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Until the last two minutes before blastoff, the cherry picker had been close to the pad, prepared to snatch Shepard from Freedom 7 in case of a disaster on the ground. Besides the cherry picker, a fire-proofed Army personnel carrier stood by with a fire-suited crew. Some four miles from Pad 5, the headquarters of the Cape's Abort Rescue Team was a humming hive of activity. Six helicopters were tuning up, ready to carry skilled technicians, doctors and frogmen to rescue the astronaut if the capsule splashed near by. If the Freedom 7 should start to sink, frogmen would be ready to slip beneath it and inflate a raft to lift it to the surface. Army amphibious craft were ready to retrieve the capsule if it fell in the surf. Waiting out at sea were 65-ft. Navy speedboats; other special craft were on the alert should the capsule head in the wrong direction and land in the Banana River, the shallow lagoon behind Cape Canaveral. The chance that any of this complicated and costly equipment would be needed had been calculated at something like 1 in 100. But among the burdens (and the glories) of the U.S. military tradition is the principle that a man in distress is worth the cost of any rescue.
Downrange, to the north of Grand Bahama Island, was an even weightier deployment. Circling near the calculated impact area of the Mercury capsule, Lake Champlain bristled with helicopters, and a flotilla of six destroyers strung out along the range. Watching the range with sharp electronic eyes were the swarming radars of Cape Canaveral, and high overhead soared monstrous aircraft burdened with more radars. Neither money, men nor equipment had been spared to protect the life of U.S. Astronaut No. 1.
Tests & Torture. Painstaking as they were, all the preparations for trouble could not compare with the planning that had gone into the training of the astronaut himself. One of seven volunteers chosen in April 1959 from a list of no military test pilots, Shepard had been in rigorous discipline ever since. He took physical tests that most doctors have no need for. His blood was analyzed in a dozen different ways; the functioning of his various organs—heart, lungs, spleen, stomach, eyes, etc.—were tested over and over. He traveled out to Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory to have his body's natural radiation measured.
Along with his fellow astronauts, Shepard submitted on the ground to all the possible privations of space flight. He walked on endless treadmills, sat with his feet in ice water, endured two hours in a room heated to 130°F. and three hours in a soundproof, totally dark chamber. He took countless psychological tests. His torso was tattooed to mark the spots where electrodes would be attached for medical measurement.