The Right Stuff was first published in 1979, just a few months before I was born. The book recalls events decades earlier, reaching back to the 1950s. Tom Wolfe quotes Chuck Yeager, speaking in 1953—that’s seventy years ago, as I’m writing this—when the great pilot predicts: “Some of the proposed fighters of tomorrow will be able to find and destroy a target and even return to their home stations and land by themselves. The only reason a pilot will be needed is to take over and decide what to do if anything goes wrong with the electronic equipment.” Human imagination is richer and more
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