The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

In the eyes of the engineers assigned to project Mercury the training of the astronauts would be the easy task on the list. Naturally you needed a man with the courage to ride on top of a rocket, and you were grateful that such men existed. Nevertheless, their training was not a very complicated business. The astronaut would have little to do in a Mercury flight except stand the strain, and the engineers had devised what psychologists referred to as “a graded series of exposures” to take care of that. No, the difficult, the challenging, the dramatic, the pioneering part of space flight, as the engineers saw it, was the technology. 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.