Inside Look at Americans' First Foray Into Outer Space

The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, tells the story of the United States' early space race against the Soviet Union. Its central focus is the original seven astronauts and the Mercury program whose goal was to put men in orbit around the earth.

Thanks to Wolfe's book, just about everyone today knows the "the right stuff" refers to the courage and coolness under life-threatening pressures that people such as astronauts or test pilots need in order to function effective at their jobs. When the book first came out in 1979 the title seemed a little obscure, at least to me. It is a testament to the book's impact that this is no longer the case.

One of Wolfe's greatest strengths is his ability to analyze and describe American subcultures, and the world of the fighter jock and test pilots of the 1950s and early 1960s provides a perfect milieu for him to explore. He begins his story not with the establishment of the Mercury program, but with the experiences of Navy and Air Force test pilots such as Pete Conrad and Chuck Yeager. Wolfe takes us with Conrad to the horrendous crash site of one of Conrad's fellow pilots and describes how Conrad must repeatedly bring his dress uniform out of his closet to attend a succession of funerals of others from his flight test class who died while testing the weaknesses of new aircraft. He also describes the circumstances behind Yeager's successful attempt to break the sound barrier. We learn that he had broken some ribs in a horse riding accident a couple of days before. A doctor had taped him up, but Yeager kept it a secret from the brass so as not to jeopardize his chances of completing the mission. A friend helped by improvising a stick with which he could close the hatch of his X-15 experimental jet, a task that his injury wouldn't allow him to perform otherwise. The G-forces and intense turbulence that he would encounter were not a deterrence. Yeager truly seems cut from a different cloth from most of the rest of us.

Wolfe examines the character traits that set these men apart, and he also portrays each of the men as individuals with distinctive personality traits all their own. As a group, all the original seven astronauts were intensely competitive with large egos and a positive faith in their ability to rise above any dangerous situation in which they might find themselves. Monetary rewards took a distant backseat to their work, though they hungrily accepted any perks that supplemented their meager military pay. As individuals, some had looser morals than others, some were higher strung, some were more happily married, and some were more by-the-book, following orders to the letter. Al Shephard, the first American in space, had a dual personality that could at times be fun-loving and at other times be regulation serious. John Glenn was the boy scout of the group, but with a fierce independent streak. He'd throw his full body and soul behind any order he believed legitimate, but give him an order that seemed out-of-bounds and he'd balk, such as when he was ordered to get his wife to agree to a high-publicity meeting with vice-president Lyndon Johnson at a time that she was feeling insecure and vulnerable. He told his wife he was behind her.

Now that the early space race has receded into the distant past, it's valuable to have Wolfe's history. I'd come to associate the formation of the space program with President Kennedy's administration, but it was President Eisenhower who began it and created NASA as a civilian agency, separate from the Air Force whose experimental aircraft was probing the boundary between the upper atmosphere and space. Wolfe follows the rivalry between the Air Force and NASA throughout the book, as well as NASA's fiercer rivalry with the Soviet Union's space program. Wolfe describes the uncertainties created when Kennedy was elected and no one was certain he would continue to support the program. The Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis also brought their own set of jitters, as did the Soviet Union's uncanny ability to one-up the American space efforts every step of the way. Finally, the nuclear non-proliferation treaty that the United States signed with the Soviet Union ushered in its own transformations, with greater cooperation being the watchword.

Deep veins of irony and dark humor run through Wolfe's book. It's fun to read, somewhat like a Kurt Vonnegut novel. You read about a meeting of some of the test pilots considering applying to become an astronaut at which it was strongly argued, by Wally Schirra in particular, that it would probably derail their chances to advance their careers. Pete Conrad was there, and though he volunteered to become an astronaut, he took a lackadaisical attitude toward the preliminary testing which probably caused him to be "left behind" (Wolfe's dreaded term for being culled from the program). At the start of the program, it looked like the pilots' original evaluation was correct. The astronaut volunteers were derided by their test pilot brethren. After all, they were more like medical test subjects than pilots, little better than the chimpanzees that were to precede them on both their first sub-orbital and orbital flights. They didn't actually fly anything. They just went along for the ride. But a strange thing happened as the Mercury program progressed. The astronauts were able to wrench more control over the capsule from the engineers so that soon they had influence over the re-entry process, at least. The public went into a frenzy over every new launch. The astronauts were lionized, their perks became substantial, and their stature was vaulted above the test pilots whose own test flight projects became increasingly to seem like dead end jobs. When the next call for volunteers went out, Pete Conrad applied again, but this time he took the preliminary testing seriously.

A couple more of the many instances of irony are the inability of the brightest engineers to foresee the need of an astronaut, strapped into his capsule inside a pressure suit, to relieve himself after waiting for hours through various holds in a launch sequence, and the public response to John Glenn's first orbital flight which completely overshadowed Al Shephard's first American into orbit, while Gus Grissom's sub-orbital flight, which came in between, was met largely with indifference.

The most engrossing parts of the book, for me, are the accounts of the six Mercury launches which are told from an inside-the-space-capsule point of view, and also the accounts of Chuck Yeager's record-setting test flights, the last and most pulse-pounding of which closes the book. All these accounts are very exciting, despite knowing how they turn out, just as the movie, Apollo 13, keeps you totally engaged.

Tom Wolfe's writing style is somewhat idiosyncratic, but not overbearingly so. He likes to insert phrases repeatedly, such as our rockets always blow up or flying and drinking, and drinking and driving which act like mini-parodies of Greek choruses. He's also fond of using cartoonish labels, such as calling the Soviet Union the "mighty Integral" or the press "the great Victorian Animal." I think these detract somewhat from his book as an historic account, but I still found The Right Stuff to be enjoyable and instructive.