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Rene was determined to write her own Life cover profile about the tense hours she spent during Scott’s launch and flight. It had become the tradition that each wife got a cover profile to coincide with her man going into space, and Rene could better describe what was going through her mind during Scott’s flight than any ghostwriter.
She had been displeased with the prelaunch cover profile on Scott. Loudon Wainwright had written a more “authentic” take on an astronaut than he ever had previously.
Painting a portrait of Scott’s young years in Colorado, Loudon had written how Scott had “filched a pair of tiger-eye taillights” as a kid when growing up in Boulder. Scott was known among the astronauts to go out on the beach alone and strum his guitar under the Moon, and it was this sensitive nature that Loudon touched upon in his article. Loudon wrote, “He is also concerned, in the words of Robert Frost, with his own ‘inner weather.’” Inner weather? “I think I’d like to go to a beautiful unspoiled island and get back to basics,” Scott said in Life . “There I’d just take root and grow like another tree.” A tree ? To readers of the time, this sort of earthy navel-gazing was dangerously close to the terrain of the dreaded beatnik, the current scourge of upstanding America. Life had recently done a glossy portrait of what they deemed the classic beatnik lifestyle, the stereotypical cool cat and his chick decked out in black turtlenecks, lounging around in Life ’s mock-up set of “The Well-Equipped Pad,” a cold-water flat complete with a single bare bulb and a set of bongo drums. In the pages of the wives’ first Life cover three years earlier, the magazine had pitted Squaresville against Beatsville, and there was no question which side NASA wanted their astronauts on.
Rene had her own flight plan for the day. Up early, she and the kids all talked to Scott one last time on the phone as Ralph Morse from Life snapped away. Then they got dressed and went out to the beach to watch the launch.
Scott’s Aurora 7 capsule careened into the sky. Scott had named the capsule himself. Aurora happened to be the goddess of the dawn, but the real reason he picked the name was because he’d grown up on Aurora Street in Boulder.
Ralph shot Rene on the beach, against the morning sun. Was that sunburst he captured in the twin mirrors of Rene’s wraparound aviator sunglasses the reflection of Scott’s rocket riding a tail of fire? What a shot!
Inside, the live television updates used a cartoon drawing of a man in a space helmet to represent Scott as if he were a comic book hero. As ground control saw it, Scott seemed to be having the time of his life up there, snapping photos with his Hasselblad camera and performing the experiments the scientists had set up for him. He was the first astronaut after John to sample space food. He squeezed some radioactive food into his mouth from a toothpaste-like tube. The NASA doctors would later track this Spam glowworm as it snaked its way through his system. Scott made the fascinating discovery that his friend John’s glimmering “fireflies” weren’t forms of extraterrestrial life at all, but in fact were urine particles, frozen after being ejected from the spacecraft via a condom-like device attached to a tube. Fascinating!
While Scott appeared to be playing tourist up there with his Hasselblad, using his rocket boosters to position his spacecraft just so, he didn’t seem overly concerned with the repeated warnings from the ground that he was using up a dangerous amount of fuel. When it was time for him to realign and burn back into Earth’s atmosphere, he barely had enough fuel left to hit the proper trajectory to come home. There was silence for what seemed an eternity. “I’m afraid…we may have…lost an astronaut,” reported CBS’s Walter Cronkite. After a nail-biting hour, Cronkite,
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