Deke Slayton

• 1. Introduction

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  Deke Slayton was born on the 1st of March 1924, on a farm near Leon, Wisconsin, and by 1959 he was one of the seven most famous test pilots in America. He had flown combat missions over Nazi-occupied Europe and Imperial Japan. He had tested Britain's first supersonic fighter over the Mojave Desert. NASA had picked him for the Mercury Seven, the founding class of American astronauts. And then, with a single electrocardiogram, it all stopped.

  An irregular heartbeat grounded Slayton in 1962, two months before his scheduled spaceflight. He would wait a decade before NASA returned him to flight status. In that decade he ran the astronaut office, quietly deciding who flew and who did not, who walked on the Moon and who stayed on the ground. The name on the outside of the capsule was never his. The hand that picked the crews was always his.

  This is a story about what happens when the most capable person in the room is denied the one thing he wants most, and what he does with all that remaining time.

• 2. Farm Boy to Fighter Pilot

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  At the age of five, Slayton was clearing a horse-drawn hay mower on his family's farm when the machine severed his left ring finger. That same finger would later nearly disqualify him from military flight training. His childhood home had no electricity and no indoor plumbing. His family raised sheep, cows, and tobacco. He graduated from Sparta High School in 1942 having played trombone, boxed, and served in the Future Farmers of America.

  The attack on Pearl Harbor happened during his senior year. Slayton had wanted to join the Navy, but joined the Army Air Forces when it began accepting high school graduates as aviators. Medical examiners flagged the missing finger; he was eventually cleared to fly. His early training took him through the Fairchild PT-19, the PT-17 Stearman, and the AT-6 Texan. Despite his preference for single-engine fighters, the Army assigned him to multi-engine aircraft. He graduated from flight training on the 22nd of April 1943, assigned to the North American B-25 Mitchell, which he described as his last choice.

  His unit, the 340th Bombardment Group, sent him to the European theater. Near the Strait of Gibraltar, German bombers and submarines attacked his convoy. He eventually flew 56 combat sorties out of bases including Salerno and Corsica, where he progressed from copilot to pilot. He completed his combat tour and returned to the United States in May 1944, then requested transfer to a new bomber, the Douglas A-26 Invader, specifically to reach the Pacific theater. He arrived on Okinawa in July 1945 and flew seven missions over Japan before the war ended. His final combat mission was August 12, three days after the bombing of Nagasaki.

• 3. The Heart That Wouldn't Quit

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  During a centrifuge training course in 1959, an electrocardiogram picked up erratic heart activity in Slayton. He was diagnosed with idiopathic paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, an irregular rhythm with no identified cause. At the time, NASA judged him healthy enough to keep flying. That judgment held for nearly three years.

  In early 1962, NASA Administrator James Webb opened a formal investigation. On the 15th of March 1962, with two months remaining before his scheduled launch, Slayton was medically disqualified from Mercury-Atlas 7, the mission he had intended to name Delta 7. Scott Carpenter replaced him. The grounding was initially limited to that one mission, but NASA leadership extended it to all remaining Mercury flights.

  Flight doctors recommended a cardiac catheterization to find out whether the condition was congenital. NASA management rejected the recommendation because of the risks the procedure carried. Slayton was left with a condition that could not be formally diagnosed and a career path that was now blocked.

  He did not stop trying. Over the following years he quit smoking and coffee, reduced his alcohol intake, exercised regularly, and took vitamins. In 1970 the palpitations grew more frequent and he began taking experimental daily doses of quinidine, a crystalline alkaloid. The treatment worked. Concerned that any medication would still bar him from solo flight, he stopped taking the quinidine against his doctors' advice. After seeing physicians around the world over more than a decade, he went to the Mayo Clinic in 1971 following a long stretch without fibrillation. Doctors there found no coronary condition. On the 13th of March 1972, NASA announced that Deke Slayton was back on flight status.

• 4. The Man Who Chose the Crews

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  In early 1962, simultaneously with his grounding, Slayton was selected to run the astronaut office as its senior manager. The job came with extraordinary influence. His first major act was selecting the Group 2 astronauts, announced in September 1962. He then assigned Gordon Cooper to Mercury-Atlas 9. Everything that followed flowed from that same authority.

  He created a crew rotation where a backup crew would later become the prime crew three missions ahead. The system was logical and, in at least one case, world-changing. The backup crew of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins rotated forward through that schedule and became the primary crew for Apollo 11.

