Deke! My Thirty Years In (Hardcover)

Instead of flying, Slayton became the titular head of the astronauts, officially being named Coordinator of Astronaut Activities in September 1962, and was responsible for the operation of the astronaut office. In November 1963, he resigned his commission as an Air Force Major to assume the role of Director of Flight Crew Operations. For a decade he oversaw the activities of the astronauts, most importantly making crew assignments and managing the full range of astronaut activities. Slayton personally chose all of the crews, determining among other things that Neil Armstrong would be the first person to walk on the Moon in July 1969.

As one might expect, Slayton wielded enormous power at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston (renamed the Johnson Space Center in 1973) in his role as director of the astronaut office. He effectively kept a collection of egotistical-for good reason-hot-shot pilots under control and maximized their role in the NASA of the 1960s. His place in helping to ensure the success of Project Apollo cannot be underestimated. This book is the recollection of Slayton during his NASA career. It contains a lot of standard information that most space history buffs are aware of, as well as some new stories. As always in such books as this, Slayton seeks to get behind the techno-nerd facade of NASA and emphasize its human side. Accordingly, we see astronauts in social settings and in embarrassing situations, as well as in their hardworking day jobs. A high point of the book is the discussion his early experiences as a farm boy from Wisconsin who flew bombers in World War II, went to college on the GI Bill, and became a member of one of the most celebrated teams in modern American history, the Mercury Seven.

Michael Cassutt, an outstanding writer with a string of other superb books, ensures that this is an excellent memoir. Especially so, since Cassutt saw it through publication after the death of Slayton on June 13, 1993, in League City, Texas, from a brain tumor. This is not the best of the astronaut autobiographies, that distinction belongs to Michael Collins' "Carrying the Fire," but it is a pretty good one.

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So he steps up and builds the Astronaut Liason office, basically making sure that the astronauts become part of mission objective developement teams, making sure that the astronauts get all of the training they can stand, and he's also the one assigning men to teams and teams to flights.

It's his job to get to know each of the astronauts well enough to (with the help of others, granted) decide who goes where and in what capacity. To make sure there aren't personality conflits with the boys on the same flights, to make sure that there is always someone else trained so that when something goes wrong, someone else can step in. What an amazing amount of pressure.

And he did write about the things that go wrong. He wrote about the airplane accidents that took the lives of several astronauts and how as a close group of workmates they had to cope and keep going. He wrote about Apollo I. He hand picked the men who would be in that tin can the day of the plugs out test. One of them Virgil (Gus) Grissom, who was a member of the "Original 7" with Deke and a good friend.

This book wasn't just about the manned space program, though that was certainly the focus, it was a autobiography written by a man who knows that he has cancer and is taking advantage of the time left to him to tell his story in his own words (though it is co-written). It is a well told story and a very interesting perspective to have. This book was middling technical, not a whole lot but some stuff, while probably dumbed down specifically for people like me who aren't pilots or engineers, was still kind of tough to slog through.

Thankfully having been around airplanes most of my life, at least that part I got the jist of. It's like there's a fly boy gene (though my grandma's got it too) that Deke had, that my Grandparents and my Dad have; that I might have a bit of. Flying is like setting things up and knocking them down. It was really cool to have this love of airplanes almost given back to me. Deke writes with such love and joy of his time flying planes that I think if you have a bit of the fly boy gene it's going to waken that up for you too.

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