Cbr16bingo Tech
I only picked this up in order to fill the Tech square on my bingo card. It’s not the kind of book I would have looked at otherwise — nonfiction with an emphasis on military flights and the space program? Ugh, no thanks. But in Tom Wolfe’s hands, the topic does become more interesting and readable. The book started as an article for Rolling Stone Magazine about that certain quality that the men involved in the early days of the space program seemed to have in abundance, the “right stuff.” What is it? Who were these people and how did they, in Wolfe’s favorite analogy, ascend to the top of the “ziggurat,” becoming national heroes beyond all imagination? Wolfe looks at the pilots in the 1950s who were regularly testing the boundaries of flight (without much fanfare) and the subsequent transition toward space flight and hero worship, ending with the completion of the Mercury project in 1963.
Wolfe follows a chronological outline for this book. The early chapters on supersonic jets and breaking the sound barrier introduce the reader to the unsung heroes (at least at that time) in the US’s race to produce the best and fastest flight tech. Many of the early test pilots had been tested in battle, either WWII or Korea or both. Some came from career military families and others were from fairly average backgrounds. In the 1950s, among the “brethren,” that is, the test pilots pushing the boundaries in Nevada and California, Chuck Yeager was recognized as the top of the heap. Yeager was a WWII battle veteran from West Virginia and, like other other pilots, seemed to have ice in his veins. One of the hallmarks of guys with the “right stuff” was unflappability, and Yeager had that in spades. Fun fact, the “pilot voice” that you hear on flights and that is parodied in comedy sketches originated with Chuck Yeager. Over time, other test pilots just started imitating him and the “pilot voice” became standard. Anyway, the test pilots stayed calm in the most harrowing situations and seemed at peace with the notion that they might not come back alive from a test flight. They were highly skilled aviators who had to be in tune with every part of the supersonic rockets they were flying. It was also accepted amongst the brethren that when someone bought it, it was his fault; clearly he didn’t have the right stuff after all. Wolfe also depicts the test pilot “culture” that I think became familiar to many of us in “Top Gun”; these were guys who felt the need for speed on the ground as well as in the air, and spent their off hours racing across the desert, drinking and getting friendly with the ladies. Test pilots were an elite club, and being at the top of their ranks was all any of them wanted.
Things began to change once the Soviets launched Sputnik and panic arose in the US government and among the population that the Russians were going to dominate space. One of the interesting things that I learned from this book is that the Russians were actually dominating the space race and handing us our asses when it came to launching satellites and manned rockets into space. They pretty much beat the US to everything except landing someone on the moon, which is not covered in this book. At any rate, the Kennedy administration and Congress committed big money to catching up and overtaking the Russians. The Mercury Program was meant to put Americans in space, and it was decided that the first astronauts should be experienced pilots with a college education. Yeager’s lack of a college education eliminated him from contention, but as it turns out, many of the elite test pilots were not even interested in the Mercury Program, because they all knew that the guys who got shot into space would not even need pilot skills. They would be no better than test monkeys. They would not actually fly the craft. Those who applied and were accepted had qualms about that themselves, but a mixture of patriotism, fear of missing out, and the desire to be the “first” at something as historic as a space mission, overcame those concerns. And those first “astronauts,” including the likes of John Glenn and Alan Shepherd, made a point of speaking up to NASA and its engineers about their desire to have functionality, operational significance, on the test flights. Eventually, those concerns were incorporated into planning, giving the astronauts more control over the capsules.
The personalities of these first astronauts and the roles of their wives and families make for interesting reading. John Glenn has a real “Superman/Boyscout” vibe about him, and some of the others, like Gus Grissom and Shepherd, come off as rather pompous assholes (which honestly is a pretty good descriptor of elite test pilots in general). The details of each man’s flight, the politics involved in Washington and at NASA, and the role of the press in turning these guys into American Heroes does make for fascinating reading. The test pilots out West kept thinking that everyone would surely recognize that these guys weren’t actually pilots any more, and they were constantly stymied by the press and popular adulation that the seven received. Clearly, getting to the top of the “ziggurat” was going to mean becoming an astronaut after all.
While I did find The Right Stuff an engrossing read, there were a few things about it that bothered me. Wolfe’s writing is quite colorful, but sometimes it just annoyed me. He is clearly not an historian who is going to stick to the facts; he is writing for a public used to Rolling Stone Magazine. So Wolfe spends a lot of time telling us what is going on in people’s heads and their feelings and ambitions, but I am not sure how accurate any of it is. Is it just speculation on his part or is this based on interviews of some sort? There are no footnotes and no bibliography, but he mentions a few books and people in his author’s note. Wolfe ends his narrative in 1963, claiming that astronauts were at this point recognized by other test pilots as being real pilots and therefore deserving of being at the top of the ziggurat; he also says the Cold War ended in 1963, which is nonsense. But overall it was a better read that I expected it to be.