The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

So there’s John, with half his mesh underlining hanging off his body and biosensor wires spouting from out of his thoracic cage … there’s John, covered with sweat, drawn, deflated, beginning to feel very tired after waiting for five hours for a hundred tons of liquid oxygen and RP-1 kerosene to explode under his back … and the hierarchy of NASA has one thing on its mind: keeping Lyndon Johnson happy. So John puts in the call to Annie, and he tells her: “Look, if you don’t want the Vice-President or the TV networks or anybody else to come into the house, then that’s it as far as I’m concerned, they are not coming in—and I will back you up all the way, one hundred percent, and you tell them that. I don’t want Johnson or any of the rest of them to put so much as one toe inside our house!”