The Right Stuff

He was right to love it.

Chuck Yeager's autobiography, written with Leo Janos, is the primary source for most of what I shared today, and Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff fills in the atmosphere in a way nobody has matched before or since.

Technical documentation lives in the NASA Historical Records RadioHangar.com. I'm Taildragger.

Command assignments, Vietnam era service, and eventually retirement as a brigadier general in 1975.

When Tom Wolfe published The Right Stuff in 1979, a whole new generation met Yeager for the first time, and the book captured something real about him.

There was a quality to the man that defied the celebrity culture that eventually surrounded test pilots.

He was not interested in the mythology.

It's a weird philosophy.

There was a wonderful book that Tom Wolfe wrote called The Right Stuff, which is about the early fighter pilots who became astronauts, and John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, but also the ones who didn't make it.

And he has a wonderful chapter where he talks about how you kind of – semi-rationalize and say, it wouldn't have happened to me.

He made that mistake rappelling off the end of the rope.

By then, Jaeger had flown the X-1 dozens more times, pushed deeper into the numbers, and turned a single milestone into a full body of knowledge about supersonic flight.

The full story found the audience it deserved in 1979, when Tom Wolfe wrote about it in The Right Stuff.

That book gave a generation that grew up after the fact the whole picture.

Poncho Barnes Barr, the culture of the pilots at Muroc, the dry lake bed and the way the desert looked at dawn, the bureaucratic fights and the quiet courage and the piece of broomstick.

It was a door.

And a 24-year-old kid from West Virginia opened it with two broken ribs and a piece of sawed-off broomstick.

Much of this comes from Yeager's own autobiography, from Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, and from the historical records maintained at Edwards Air Force Base.

Find us at RadioHanger.com. I'm Tail Dragger.

That thing is a hog.

Instead, I would read Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff.

It has all the technical lingo in there, but it's fun and fast-paced.

All of this, by the way, would be tricking my brain into not being scared of these words and these people.

And this book, I was a TA at Rutgers.

It's called The Right Stuff.

It's about NASA, and it's an amazing book.

Maybe I'll do my quote from here.

Maybe I'll do the quote from here.

I'll look up the chapter.

And I TA'd for this class, Mike, and they were assigned the right stuff.

And I saw in the syllabus that it was about NASA.

It shows up on its own, usually somewhere out in the mountains or the coal country or the grass strip flatlands, and it is waiting there when you need it.

Most of what I've drawn on today comes from General Yeager's autobiography written with Leo Janos, Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, and the National Air and Space Museum archives on the X-1 program.

You can find us at RadioHangar.com. I'm Tail Dragger.

Keep the greasy side down.