As a kid growing up during the Space Race era I always thought of the enterprise as a national effort and I was keenly aware of the efforts of literally thousands of people working together to make the moon landings possible. I suppose part of that was due to my father working as a civilian employee of the Air Force and our close proximity to an Air Force base drove home the fact that the pilots are but only one piece of a far bigger picture.
It wasn’t until I read The Right Stuff that the idea of a single combat warrior even dawned on me as an apt analogy! So at least for me the thesis of one overshadowing the other did not happen.
Gordon Cooper sure came out looking good in the movie, while Gus Grissom will forever be known as “Mr. Squirmin’ Hatch Blower”, later revelations with the recovery of Liberty Bell 7 notwithstanding.
I had the good fortune to read “The Right Stuff” just a couple of months before the first Shuttle flight in 1981. It gave me the background to appreciate it more, as well as Young and Crippen’s walkaround inspection of the craft after landing. That was what pilots do, as opposed to being plucked from the ocean by helicopter.
The Shuttle turned out to be less than what we hoped for, but in the beginning it seemed like we finally had the space plane that the early experiments in the 1950s pointed toward, before they were sidetracked by the space capsules in the 1960s.
Chuck Yeager is 95, and still alive. Wow.
In The Right Stuff, Wolfe acidly denigrates Neil Armstrong, using him as a negative contrast to Yeager. But in light of the Yeager NF-104 crash vs the Gemini 8 emergency, I think Wolfe was unfair to Armstrong.
Perhaps a seat-of-the-pants test pilot like Yeager is your man for winging it down in the soup. But in the counter-intuitive environment of space, you probably want a calculating pilot like Armstrong.
As a kid growing up during the Space Race era I always thought of the enterprise as a national effort and I was keenly aware of the efforts of literally thousands of people working together to make the moon landings possible. I suppose part of that was due to my father working as a civilian employee of the Air Force and our close proximity to an Air Force base drove home the fact that the pilots are but only one piece of a far bigger picture.
It wasn’t until I read The Right Stuff that the idea of a single combat warrior even dawned on me as an apt analogy! So at least for me the thesis of one overshadowing the other did not happen.
Gordon Cooper sure came out looking good in the movie, while Gus Grissom will forever be known as “Mr. Squirmin’ Hatch Blower”, later revelations with the recovery of Liberty Bell 7 notwithstanding.
I had the good fortune to read “The Right Stuff” just a couple of months before the first Shuttle flight in 1981. It gave me the background to appreciate it more, as well as Young and Crippen’s walkaround inspection of the craft after landing. That was what pilots do, as opposed to being plucked from the ocean by helicopter.
The Shuttle turned out to be less than what we hoped for, but in the beginning it seemed like we finally had the space plane that the early experiments in the 1950s pointed toward, before they were sidetracked by the space capsules in the 1960s.
Chuck Yeager is 95, and still alive. Wow.
In The Right Stuff, Wolfe acidly denigrates Neil Armstrong, using him as a negative contrast to Yeager. But in light of the Yeager NF-104 crash vs the Gemini 8 emergency, I think Wolfe was unfair to Armstrong.
http://www.kalimera.org/nf104/stories/stories_13.html
Perhaps a seat-of-the-pants test pilot like Yeager is your man for winging it down in the soup. But in the counter-intuitive environment of space, you probably want a calculating pilot like Armstrong.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/19/AR2009071901771_2.html?sid=ST2009071901829