  During the Apollo 1 fire, Slayton was in the launch control blockhouse at Cape Canaveral's LC-34. He had been a close friend of Gus Grissom and had considered entering the capsule earlier that day to diagnose communications problems. He would have worked in the area beneath the footrests, the exact location where the fire originated.

  In April 1967, after the accident, Slayton called a meeting of the senior astronauts and told them they were the candidates for the first lunar landing. He later made the call to replace Ken Mattingly with Jack Swigert on Apollo 13 after concerns arose that Mattingly might develop rubella during the mission. He assigned Alan Shepard to Apollo 13 as commander, a decision some astronauts considered a conflict of interest given Shepard's former position running the astronaut office. After the Apollo 15 postal covers scandal, Slayton reassigned the mission's crew to non-flying positions, ending their careers as astronauts.

• 5. Apollo-Soyuz

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  In February 1973, Slayton was assigned to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project as docking module pilot, alongside commander Thomas Stafford and command module pilot Vance Brand. The American crew spent two years preparing. Part of that preparation involved learning the Russian language and traveling to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in the USSR.

  Both spacecraft launched on the 15th of July 1975. Two days later, the Apollo and Soyuz craft rendezvoused in orbit. Slayton and the other American astronauts conducted crew transfers with Soviet cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov. It was the first crewed international spaceflight of the Cold War era.

  The return was dangerous. An erroneous switch setting caused noxious nitrogen tetroxide fumes from the command module's reaction control system thrusters to be drawn into the cabin during the descent. The crew was hospitalized in Honolulu, Hawaii, as a precaution for two weeks. During that hospitalization, doctors discovered a lesion on Slayton's lung and removed it. It proved benign. Had it been found before the mission, he would almost certainly have been grounded again.

  He was 51 years old at the time of the flight, making him the oldest person to fly in space up to that point. His total wait between being named an astronaut and actually reaching orbit had stretched across more than fifteen years.

• 6. After the Astronaut Office

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  Before Apollo-Soyuz even flew, Chris Kraft had assigned Slayton to manage the Approach and Landing Tests for the Space Shuttle program. That work centered on the orbiter Enterprise and involved modifying several F-104 Starfighters and T-38 Talons for astronaut training. Slayton also helped develop the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft.

  When the Approach and Landing Tests concluded in late 1977, Slayton moved to managing the Shuttle's Orbital Flight Tests. He advocated for smaller astronaut classes during the Group 8 selection, expecting that regular satellite deployment missions would need only two-person crews. He officially retired in 1980 but stayed on in an advisory capacity for STS-1 and flew a T-38 chase plane during the landing of STS-2. He formally left NASA on the 27th of February 1982, having logged 7,164 flight hours.

  He moved to the private sector as president of Space Services Inc., a Houston-based company focused on commercial rockets for small payloads. He served as mission director for the Conestoga rocket, which launched successfully on the 9th of September 1982. It was the first privately funded rocket to reach space. He also became president of International Formula One Pylon Air Racing and director of Columbia Astronautics, and served on the Department of Transportation's Commercial Space Advisory Committee.

  In 1991 he began working with space historian Michael Cassutt on his autobiography, titled Deke!: U.S. Manned Space from Mercury to the Shuttle. It was published in 1994, a year after his death. He also co-wrote Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon with Alan Shepard, the very astronaut whose crew assignments he had fought over for years.

• 7. Legacy and the Name

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  Slayton's nickname came from a technical problem. When he was a test pilot, another pilot in his unit shared the first name Don. To avoid confusion on radio calls, controllers began calling him by his initials, D.K. Over time those two letters shortened to Deke, and the name stuck for the rest of his life.

  In 1992, he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. He died at his home in League City, Texas, on the 13th of June 1993, at the age of 69. President Bill Clinton issued a statement that Slayton had met adversity with determination and discouragement with a dedication to never yield his dreams. His ashes were scattered over his family's farm in Sparta, Wisconsin, where he had lost that finger at the age of five.

  He was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame on the 11th of May 1990. The road through League City designated FM 518 was renamed Deke Slayton Highway. The Deke Slayton Memorial Space and Bicycle Museum in Sparta holds his Mercury space suit and his Ambassador of Exploration Award, which contains a lunar sample from one of the missions whose crews he chose.

  A cargo spacecraft named S.S. Deke Slayton was lost when its Antares rocket exploded during a 2014 launch. A successor vehicle, S.S. Deke Slayton II, reached the International Space Station on the 6th of December 2015, carried there by an Atlas V rocket.