The Right Stuff

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Mercury "Friendship 7" on display in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall at the Museum in Washington, DC. Vernon Scott, article "Schirra debunks notions about astronauts," The Tribune newspaper, San Diego, CA, 9 May 1985, p. D-12. Our [qualification] physical was very much like the one that they show in the movie 'The Right Stuff', just about all the same stuff," Carr said to NASA in 2000; he died earlier this year. "We didn't have any of the comedians like [astronaut] Pete Conrad in the movie, but there was lots of good memories about that. It's an unforgettable experience, I'll tell you."

This was the award for General Nonfiction (hardcover) during a period in National Book Awards history when there were many nonfiction subcategories. Grissom was one of the original seven Mercury astronauts, and the second to go into space. After his capsule splashed down, its hatch blew before the recovery helicopter arrived and the spacecraft sank, marring a near-flawless mission. No one was able to determine the cause of the incident (even after the capsule was recovered from the ocean floor thirty years later) but the universal consensus among NASA's engineers and astronauts was that mechanical failure couldn't be ruled out, and that Grissom deserved the benefit of the doubt. A book about space program is exactly what I normally would get all “Oooh, shiny!” about. It’s the stuff I love dearly and will happily lap up. But this one — despite an interesting promise it kept periodically hitting the false notes, feeling a little too much, too overdone, too weirdly subjective, too reliant on creating excitement out of everything, too gleefully dwelling on the gruesomeness of tragedies, too reliant on verbal lists like the one I just created, plus ellipses and exclamation points. Goldman, William (1989). Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting (reissue ed.). Grand Central Publishing. ISBN 0-446-39117-4. The film was later expanded into its titular franchise, including a television series and a documentary film.In his review for Newsweek, David Ansen wrote: "When The Right Stuff takes to the skies, it can't be compared with any other movie, old or new: it's simply the most thrilling flight footage ever put on film". [4] Gary Arnold in his review for the Washington Post, wrote: "The movie is obviously so solid and appealing that it's bound to go through the roof commercially and keep on soaring for the next year or so". [35] In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby praised Shepard's performance: "Both as the character he plays and as an iconic screen presence, Mr. Shepard gives the film much well-needed heft. He is the center of gravity". [43] Pauline Kael wrote: "The movie has the happy, excited spirit of a fanfare, and it's astonishingly entertaining, considering what a screw-up it is". [44] Wolfe's maximalist style – full of exclamation marks!!! ... ellipses ... and repeated italicized phrases that take on the rhythm of great jazz – is perfectly suited to his gargantuan, ego-driven, patriotic, rah-rah subject matter. It's about narrative. Excitement. And if even a tiny bit of that goes away, then the support of the public will kill it. The Mercury Seven astronauts were mostly negative about the film. In an early interview, Deke Slayton said that none of the film "was all that accurate, but it was well done." [47] However, in his memoirs, Slayton described the film as being "as bad as the book was good, just a joke". [48] Wally Schirra liked the book a lot, but expressed disappointment and dislike for the movie, and he never forgave the producers for portraying Gus Grissom as a "bungling sort of coward", which was totally untrue. [49] In an interview, Schirra said: "It was the best book on space, but the movie was distorted and warped... All the astronauts hated [the movie]. We called Colin Greenland reviewed The Right Stuff for Imagine, and stated: "It is the film's willingness to question [...] idealism, while laying down some very fine footage of things that are moving very fast, which makes The Right Stuff thoroughly absorbing for nearly three and a quarter hours." [45]

