Frank

Frank was an idiot. A brand spanking new Triumph Bonneville motorcycle straight off the boat from England, and he'd already rebored the carburetter and changed out the sprocket when I saw him.

'It's gonna end in tears Franky boy,' I said. All for a lousy twenty extra miles per hour. He was a speed demon. A real seat of the pants guy, made of the right stuff. That's why when he came back from the Jupiter 59 Mission, I knew it was big. A serious, serious businesss. And Frank was never gonna be the same.

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We arrived at Edwards airforce base in March of nineteen fifty seven and there we all met for the first time. Me, Gordon, Scottie Carpenter, Neil, Bob and Frank. We were all test pilots, and came from the services as engineers. Frank and I worked together with the NASA guys on the development of the landing systems for Jupiter and after some frustrating problems we finally managed to crack it in the summer of the following year.

It's scary to think what we were working with then, the kind of hardware we relied on. Hell, there's more technology in my cellphone than what we used to put Neil on the moon, and Jupiter was ten years earlier.

Over the months, we all the became a pretty tight team though Bob left in the autumn and we never really knew why. He said he'd been seconded for some secret military mission, hush hush kinda thing. Gordy said it was Cuba but anyway he was replaced by Ed Irving.

We knew it would be one of us. I knew it would be Frank, and sure enough Christmas came early for him that year when in November Mr Glennan called to tell Frank he was going be the first man into space.

I couldn't say I wasn't a little disappointed. I suppose we all were really but Frank was the right choice and we all knew it.

There was a certain relief that came with the news of Frank's appointment and only when I knew the call had finally come did I realise I'd been waiting for it myself.

Gloria knew, she said for the past eighteen months when I was home, I wouldn't stray more than a few feet from the kitchen, from the telephone. It must have been a big deal for her too. She lived every day with the same danger as me and whilst I didn't say it, I knew that hurtling fifty miles above the Mojave desert in an X-15 at three and a half thousand miles an hour was different from right up there, in the dark, the unknown. She wouldn't see me at the end of a days work or get the Hi honey, I'm safe and well call I made after the routine test flights that's for sure. It would be a black car and two sombre men in regalia at the door reminding her of the amazing sacrifice I had made for my country.

Still it was down to Frank now, for him and his loved ones and for that at least, as funny as it sounds, I was glad it wasn't me.

The night of the call was a big celebration. We already had a reputation as hell raisers which in part was true it was fair to say, but we worked hard and needed to let off a little steam now and then.

Our little band had become celebrities. Joe public had a massive appetite for the 'Space Race,' and we received a lot of attention, not all good but it culminated in a sweet deal that saw access to us and our stories sold for a quarter of million dollars to Life magazine. Split between us it sure made the long days shorter and well, it was something nice for the girls. We spent money on the house and for Gloria, a whole new wardrobe. She said she felt like a movie star. It made her happy and I was glad.

Frank bought a motorcycle.

After the excitement about Frank died down it was back to the grind and even more intense training. This time against a deadline set by NASA. Two of us, me and Scottie, trained side by side with Frank.

At the end of April, Frank began to get really nervous. He confided in me quite a bit and I guess I could say I knew the real Frank, the man behind the bravado, the sleek hair and dangerous twinkle in his eye. Frank wasn't tall but he was magnetic, so the moment he walked into a room, everyone turned to hear what he might say. One night, over a couple of beers in the base bar Frank told me he was scared. I told him there wasn't a man on the planet, or any other planet for that matter, that wouldn't be frightened. We didn't talk percentages but the chances of him not coming back, or of not even making it out of the atmosphere alive were finely balanced. We weren't kidding ourselves, but what a thing to be the first. The first human into space, and beating the ruskies and all.

It was that conversation that I kept going back to after he came back. We'd spent a good couple of hours discussing every stage of the launch, boost and rentry with the aim of finding something that had been missed, a little detail that could be ironed out and would give Frank just a couple more ounzes of confidence. 'You're gonna be a hero Frankie,' I said. 'Come June, every man, woman and child's gonna be waving a flag for you.' He'd smiled I remember, and nodded his head just a little as he rolled the thought around.

If it was going to happen, it would be mechanical failure that got him, so once the tests and checks had been done and redone it would be in the lap of the gods. I was angry when he came back. They told us about the research into the human immune system in microgavity conditions and how Frank would have been highly susceptible to bacteria either in his environment or dormant inside his body. Whilst the training was designed to prepare us for the conditions we would encounter, as best they could be understood from earth, no one could know what really would happen to our bodies.

Some said we weren't meant to travel into space and that we inhabitat this planet for a reason. There were quite a few dissenters, those who weren't waving a flag on launch day, and when Frank came back I wanted them to know the truth but all they got was validation when it was announced that Frank had been rushed to the Holy Cross Centre for Disease Control.

They let me visit a couple of times and we spoke on the telephone through a plate glass wall. Two government agents were posted outside the door to his room and I guessed this was to keep any press at bay. Frank was big news.

He was hooked up to a dozen or so monitors and when he spoke, he was different, slow, as if something wasn't working right in his brain. They had told me strictly not to ask him any questions about the flight but I was burning to know. He said he hadn't seen anyone else really but that men in suits came daily and asked him a lot of questions. They didn't know what was wrong with him. When I asked the doctors, they answered curtly as if making Frank better wasn't a priority.

When I learned the truth, things like that made sense. I was approached by NASA shortly after Frank came back. They wanted me to head the next mission and launch date was set for less than six months. When I was called to the White House for the mission briefing, I knew something was happening. Frank wasn't ill and what they told me changed everything.

In a universe so unexplained, unknown and unexplored, man will always be overwhelmed by curiosity and his desire for knowledge will know no bounds. What we didn't know back then as we raced so hard to put man into space, was that we were already up there. The human species inhabited space and they'd been waiting for Frank for two thousand years.

I came to Mars in nineteen sixty four on board a transporter ship built by the first humans. I've been here with them now for forty eight years. It's taken that long for us, well the second humans, to get up to speed with the technology that had been developed since the first humans left the planet in a.d. thirty two but now the whole species live as one despite the obvious differences.

When they released Frank from Holy Cross he found a very large sum of money in his bank account. We laughed but knew they could have taken more permanent action to stop him talking rather that pumping him full of tranquilizers. He never did tell anyone and things came to light in the natural order of things, mainly when there was money to be made in leaving earth once again.

Frank died three years after Project Jupiter in the Mojave desert. A blowout on his motorcycle at one hundred and thirty eight miles an hour. They gave him a hero's send off, tickertape in Times Square kinda deal. The journey he took will remain in history for many reasons.

He may not have been the first man into space but he was my friend and I miss him.

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By Darren Seeley