The Right Stuff

Product Information

Hansen, James R. First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. ISBN 0-7432-5631-X.

Pete took out the bridge coat again and he and Jane and all the little Indians went to the funeral for Ted Whelan. That it hadn't been Pete was not solace enough for Jane. That the preacher had not, in fact, come to her front door as the Solemn Friend of Widows and Orphans, but merely for a church call … had not brought peace and relief. That Pete still didn't show the slightest indication of thinking that any unkind fate awaited him no longer lent her even a moment's courage. The next dream and the next hallucination, and the next and the next, merely seemed more real. For she now knew. She now knew the subject and the essence of this enterprise, even though not a word of it had passed anybody's lips. She even knew why Pete—the Princeton boy she met at a deb party at the Gulph Mills Club!—would never quit, never withdraw from this grim business, unless in a coffin. And God knew, and she knew, there was a coffin waiting for each little Indian. Mercury "Friendship 7" on display in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall at the Museum in Washington, DC. At least some astronauts, however, used "The Right Stuff" as cultural touchstones to discuss milestones in their training. Gerald Carr was selected by NASA in 1966 and flew during the Skylab 4 space station mission in 1973.I don’t want to give the impression that the storyteller overwhelms the story. Wolfe’s talent is evident in every polished sentence, yet all his tools are being used in service of the material he is presenting. He’s not showing off. Well, he’s probably showing off a little. But there is a method and meaning to everything he does. I didn’t so much learn about Project Mercury as I felt it in all its intensity. I found the book compelling, extremely interesting, and oftentimes humorous, as I would mentally place myself in the flight suits of these men who were to become the first," Clayton Anderson, who flew twice in space as a NASA space shuttle astronaut and International Space Station crew member, told Space.com. It's about narrative. Excitement. And if even a tiny bit of that goes away, then the support of the public will kill it.

The storyline also involves the political reasons for putting people into space, asserting that the Mercury astronauts were actually a burden to the program and were only sent up for promotional reasons. Reasons for including living beings in spacecraft are barely touched upon, but the first option considered was to use a chimpanzee (and, indeed, chimpanzees were sent up first). Programs Learning resources Plan a field trip Educator professional development Education monthly theme So this was a buddy read among the pantsless, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. Unfortunately, for me, it was more of a failure to launch than a successful mission. (See what I did there?) And because, in addition to “courage”, “test pilots” etc, The Right Stuff is all about Wolfe, it exhibits its author’s lifelong – and, let’s face it, southern – quarrel with the New York literary establishment. The Thomas Wolfe Jr, born in 1931, who had grown up in Richmond, Virginia, during the second world war, revered those “adventurous young men who sought glory in war” and who had become fighter pilots. As a young reporter in 60s Manhattan, he found himself an outsider. Towards the record of these pilots’ self-sacrifice and heroism, “the drama and psychology of flying high-performance aircraft in battle”, Wolfe observes, with some dismay, “the literary world remained oblivious”. The cold war aspect was at its apex, and these men considered their mission a holy war against the Russians for control of space. At the time it was believed the winner could fling nuclear weapons at their opponent, so the men who succeeded were regarded as heroes (Wolfe explains how in some histories, e.g. David and Goliath, the best single warriors would sometimes fight to determine victors, avoiding the carnage of full army battles). He goes into gory detail on how the aircraft and their engines eventually made that first sonic boom and exceeded the speed of sound (Mach 1) which had been thought to be a natural barrier, and unachievable. Eventually they blew that away (Mach 6) as technology and know-how for controlling these machines improved. The race to put a man in space, at least 50 miles above the earth, became the focus. What surprised me was that the Russians basically won every contest in those times, they had better technology and would consistently embarrass the United States by winning at every turn (un-manned, then a dog in space, finally a man, then a woman, then multiple spacecraft).Every wife wanted to cry out: "Well, my God! The machine broke! What makes any of you think you would have come out of it any better!" Yet intuitively Jane and the rest of them knew it wasn't right even to suggest that. Pete never indicated for a moment that he thought any such thing could possibly happen to him. It seemed not only wrong but dangerous to challenge a young pilot's confidence by posing the question. And that, too, was part of the unofficial protocol for the Officer's Wife. From now on every time Pete was late coming in from the flight line, she would worry. She began to wonder if—no! assume!—he had found his way into one of those corners they all talked about so spiritedly, one of those little dead ends that so enlivened conversation around here. The stuff I liked was the sheer danger the test pilots went through and how a lot of their work got overshadowed by the bright appeal of astronaut program. And the unsettling idea of how much, despite being lauded as best pilots and heroes, the job of the first astronauts was supposed to be a glorified test subject in a small metal can, doing about the same as the astrochimps, but with realization of helpless danger that was there if anything went wrong. The funny moments of Pete Conrad and his rectal tube/barium enema low point that made me laugh for at least five minutes straight.