The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

In time, the Navy would compile statistics showing that for a career Navy pilot, i.e., one who intended to keep flying for twenty years as Conrad did, there was a 23 percent probability that he would die in an aircraft accident.

So did the most gifted of all the pilot authors, the Frenchman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. As he gazed down upon the world … from up there … during transcontinental flights, the good Saint-Ex saw civilization as a series of tiny fragile patches clinging to the otherwise barren rock of Earth. He felt like a lonely sentinel, a protector of those vulnerable little oases, ready to lay down his life in their behalf, if necessary; a saint, in short, true to his name, flying up here at the right hand of God. The good Saint-Ex! And he was not the only one. He was merely the one who put it into words most beautifully and anointed himself before the altar of the right stuff.

The pilots who signed up to crawl into the Mercury capsule—the capsule, everybody noted, not the ship—would be called “astronauts.” But, in fact, they would be lab rabbits with wires up the tail and everywhere else.

Yeager was young enough—still only thirty-five—but had never attended college.

They had many names, these rockets, Atlas, Navaho, Little Joe, Jupiter, but they all blew up.

Military pilots, almost to a man, perceived psychiatry as a pseudo-science.

Naturally the brave lads chosen for single combat enjoyed a very special status in the army and among their people (David was installed in the royal household and eventually superseded Saul’s own sons and became king). They were revered and extolled, songs and poems were written about them, every reasonable comfort and honor was given them, and women and children and even grown men were moved to tears in their presence. Part of this outpouring of emotion and attention was the simple response of a grateful people to men who were willing to risk their lives to protect them. But there was also a certain calculation behind it. The steady pressure of fame and honor tended to embolden the lads still further by constantly reminding them that the fate of the entire people was involved in their performance in battle. At the same time—and this was no small thing in such a high-risk occupation—the honor and glory were in many cases rewards before the fact; on account, as it were. Archaic cultures were quite willing to elevate their single-combat fighters to heroic status even before their blood was let, because it was such an effective incentive. Any young man who entered the corps would get his rewards here on earth, “up front,” to use the current phrase, come what may. With the decline of archaic magic, the belief in single combat began to die out. The development of the modern, highly organized army and the concept of “total war” seemed to bury it forever. But then an extraordinar...

single-combat warriors

athletes as single combat warriors. national teams

It was only thanks to a recent invention, the high-speed electronic computer, that Project Mercury was feasible at all. There was an analogy here with the great Admiral of the Seas himself, Columbus. It was only thanks to a recent invention of his day, the magnetic compass, that Columbus had dared to sail across the Atlantic. Until then ships had stayed close to the great land masses for even the longest voyages. Likewise, putting a man into space the quick and dirty way without high-speed computers was unthinkable. Such computers had not been in production before 1951, and yet here it was, 1960 and engineers were already devising systems for guiding rockets into space, through the use of computers built into the engines and connected to accelerometers, for monitoring the temperature, pressure, oxygen supply, and other vital conditions of the Mercury capsule and for triggering safety procedures automatically—meaning they were creating, with computers, systems in which machines could communicate with one another, make decisions, take action, all with tremendous speed and accuracy … Oh, genius-engineers!

The glorification of the astronauts had really gotten out of control! In the world of science—and Project Mercury was supposed to be a scientific enterprise—pure scientists ranked first and engineers ranked second and the test subjects of experiments ranked so low that one seldom thought about them. But here the test subjects … were national heroes!

How, then, could there be so much excitement over Project Mercury and so little over the X–15? Here was the thing that got to the boys after a while, no matter how nonchalant they tried to appear: the Mercury astronauts were national heroes without ever having left the ground—all because they had volunteered to ride on top of rockets. Well … Walker and White and Crossfield, like Yeager before them, had already ridden rockets, from the X–1 to the X–15. And they had ridden them as pilots. Your own brain was the guidance system for the X–15, and your own hand maneuvered the ship. In the Mercury-Redstone system, a bank of computers was the pilot, and the astronaut was a passenger. Why couldn’t everyone comprehend such a simple fact? Was it because the astronauts were seen as America’s front runners in the race with the Russians? Well, if so, that was pretty ironic. By now, mid-1960, the astronauts were supposed to have gone up in their first ballistic flights. That was the whole point of choosing the Mercury system. It was dirty—but it was quick; supposedly. But the Mercury capsule wasn’t even ready yet. There had been one delay after another.

But out back of Hangar S the little bastards could play their Mercury consoles like a dream.

Another goddamned day with these earnest hard-zapping ballbreaking white-smock humans.

You would have a twenty-million-dollar hole in the ground and a pulverized ape.

Like most military people, including those in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, they didn’t really consider New York part of the United States.

This horrible rat-gray city was suddenly touching, warm!

Here you saw it in a million-footed form, before your very eyes!

Oh, it was a primitive and profound thing! Only pilots truly had it, but the entire world responded, and no one knew its name!