Despite its strident refusal to be a standard history, there is certainly a chronology at play. Beginning with Yeager breaking the sound barrier, Wolfe moves along the timeline, faithfully recounting the famed suborbital flight of Alan Shepard, the botched capsule egress of Gus Grissom, and John Glenn’s orbital journey. Still, The Right Stuff is less an intellectual exercise than a book that is designed to appeal to – and sometimes assault – your senses. In other words, if you’re looking for a rigorous analysis of the space program or technological explanations of the equipment that allowed the Mercury Seven to leave earth, this isn’t the place to start. Other notable inaccuracies include: early termination of Glenn's flight after three orbits instead of seven (in reality, the flight was scheduled for at most three orbits); the engineers who built the Mercury craft are portrayed as Germans (in reality, they were mostly Americans). [9] Film models [ edit ] A replica of the Glamorous Glennis which was used in filming The Right Stuff. Now on display at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas. The same museum has the flown Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft on display. Now, I think it's likely that he was trying to "be one of the guys" and act as cavalier about death as they had to be... but he wasn't "one of the guys". He was writing about them, interviewing them, and portraying THEIR story to readers who have no idea what that life is like. The author, a good author, would take all of that and clarify it, and present it in a way that doesn't change or take away from the experiences and interviews, but makes it feel real and substantial without being cruel about it. This just did not work for me. I don’t want to give the impression that the storyteller overwhelms the story. Wolfe’s talent is evident in every polished sentence, yet all his tools are being used in service of the material he is presenting. He’s not showing off. Well, he’s probably showing off a little. But there is a method and meaning to everything he does. I didn’t so much learn about Project Mercury as I felt it in all its intensity.Why ask now?" she wanted to say. But they wouldn't have had the faintest notion of what she was talking about. Much of the work’s magic comes from the wondrous way in which Wolfe blended teaching and entertaining. He delved into the concept of the “righteous stuff,” perhaps understood to be cool bravery, which the author suggested separated the best pilots from everyone else. He studied the subculture among these men and the mass hysteria, driven by fears of Soviet Communist space supremacy, which surrounded these original seven astronauts. It’s as much an examination of American culture as a history book. But throughout, the pace never slows, the read never grows dull, and the text’s amusing wit and charm never fails. Wolfe evocatively portrayed the places and the people who made the United States early human spaceflights happen. And then there's this: "By 1949 the girls had begun turning up at Pancho's in amazing numbers. They were young, lovely, juicy, frisky—and there were so many of them, at all hours, every day of the week! And they were not prostitutes, despite the accusations made later. They were just… well, just young juicy girls in their twenties with terrific young conformations and sweet cupcakes and loamy loins. They were sometimes described with a broad sweep as "stewardesses," but only a fraction of them really were. No, they were lovely young things who arrived as mysteriously as the sea gulls who sought the squirming shrimp. They were moist labial piping little birds who had somehow learned that at this strange place in the high Mojave lived the hottest young pilots in the world and that this was where things were happening." Crammed with inside poop and racy incident . . . fast cars, booze, astro groupies, the envies and injuries of the military caste system . . . Wolfe lays it all out in brilliantly staged Op Lit scenes.” — Time

