Unlike the revered test pilots, however, the Mercury astronaut was just ‘spam in a can’. When the tape stopped, wrote Wolfe, ‘everybody around the table would look at one another and nod ever so slightly, and the unspoken message was: Too bad! There was a man with the right stuff.’ In one scene Wolfe describes how the pilots would listen to the inflight recordings of colleagues who had died in air accidents – those last seconds as the plane dived and they were shouting ‘for one last hopeless crumb of information’ that might rectify the situation. In many respects The Right Stuff follows the Glenn career trajectory: Wolfe begins the book by drawing us into the glamorous if lethal world of America’s test flight pilots in the 1940s and 1950s – pilots like Chuck Yeager, who broke the sound barrier on 14 October 1947 in an X-1, men who were determined to push the envelope in planes that, in Wolfe’s memorable phrase, ‘were like chimneys with little razor-blade wings on them, you had to be “afraid to panic”.’ Senator for three decades and returned to space aboard the shuttle in 1998.) Glenn was a former Second World War fighter pilot, who became a test pilot after the war, before volunteering for Project Mercury. Related: Step inside the hometown of the first man in space. His flight lasted four hours and 55 minutes but it granted him an eternal fame in the annals of space exploration. Then they went one better, when another of the Mercury Seven, John Glenn, orbited the Earth three times aboard Friendship 7on 20 February 1962. In 1961 astronaut Alan Shepard become the first American in space. While the Soviets got there first – when in 1961 Yuri Gagarin was blasted into outer space – the U.S. was not far behind.
Sputnik lit the touch paper of the space race, leading to the creation of NASA in 1958 and start of Project Mercury, the American bid to get the first man in space.
That’s when Russia shocked the world – and particularly the USA – by launching Sputnik, the world’s first satellite into orbit. ‘In the twentieth century, he said, they would regard the military pilot as the quintessence of manly daring that the cavalryman had been in the nineteenth.’Īnd this was true – until 1957. In The Anatomy of Courage, ‘Moran predicted that in the wars of the future adventurous young men who sought glory in war would tend to seek it as pilots,’ wrote Wolfe.
Wolfe credits Winston Churchill’s personal doctor Charles Moran – who had served as a doctor in the trenches of the First World War – with helping to locate the answer.
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