely section of Arlington National Cemetery.

It only me took seven years.

Q: You have mentioned in previous interviews that you feel Grissom is underappreciated. Given his importance to early space exploration, how do you feel this happened?

Leopold: Part of its was Grissom’s unwillingness to toot his own horn. Gus always said the pre-flight press conferences were harder than the actual space missions. Another factor was the serendipitous nature of the early Project Mercury crew assignments. Most remember Alan Shepard’s first flight and John Glenn’s orbital flight. Grissom was remembered mostly for losing his first spacecraft.

And there was little reward or notoriety outside of his own peer group for the long hours at the factory doing the tedious testing required to get the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft into orbit. Grissom was engineering test pilot by training. All he really wanted to do was to go faster and higher—all the way to the moon and back. He cared not a whit about personal prestige, but he worked tirelessly to ensure the United States was first on the moon. Without Grissom’s contributions, I’m convinced we would not have made it by the end of the 1960s as we so declared.

Q: What do you imagine the space program would look like today if the Apollo 1 mission had been a success?

Leopold: It’s hard to say. Space exploration is a deadly business. If the Apollo 1 fire had not occurred on the launch pad, an accident in space would have been worse because investigators would know next to nothing about the precise cause(s). One of the cruel ironies, the central paradox of the Space Race, was that a launch pad fire actually saved the Apollo program. The reason was the evidence of what had been overlooked in Grissom’s ship—the faulty wiring, the leaking coolant, the lack of flame-retardant materials in the spacecraft, the clumsy inward opening hatch and, most important of all, NASA’s misguided engineering decision to use pure oxygen under pressure on the launch pad—all of it was there for the investigators to sift through.

To its credit, NASA rose from the ashes and built a great machine that took 24 humans to the moon.

Q: What are some things you believe the average person would be most surprised to know about the early age of space exploration?

Leopold: What a risky enterprise this was and the price the astronauts’ families paid. That, and the fact that Grissom and the early astronauts were test pilots who did not fly by the seat of their pants. They accepted risks, but they always sought to minimize them and come back alive. Gus Grissom is widely quoted as saying the rewards outweighed the risks (I never did track down the precise origin of Grissom’s iconic “worth the risk” quote, but he did say something close to this.) Hence, my thesis is that Grissom calculated those risks, dangers that every astronaut had to accept, and determined to proceed.

That decision cost him and his Apollo crew their lives, and shattered their families.

Q: What were some of the changes made for the new edition of the book? What makes it worthwhile for the person who has already read the original?

Leopold: For starters, the new Afterword describes how NASA finally provided a measure of closure for the Grissom, White, and Chaffee families. It’s an account of the 50^th anniversary observance of the Apollo 1 fire. Gus Grissom’s brother Lowell did me the honor of an invitation to attend the ceremonies at Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA at long last did right by the crew, mounting a permanent Apollo 1 exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center that includes the scorched hatches. The NASA exhibit also includes photos of Gus Grissom first published in Calculated Risk.

I and others have long argued that some part of the spacecraft should be displayed in a dignified way to remind future generations of the sacrifices of the early astronauts. NASA did just that. The exhibit was long overdue.

Further, we believe the updated version is more readable, and benefited from the kind of crowdsourcing that occurs when a book on an important subject is published. A scholarly peer review process, enabled by social media, identified a few areas for improvement. The result, we firmly believe, is the authoritative account of Gus Grissom’s life and career.

Q: You have spent countless hours researching and interviewing for this book. What is your favorite story that didn’t make it in?

Leopold: Not left out, merely overlooked until recently. When the Apollo 1 crew assignment was announced during a press conference in Houston in March 1966, a reporter asked about the protocol for deciding which two astronauts on each three-man crew would land and walk on the lunar surface during later Apollo missions. A NASA manager started in with a long technical answer.

Grissom listened for a moment, smiled and jumped in—getting right to the point: “If it was this crew, it would be me and somebody else!”

Q: Do you think that Grissom’s reputation has improved? Are there steps you would like to see taken to ensure his place in space history?

Leopold: I’d venture to say Gus Grissom is beloved, especially by those who knew him and understood his competence, dedication, and willingness to work and sacrifice. Those contributions to manned space exploration are certainly more appreciated now than, say, the late 1970s and early 1980s when The Right Stuff narrative held sway. The 50^th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire, for which the release of this biography was timed, also contributed to greater appreciation of Grissom’s central role.

My subject would undoubtedly be amused by all the fuss….

I am currently working with a group seeking to place a memorial at Arlington National Cemetery to honor the Apollo 1 crew. Gus Grissom and his crew mate and fellow Purdue alumnus Roger Chaffee are buried at Arlington. Surprisingly, there is no monument there commemorating the crew’s sacrifice—as there are for the astronauts lost in the two Space Shuttle accidents. The Apollo 1 memorial at Arlington National Cemetery was authorized by Congress, and we hope to have one in place during a future NASA Day of Remembrance for the Apollo 1 and shuttle crews.

Q: If you could ask Gus Grissom himself one question, what would it be?

Leopold: I would ask about his state of mind in the last weeks of his life, which must have been hell. He knew he had a faulty spacecraft on his hands, but he and the others figured they could fix it as they had done before. In that respect, Gus Grissom was a fatalist.

George Leopold is a veteran technology journalist and science writer who has covered the nexus between technology and policy for over thirty years. Leopold has written extensively about U.S. manned spaceflight, including the Apollo and space shuttle programs. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Scientist, and a variety of other science and technology publications. He resides in Reston, Virginia. Follow him on Twitter!

Get more from Purdue University Press by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and subscribing to our email newsletter! #ReadUP