As he once went about making English intelligible, Bryson now attempts the same with the great moments of science, both the ideas themselves and their genesis, to resounding success. Piqued by his own ignorance on these matters, he’s egged on even more so by the people who’ve figured out—or think they’ve figured out—such things as what is in the center of the Earth. So he goes exploring, in the library and in company with scientists at work today, to get a grip on a range of topics from subatomic particles to cosmology. The aim is to deliver reports on these subjects in terms anyone can understand, and for the most part, it works. The most difficult is the nonintuitive material—time as part of space, say, or proteins inventing themselves spontaneously, without direction—and the quantum leaps unusual minds have made: as J.B.S. Haldane once put it, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” Mostly, though, Bryson renders clear the evolution of continental drift, atomic structure, singularity, the extinction of the dinosaur, and a mighty host of other subjects in self-contained chapters that can be taken at a bite, rather than read wholesale. He delivers the human-interest angle on the scientists, and he keeps the reader laughing and willing to forge ahead, even over their heads: the human body, for instance, harboring enough energy “to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.” Farmer, Jim. "Filming the Right Stuff." Air Classics, Part One: Vol. 19, No. 12, December 1983, Part Two: Vol. 20, No. 1, January 1984. Like many other wives in Group 20 Jane wanted to talk about the whole situation, the incredible series of fatal accidents, with her husband and the other members of the Group, to find out how they were taking it. But somehow the unwritten protocol forbade discussions of this subject, which was the fear of death. Nor could Jane or any of the rest of them talk, really have a talk, with anyone around the base. You could talk to another wife about being worried. But what good did it do? Who wasn't worried? You were likely to get a look that said: " Why dwell on it?" Jane might have gotten away with divulging the matter of the nightmares. But hallucinations? There was no room in Navy life for any such anomalous tendency as that.And you're there when some Friend of Widows and Orphans comes to your door after there's been an accident. . . Barely a week had gone by before another member of the Group was coming in for a landing in the same type of aircraft, the A3J, making a ninety-degree turn to his final approach, and something went wrong with the controls, and he ended up with one rear stabilizer wing up and the other one down, and his ship rolled in like a corkscrew from 800 feet up and crashed, and he was burned beyond recognition. And the bridge coats came out and they sang about those in peril in the air and then they put the bridge coats away and after dinner one night they mentioned that the departed had been a good man but was inexperienced, and when the malfunction in the controls put him in that bad corner, he didn't know how to get out of it. These astronauts who were also fighter pilots didn’t know how this new title and opportunity was going to play out for them. It was a risk that wound up paying off huge because of the patriotism they represented to Americans and the willingness to risk their lives for their country. These men became celebrities as a result of the Space Race with the Soviet Union. People were engaged in what was happening in the country and aware and supportive of the strides that the NASA program was taking. Reading about how invested we were as a nation in these men and their abilities brought me to tears. I want this mindset for our country now. We need something like this that can unite us and help us to grow together and not divide us. These first astronauts and their missions drew the public together in a way that promoted patriotism and love of country. On May 15, 1963, Cooper has a successful launch on Mercury-Atlas 9, ending the Mercury program. As the last American to fly into space alone, he "went higher, farther, and faster than any other American ... for a brief moment, Gordo Cooper became the greatest pilot anyone had ever seen." The movie also provoked strong opinions from some of those who joined the NASA astronaut corps later in the 1960s, during the Gemini and Apollo programs. Those astronauts interacted directly with the real-life people featured in "The Right Stuff," allowing them to think critically about the story's accuracy.

The cold war aspect was at its apex, and these men considered their mission a holy war against the Russians for control of space. At the time it was believed the winner could fling nuclear weapons at their opponent, so the men who succeeded were regarded as heroes (Wolfe explains how in some histories, e.g. David and Goliath, the best single warriors would sometimes fight to determine victors, avoiding the carnage of full army battles). He goes into gory detail on how the aircraft and their engines eventually made that first sonic boom and exceeded the speed of sound (Mach 1) which had been thought to be a natural barrier, and unachievable. Eventually they blew that away (Mach 6) as technology and know-how for controlling these machines improved. The race to put a man in space, at least 50 miles above the earth, became the focus. What surprised me was that the Russians basically won every contest in those times, they had better technology and would consistently embarrass the United States by winning at every turn (un-manned, then a dog in space, finally a man, then a woman, then multiple spacecraft).

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In his books, Wolfe, who has been credited as one of the creators of what has been labeled the ”New Journalism,” used the techniques of journalistic research to gather his facts and to interpret them, and then he applied novelistic techniques to tell the story of actual people and events. The result is that “The Right Stuff” not only rests on a solid factual foundation, but it also reads like a good adventure novel. The last part of the book slows down some again, but does have it's definite highlights, such as the "astronaut charm school" teaching such indispensable knowledge as what way your thumbs should be pointed, should you ever put your hands on your hips. (Which, as we all know, probably should be avoided altogether). Another great part is the failed Yeager attempt to set a new altitude record for the souped-up version of the F-104 fighter plane. Another fact that had been altered in the film was the statement by Trudy Cooper, who commented that she "wondered how they would've felt if every time their husband went in to make a deal, there was a one-in-four chance he wouldn't come out of that meeting". According to the book, this actually reflected the 23% chance of dying during a 20-year career as a normal pilot. For a test pilot, these odds were higher, at 53%, but were still considerably less than the movie implied. In addition, the movie merely used the fictional Mrs. Cooper as a vehicle for the statement; the real Mrs. Cooper is not known to have said this. [11] Technically accurate, learned, cheeky, risky, touching, tough, compassionate, nostalgic, worshipful, jingoistic . . . The Right Stuff is superb.” — The New York Times Book Review