The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

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.