Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

Thus beat the mighty drum of martial superstition in the mid-twentieth century.

It was glorious! It was crazy! The following month, May, the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, of which McCormack was a member, called the seven astronauts before them in closed session. So the brave lads went to the Capitol for the secret proceedings. It was a strange and marvelous time. It became immediately apparent that from the committee chairman, Representative Overton Brooks, on down, no one had anything pertinent to ask them and nothing to tell them. The congressmen kept saying things like "As you men know, you are an outstanding group in our country and in our country's history." Or they would ask them questions that elicited choral responses. Brooks himself said, "All of you gentlemen have been in this type of work—that is, handling experimental planes—in the past, haven't you? You know what this is. You know that in handling any new experimental flying machine there is a certain type of risk. You understand that, isn't that right?" Then he peered beseechingly at the seven of them until they began chiming in, all at once: "Yes, sir!" "Right, sir!" "Certainly, sir!" "That's correct, sir!" There was something gloriously goofy about it. The congressmen in the room just wanted to see them, to use their position to arrange a personal audience, to gaze upon them with their own eyes across the committee table, no more than four feet away, to shake hands with them, occupy the same space on this earth with them for an hour or so, fawn over them, pay homage to them, bathe in their magical aura, feel the radiation of their righteous stuff, salute them, wish upon them the smile of God… and do their bit in bestowing honor upon them before the fact … upon our little Davids… before they got up on top of the rockets to face the Russians, death, flames, and fragmentation. (Ours all blow up!)

Chuck Yeager was in Phoenix to make one of his many public appearances on behalf of the Air Force. By now the Air Force couldn't publicize Yeager, breaker of the sound barrier, enough. Like the other branches of the service, the Air Force now saw that there was nothing like heroes and record holders for getting good press and whining appropriations. The only problem was that, in terms of publicity, every other form of flier was now overshadowed by the Mercury astronauts. As a matter of fact, today, in Phoenix, what was it the local reporters wanted to ask Chuck Yeager about? Correct: the astronauts. One of them got the bright idea of asking Yeager if he had any regrets about not being selected as an astronaut.

Yeager smiled and said, "No, they gave me the opportunity of a lifetime, to fly the X-1 and the X-1A, and that's more than a man could ask for, right there. They gave this new opportunity to some new fellows coming along, and that's what they ought to do."

"Besides," he added, "I've been a pilot all my life, and there won't be any flying to do in Project Mercury."

No flying ?—

That was all it took. The reporters looked stunned. In some way they couldn't comprehend immediately, Yeager was casting doubt on two undisputable facts: one, that the seven Mercury astronauts were chosen because they were the seven finest pilots in America, and two, that they would be pilots on the most daring flights in American history.

The thing was, he said, the Mercury system was completely automated. Once they put you in the capsule, that was the last you got to say about the subject.

Whuh!—

"Well," said Yeager, "a monkey's gonna make the first flight."

A monkey ?—

The reporters were shocked. It happened to be true that the plans called for sending up chimpanzees in both suborbital and orbital flights, identical to the nights the astronauts would make, before risking the men. But to just say it like that!… Was this national heresy? What the hell was it?

Fortunately for Yeager, the story didn't blow up into anything. The press, the eternal Victorian Gent, just couldn't deal with what he had said. The wire services wouldn't touch the remark. It ran in one of the local newspapers, and that was that.

But f'r chrissake—Yeager was only saying what was obvious to all the rocket pilots who had flown at Edwards. Here was everybody talking as if the Mercury astronauts would be the first men to ride rockets. Yeager had done precisely that more than forty times. Fifteen other pilots had done it also, and they had reached speeds greater than three times the speed of sound and an altitude of 126,000 feet, nearly twenty-five miles, and that was just the beginning. This very next month, June 1959, Scott Crossfield would begin the first testing of the X-15, designed for a pilot (a pilot , not a passenger) to take up to more than fifty miles, into space, at speeds approaching Mach 7.

All of this should have been absolutely obvious to anyone, even people who knew nothing about flying—and surely it would become clear that anybody in Project Mercury was more of a test subject than a pilot. Two of the people they chose weren't even in Fighter Ops. They had one excellent test pilot from Edwards, Deke Slayton, but he had never been high on the list of those considered for something like the X series. The other Air Force pilot, Grissom, was assigned to Wright-Pat and was doing more secondary testing than prime work. Two of the Navy guys, Shepard and Schirra, were good experienced test pilots, solid men, even though neither had done anything to make anybody's mouth fall open at Edwards. Glenn had made a name for himself by setting the speed record in the F8U, but he had not done much major flight test work, at least not by Edwards standards. Well, hell, what did anybody expect? Naturally they hadn't picked the seven hottest pilots they could find. They wouldn't be doing any flying!

Surely all this would become obvious in time… and yet it wasn't becoming obvious. Here at mighty Edwards itself the boys could feel the earth trembling. A great sliding of the templates was taking place inside the invisible pyramid. You could feel the old terrain crumbling, and… seven rookies were somehow being installed as the hottest numbers in flying—and they hadn't done a goddamned thing yet but turn up at a press conference!

From the very beginning this "astronaut" business was just an unbelievable good deal. It was such a good deal that it seemed like tempting fate for an astronaut to call himself an astronaut, even though that was the official job description. You didn't even refer to the others as astronauts. You'd never say something such as "I'll take that up with the other astronauts." You'd say, "I'll take that up with the other fellows" or "the other pilots." Somehow calling yourself an "astronaut" was like a combat ace going around describing his occupation as "combat ace." This thing was such an unbelievable good deal, it was as if "astronaut" were an honorific, like "champion" or "superstar," as if the word itself were one of the infinite variety of goodies that Project Mercury was bringing your way.

And not just goodies in the crass sense, either. It had all the things that made you feel good, including the things that were good for the soul. For long stretches you'd bury yourself in training, in blissful isolation, good rugged bare-boned isolation, in Low Rent surroundings, in settings that even resembled hallowed Edwards in the old X-1 days, and with that same pioneer spirit, which money cannot buy, and with everybody pitching in and working endless hours, so that rank meant nothing, and people didn't even have the inclination, much less the time, to sit around and make the usual complaints about government work.

And then, just about the time you were entering a good healthy state of exhaustion from the work, they would take you out of your isolation and lead you up to that balcony that all fighter jocks secretly dreamed of, the one where you walked out before the multitudes like the Pope, and… it actually happened! The people of America cheered their brains out for thirty minutes or so, and then you went back into your noble isolation for more work… or for a few proficiency runs at nailing down the holy coordinates of the fighter jock's life, which were, of course, Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving and the rest of it. These things you could plot on the great graph of Project Mercury in the most spectacular way, with the exception of the first: Flying. The lack of flying time was troubling, but the other items existed in such extraordinary dimensions that it was hard to concentrate on it at first. Any man who wasn't above a little regrouping now and then, to keep the highly trained mechanism from being wound up too tight, to "maintain an even strain," in the Schirra parlance, found himself in absolute Fighter Jock Heaven. But even the rare pilot who was aloof from such cheap thrills, such as the deacon, John Glenn, found plenty of goodies to even out the strain of hard work and mass adoration.