us clicked with each other better than others. One of the guys that I became closest to was Ed White.
Ed was a year behind me at West Point, and he and I were on the track team together and became best friends during our time at the academy. Ed enlisted in the Air Force upon his graduation in 1952. He spent three years in Germany, and he was stationed there when I arrived at Bitburg following my stint in Korea. I was stationed in Germany from 1956 to 1959, and during that time, our friendship grew even stronger.
Like me, Ed loved flying the F-86 Sabre jets as well as the incredible F-100 fighter jets in the “Big 22 Squadron” that made regular runs close to the “Iron Curtain” nations, the countries under Soviet control. We were carrying a nuclear payload, and we were ready to attack the Russians at the first sign of a nuclear threat. The Russians had already steamrolled into Budapest, crushing any opposition, so we were constantly on alert to halt any further advances by the Soviet forces in Europe. Ed and I regularly flew practice missions, loaded with bombs we were ready to deliver.
Near the end of the decade, Ed became fascinated with space. Leaving Germany, he attended the University of Michigan and earned his master’s degree in aeronautical engineering the same year that NASA selected seven men as the original astronauts for Project Mercury, the first U.S.-manned space program. All seven of the initial astronauts were test pilots, so Ed enrolled in the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He was one of the pilots to fly the planes used for astronauts Deke Slayton’s and John Glenn’s weightless maneuvers, some of the first test flights to see how zero gravity affected humans.
As the Mercury flights concluded, NASA began recruiting a new crop of astronauts for Project Gemini. Drawing from more than 200 applicants, NASA selected Ed White and eight more test pilots: Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Charles Conrad, Jim Lovell, Jim McDivitt, Elliot See, Tom Stafford, and John Young. Even among this group of superachievers, Ed stood out from the crowd. Moving to Houston, like several other astronauts including me eventually, Ed and his wife, Pat, bought a home in El Lago, to be close to the Manned Space Center. More than any other person, Ed White was the friend who encouraged me to apply to NASA to become an astronaut.
He first went into space on the Gemini 4 mission, and on June 3, 1965, Ed was the first American astronaut to perform a successful extravehicular activity (EVA), a space walk outside the capsule for 21 minutes. A devout Methodist, Ed carried three religious reminders with him when he stepped out of the hatch—a gold cross, a Star of David, and a St. Christopher’s medal. He later quipped, “I had great faith in myself, and especially in Jim [McDivitt, the mission’s commander], and I think I had great faith in my God … The reason I took these symbols was that this was the most important thing I had going for me, and I felt that while I couldn’t take one for every religion in the country, I could take the three I was most familiar with.”
Besides his incredible courage, Ed had a great sense of humor. Before stepping out in space, using a handheld maneuvering gun and attached to the spacecraft by a tether, Ed checked his 35mm camera equipment three times. He said, “I wanted to make sure I didn’t leave the lens cap on!”
Far too quickly, in Ed’s estimation, his space walk came to an end. “I enjoyed the EVA very much, and I was sorry to see it draw to a close,” he said.
Following his outstanding Gemini EVA, Ed was selected as senior pilot for Apollo 1, scheduled for launch on February 21, 1967, as America’s first mission in the program that would eventually take us to the Moon. Unfortunately, as Ed, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee trained and prepared, it seemed they encountered one setback after another. Finally, everything started to come together, each problem solved, so on January 27, 1967, NASA planned a “plugs out” test, a full dress rehearsal for launch, in which the Apollo 1 capsule would be unplugged from external power while the astronauts practiced emergency escape procedures.
Ed sat in the middle seat, and it was his responsibility to reach above his head with a ratchet to loosen the bolts