The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

“I don’t advise it, you understand, but it can be done.” (Provided you have the right stuff, you miserable pudknocker.)

The speed of sound, Mach 1, was known (thanks to the work of the physicist Ernst Mach) to vary at different altitudes, temperatures, and wind speeds. On a calm 60-degree day at sea level it was about 760 miles an hour, while at 40,000 feet, where the temperature would be at least sixty below, it was about 660 miles an hour.

The plane the Air Force wanted to break the sound barrier with was called the X–I at the outset and later on simply the X–I.

On the one hand, they hated the process. It meant talking to reporters and other fruit flies who always hovered, eager for the juice … and invariably got the facts screwed up … But that wasn’t really the problem, was it! The real problem was that reporters violated the invisible walls of the fraternity. They blurted out questions and spoke boorish words about … all the unspoken things!—about fear and bravery (they would say the words!) and how you felt at such-and-such a moment! It was obscene!

Project Mercury, the human cannonball approach, looked like a Larry Light-bulb scheme, and it gave off the funk of panic. Any pilot who went into it would no longer be a pilot. He would be a laboratory animal wired up from skull to rectum with medical sensors.

Conrad stares at the piece of paper and then looks up at the man and says in a wary tone, as if he fears a trick: “But it’s upside down.” This so startles the man, he actually leans across the table and looks at this absolutely blank sheet of paper to see if it’s true—and only after he is draped across the table does he realize that he has been had. He looks at Conrad and smiles a smile of about 33 degrees Fahrenheit.

The seven of them sat there like fools with their hands hung up in the air, grinning with embarrassment. But that was all right; they would get over the embarrassment soon enough. Glenn, one couldn’t help noticing, had both hands up in the air.

John Glenn came out of it as tops among seven very fair-haired boys. He had the hottest record as a pilot, he was the most quotable, the most photogenic, and the lone Marine. But all seven, collectively, emerged in a golden haze as the seven finest pilots and bravest men in the United States. A blazing aura was upon them all.

Glenn seemed to eat this stuff up. He couldn’t get enough grins or handshakes, and he had a few words filed away in every pocket. He would even come back to Langley and write cards to workers he had met on the assembly line, giving them little “attaboys,” as if they were all in this thing together, partners in the great adventure, and he, the astronaut, would never forget his, the welding inspector’s, beaming mug. The idea, much encouraged by NASA, was that the personal interest of the astronaut would infuse everyone working for the contractors with a greater concern for safety, reliability, efficiency. Oddly enough, it seemed to work.

Gus realizes it’s his turn to say something, and he is petrified. He opens his mouth and out come the words: “Well … do good work!” It’s an ironic remark, implying: “ … because it’s my ass that’ll be sitting on your freaking rocket.” But the workers started cheering like mad. They started cheering as if they had just heard the most moving and inspiring message of their lives: Do good work! After all, it’s Little Gus’s ass on top of our rocket! They stood there for an eternity and cheered their brains out while Gus gazed blankly upon them from the Pope’s balcony. Not only that, the workers—the workers, not the management but the workers!—had a flag company make up a huge banner, and they strung it up high in the main work bay, and it said: DO GOOD WORK.

Divorce—still, as of 1960—was a fatal step for a career military officer; it led to damaging efficiency reports by one’s superiors, reports that could ruin chances of advancement.

As time went by, the Glenn position became: Look, whether we like it or not, we’re public figures. Whether we deserve it or not, people look up to us. So we have a terrific responsibility. It’s not enough not to get caught. It’s not even enough to know to your own satisfaction that you’ve done nothing wrong. We’ve got to be like Caesar’s wife. We’ve got to be above even the appearance of doing wrong.

Glenn had never been afraid to alienate his peers when he knew he was right; perhaps this, too, had always impressed his superiors—and he had never been left behind. His faith in what was right was part of his righteous stuff.

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.

