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Kindle Notes & Highlights
career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even—ultimately, God willing, one day—that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.
Sputnik I took on a magical dimension—among highly placed persons especially, judging by opinion surveys. It seemed to dredge up primordial superstitions about the influence of heavenly bodies. It gave birth to a modern, i.e., technological, astrology. Nothing less than control of the heavens was at stake. It was Armageddon, the final and decisive battle of the forces of good and evil.
He was genuinely convinced that the Soviets would send up space platforms from which they could drop nuclear bombs at will, like rocks from a highway overpass.
Just about any young male college graduate with experience in a physically dangerous pursuit would do, so long as he was under five feet eleven and could fit into the Mercury capsule. The announcement calling for volunteers did mention test pilots as being among the types of men who might qualify, but it also mentioned submarine crew members, parachute jumpers, arctic explorers, mountain climbers, deep sea divers, even scuba divers, combat veterans, and, for that matter, mere veterans of combat training, and men who had served as test subjects for acceleration and atmospheric pressure tests,
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Albuquerque, home of the Lovelace Clinic, was a dirty red sod-hut tortilla highway desert city that was remarkably short on charm, despite the Mexican touch here and there.
God … Family … the only thing that Glenn hadn’t wrapped them all up in was Country, and so he took care of that, too.
Aren’t you afraid you’re going to die? That was the question these people had been circling around the whole time. That was what they really wanted to know, all these wide-eyed reporters and their grunting crawling beggar photographers. They didn’t care whether the seven Mercury astronauts were pilots or not. Infantrymen or acrobats would have done just as well. The main thing was: they had volunteered to sit on top of the rockets—which always blew up! They were brave lads who had volunteered for a suicide mission! They were kamikazes going forth to vie with the Russians! And all the questions
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It dramatized the entire technological and intellectual capability of the two nations and the strength of the national wills and spirits. Hence … John McCormack’s rising in the House of Representatives to say that the United States faced “national extinction” if she did not overtake the Soviet Union in the space race. The
At night some sort of prehistoric chiggers or fire ants—it was hard to say, since you could never see them—rose up from out of the sand and the palmetto grass and went for the ankles with a bite more vicious than a mink’s.
Snarky
Next to Gagarin’s orbital flight, Shepard’s little mortar lob to Bermuda, with its mere five minutes of weightlessness, was no great accomplishment. But that didn’t matter. The flight had unfolded like a drama, the first drama of single combat in American history. Shepard had been the tiny underdog, sitting on top of an American rocket—
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.
The television people, with all their gaffers and go-fers and groupies and cameramen and couriers and technicians and electricians, were blazing with 200-watt eyeballs and ricocheting off each other and the assembled rabble of reporters, radio stringers, tourists, lollygaggers, policemen, and freelance gawkers. They were all craning and writhing and rolling their eyes and gesturing and jabbering away with the excitement of the event.
Good Example of Wolfe's style
Like most military people, including those in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, they didn’t really consider New York part of the United States. It was like a free port, a stateless city, an international protectorate, Danzig in the Polish corridor, Beirut the crossroads of the Middle East, Trieste, Zurich, Macao, Hong Kong. Whatever ideals the military stood for, New York City did not. It was a foreign city full of a strange race of curiously tiny malformed gray people.
New York
After dinner on the spur of the moment, the whole bunch of them went to see a play, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which was a big hit at the time.
Kristy
What finally got to Yeager, however, was the Ed Dwight case. It had been early this year that Yeager got word from the brass that the President, John F. Kennedy, was determined that NASA have at least one Negro astronaut in their lineup. The whole process was to take place organically, however, as if in the natural order of things. Kennedy was leaning on the Defense Department, Defense was leaning on the Air Force brass, and they tossed the potato to Yeager. The pilot who had been singled out was an Air Force captain named Ed Dwight. He was to go through ARPS and be selected by NASA. The
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This storyline about Ed Dwight is dropped.
Not even the first American to walk on the moon would ever know the outpouring of a people’s most primal emotions that Shepard, Cooper, and, above all, Glenn had known. The era of America’s first single-combat warriors had come, and it had gone, perhaps never to be relived.
