From the archive

THE ORIGINAL SEVEN ASTRONAUTS GET SUITABLE TRANSPORT FOR EARTH

If you’re a rocket pilot, you want some handy transport back on Earth too...

1. WHO

The Crew of Apollo 12

2. WHAT

Cheap Corvettes

3. WHERE

Cape Canaveral

4. WHEN

1969

The frst group of NASA astronauts – the Original Seven – might have been the frst Americans in space, but they had to make do with standard navy salaries. So it was lucky they bumped into former Indy 500 winner Jim Rathmann, who happened to own a Chevy showroom near Cape Canaveral and ofered to lease each man whatever Chevrolet he liked for just a dollar a year. As mate’s rates go, it wasn’t half bad.

It would be the best part of a decade before any of them would walk on the Moon, but to Rathmann, along with GM boss and astrobuf Ed Cole, they were already heroes. What else should they drive but Corvettes? And that’s what most of them chose, with the notable exception of John Glenn, the frst American to orbit Earth, who stuck with a station wagon for family duties.

As the early-Sixties Mercury programme turned into later Apollo missions, the pilots changed, but the Vettes kept coming. Neil Armstrong drove to work in a shiny blue Stingray. Come Apollo 12, the crew – Pete Conrad, Richard Gordon and Alan Bean – had theirs painted gold and black. You’d see them racing each other around the Cape, like others had done before.

These were test pilots; the sort of men who’d strap themselves into wonky jets or ride rockets for kicks. But could they handle a bit of American muscle? According to Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuf: “The boys were fearless in an automobile, they were determined to hang their hides right out over the edge – and they had no idea what mediocre drivers they actually were.”