There were psychologists who advised against using pilots at all—and this was more than a year after the famous Mercury Seven had been chosen. The pilot’s, particularly the hot pilot’s, main psychological bulwark under stress was his knowledge that he controlled the ship and could always do something (“I’ve tried A! I’ve tried B! I’ve tried C!” …). This obsession with active control, it was argued, would only tend to cause problems on Mercury flights. What was required was a man whose main talent was for doing nothing under stress.

An experienced zombie would do fine. In fact, considerable attention had been given to a plan to anesthetize or tranquillize the astronauts, not to keep them from panicking, but just to make sure they would lie there peacefully with their sensors on and not do something that would ruin the flight.

From a sheerly political or public relations standpoint, the astronaut was NASA’s prize possession, and the seven Mercury astronauts had been presented to the public and the Congress as great pilots, not as test subjects. If they now insisted on being pilots, great or otherwise—who was going to step in and say no?

They were tired of the designation of “capsule” for the Mercury vehicle. The term as much as declared that the man inside was not a pilot but an experimental animal in a pod. Gradually, everybody began trying to work the term “spacecraft” into NASA publications and syllabuses.

Yeager had been the first rocket pilot to go through this particular hole in the supersonic envelope, and it was during the flight in the X–IA in which he set a speed record of Mach 2.42. He was battered unconscious and fell seven miles before hitting the denser atmosphere at 25,000 feet and coming to and managing to put the ship into a spin. That was good; a mere spin he knew how to get out of, and he survived.

The mighty white shaft rumbles and seems to bestir itself—and then seems to change its mind, its computerized central nervous system, about the whole thing, because the flames suddenly cut off, and the rocket settles back down on the pad, and there’s a little pop. A cap on the tip of the rocket comes off. It goes shooting up in the air, a tiny little thing with a needle nose. In fact, it’s the capsule’s escape tower. As the great crowd watches, stone silent and befuddled, it goes up to about 4,000 feet and descends under a parachute. It looks like a little party favor.

A peer vote!—it was unbelievable! Every move Glenn had made undoubtedly worked against him like a captured weapon in the peer vote. In the peer vote he was the prig who had risen at the seance like John Calvin himself and told them all to keep their pants zipped and their wicks dry.

Eight hundred pounds of water had seeped in. For the ordinary prudent human being it would have been two hours of freaking terror. They brought the capsule to a recovery ship, the Donner, and opened it and brought out the ape’s cubicle and opened the hatch. The ape was lying there with his arms crossed. They offered him an apple and he took it and ate it with considerable deliberation, as if gloriously bored. Those two hours of being slung up and down in the open sea in seven-foot gulps inside a closed coffin-like cubicle had been … perhaps the best time ever in this miserable land of the white smocks! No voices! No zaps! No bolts, no lengths of hose, no more breaking of his bloody balls …

It was incredible, but the world was now full of people who were saying: “My God, do you mean there are men brave enough to try what the ape has just gone through?”

It was as if the Soviets’ Chief Designer, that invisible genius, was toying with them. Back in October 1957, just four months before the United States was supposed to launch the world’s first artificial earth satellite, the Chief Designer had launched Sputnik I. In January 1959, just two months before NASA was scheduled to put the first artificial satellite into orbit around the sun, the Chief Designer launched Mechta I and did just that. But this one, Vostok I, in April 1961, had been his pièce de resistance.

Nevertheless, no one had seriously studied the possibility that on the day itself, the day of the first American manned space flight, the astronaut might end up on top of the rocket and stuffed into the capsule with his legs practically immobile for more than four hours … with his bladder to answer to.

The hell with changing the filter. He would look at the world in black and white. Who cared? Don’t fuck up. That was the main thing.

After the capsule splashed down, Powers had quoted, or seemed to have quoted, Shepard as saying everything was “A-Okay.” In fact, this was a Shorty Powers paraphrase borrowed from NASA engineers who used to say it during radio transmission tests because the sharper sound of A cut through the static better than O. Nevertheless, “A-Okay” became shorthand for Shepard’s triumph over the odds and for astronaut coolness under stress, and Shorty Powers was looked up to as the medium who communicated across the gulf between ordinary people and star voyagers with the right stuff.

On May 25, twenty days after Shepard’s flight, Kennedy appeared before Congress to deliver a message on “urgent national needs.” This was, in fact, the beginning of his political comeback from the Bay of Pigs disaster. It was as if he were starting his administration over and delivering a new inaugural address.

This was the first indication that the fellows had about a major truth concerning space flights. You didn’t “take” the capsule off the ground, you didn’t bring it up to altitude, you didn’t alter its course, and you didn’t land it; i.e., you didn’t fly it—and so your performance was not going to be rated on how well you flew the craft, as it would be in flight test or combat. You could be rated only on how well you covered the items on your checklist. Therefore, the fewer items you had on your checklist, the better shot you had at a “perfect” flight.

And this was the Big Parade! This was what she got out of the compact after all this! It was a travesty. She was … the Honorable Mrs. Squirming Hatch Blower!

Since the pooch proved to be unscrewable, officially, and Gus Grissom’s flight was therefore on the record as a success, NASA was suddenly in great shape. John Kennedy was happy. “We have started our long voyage to the moon.” That was the idea.

the Titov flight put an end to the Mercury-Redstone program then and there. The next astronaut in line to ride on top of the Redstone, John Glenn, was now assigned to attempt an orbital flight, using the Atlas rocket, which had done so poorly in unmanned tests. Later there were those who speculated that NASA had been “saving Glenn for the big one” all along. But Glenn did not have that kind of status within NASA. He had learned that to his bitter regret.

And now … various functionaries and secret-service personnel are calling on the telephone and banging on the door to inform her that the Vice-President is already in Arlington, in a White House limousine, waiting to pull up and charge in and pour ten minutes of hideous Texas soul all over her on nationwide TV. Short of the rocket blowing up under John, this is the worst thing she can imagine occurring in the entire American space program.

Nothing must be novel about the experience! On top of all that, he had Shepard’s and Grissom’s descriptions of variations from the simulations. “On the centrifuge you feel thus-and-such. Well, during the actual flight it feels like that but with this-and-that difference.” No man had ever lived an event so completely ahead of time.

The earth was eight thousand miles in diameter and he was only a hundred miles above it. He knew what it was going to look like in any case. He had seen it all in photographs taken from the satellites. It had all been flashed on the screens for him. Even the view had been simulated. Yes … that’s the way they said it would look … Awe seemed to be demanded, but how could he express awe honestly?

Oh, yes, he understood now! If the landing bag was deployed, that meant the heat shield was loose. If the heat shield was loose, then it might come off during the re-entry, unless the retropack straps held it in place long enough for the capsule to establish its angle of re-entry. And the straps would soon burn off. If the heat shield came off, then he would fry. If they didn’t want him—the pilot!—to know all this, then it meant they were afraid he might panic. And if he didn’t even need to know the whole pattern—just the pieces, so he could follow orders—then he wasn’t really a pilot!

He was being treated like a passenger—a redundant component, a backup engineer, a boiler-room attendant—in an automatic system!—like someone who did not have that rare and unutterably righteous stuff!—as if the right stuff itself did not even matter! It was a transgression against all that was holy—all this in a single limbic flash of righteous indignation as John Glenn re-entered the earth’s atmosphere.

Word got back that the sailors on the Noa, the ship that hauled the capsule, with John in it, out of the water, had painted white lines around his footprints on the deck after he walked from the capsule to a hatchway. They didn’t want his footprints on their deck to ever disappear!

The crowds were not only waiting in the airport, which was not surprising—a little publicity was all it took to get a mob of gawkers to an airport—but they were also lining the godforsaken highway into the city, through the borough of Queens, or whatever it was, out in the freezing cold in the most rancid broken-down industrial terrain you have ever seen, a decaying landscape that seemed to belong to another century—they were out there along the highway, anywhere they could squeeze in, and … they were crying!—crying as the black cars roared by!

Around the Kennedys you saw a fan’s hysteria, involving a lot of shrieking and clutching, with people reaching out to grab souvenirs and swooning and squealing, as if the Kennedys were movie stars who happened to be in power. But what the multitudes showed John Glenn and the rest of them on that day was something else. They anointed them with the primordial tears that the right stuff commanded.

Obviously if the man hadn’t had a stroke, he wouldn’t have burst out crying. Until his stroke he had been a bear. Nevertheless, the emotion was there, and it would have been there whether he had had a stroke or not. That was what the sight of John Glenn did to Americans at that time. It primed them for the tears. And those tears ran like a river all over America. It was an extraordinary thing, being the sort of mortal who brought tears to other men’s eyes.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon on the Fourth of July, and the cows burned on, and the whiskey roared goddamned glad to see you and the Venus de Houston shook her fanny in an utterly baffling blessing over it all.

At the very first press conference, the one introducing the Next Nine to the public, the Original Seven were on hand, and Shorty Powers happened to introduce them in the reverse order of their flights. When he got to Shepard, he said: “And finally, this is Alan Shepard, the man who’s been saying for years, ‘But I was first!’” Well, that just cracked the place up. Everyone was laughing, with the single and obvious exception of Smilin’Al.

Glenn had not been the first man to fly in earth orbit or even the second, merely the first American. Yet he had ascended to a status so extraordinary it had no precedent. Some of the boys were convinced that Glenn had his eyes set on becoming President. (Nor was the notion farfetched; after all, it was David who had succeeded to the throne of Saul.)

By now, when the other wives came around to the house of the Wife during a flight, they were not there to hold her hand over the dangers her husband was facing. They were there to hold her hand over the television cameras she would be facing. They were there to try to buck her up for a true ordeal.

For re-entry Cooper would not only have to establish the capsule’s angle of attack by hand, using the horizon as his point of reference, he would also have to hold the capsule steady on all three axes, pitch, roll, and yaw, with the hand controller and fire the retro-rockets by hand. Meantime, the electrical malfunction had done something to the oxygen balance. Carbon dioxide started building up in the capsule and inside Cooper’s suit and helmet as well. “Well … things are beginning to stack up a little,” said Gordo.

A lot of people couldn’t figure out Armstrong. He had a close blond crew cut and small pale blue eyes and scarcely a line or a feature in his face that you could remember. His expression hardly ever changed. You’d ask him a question, and he would just stare at you with those pale-blue eyes of his, and you’d start to ask the question again, figuring he hadn’t understood, and—click—out of his mouth would come forth a sequence of long, quiet, perfectly formed, precisely thought-out sentences, full of anisotropic functions and multiple-encounter trajectories, or whatever else was called for. It was as if his hesitations were just data punch-in intervals for his computer.

As Scott and Adams neared the ground, the “eyelids” on the afterburner malfunctioned, opening too wide, cutting the thrust down to 20 or 30 percent of maximum. Visually they could tell the ship was sinking too fast. Scott, who had the controls, gunned it but got very little response. They were dropping like a brick. Adams, in back, knew that the tail would hit the runway first, due to the angle of attack they were in, if Scott couldn’t regain power. He told Scott over the radio circuit that if the tail hit he was ejecting. The tail hit, and in that moment he pulled his cinch ring and ejected at zero altitude. Scott elected to stay with the ship. The belly smashed onto the runway and the ship went careening down it and off into the mesquite. When the beast finally came to a halt, Scott looked back, and the engine was jammed up into the space where Adams used to be. Both men had made the right decision.

Way back in April of 1953, Yeager had made a speech in which he said, “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.” Talking about the Ships of Tomorrow had made it all seem far off. But now, ten years later, they were already bringing such systems into the hardware stage.

Yeager was standing erect with his parachute rolled up and his helmet in the crook of his arm, right out of the manual, and staring at them quite levelly out of what was left of his face, as if they had had an appointment and he was on time.