The Right Stuff

"It’s probably a cliché to say that so often, amazing feats of science and human achievement are presented simply as ‘what happened’ without looking at the actual personalities involved. I think you can do that, but you miss the interplay between characters. This book takes you from the breaking of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager up to the start of the Apollo programme. It’s before all of the stuff that people would say is the heyday of NASA, like the moon landings and so on. It’s everything that happened before. It’s all the extraordinary things that people did. It’s what you can do if you have a mindset completely detached from worrying about your own safety, not caring about whether your spouse will be widowed and your children left without a parent. It’s a mindset of absolutely bloody-minded bravery, hubris almost, combined with an essentially unlimited budget to satisfy what was then a political agenda. Sign up here for our newsletter featuring the best children’s and young adult books, as recommended by authors, teachers, librarians and, of course, kids. Some of the stories in the book are slightly over-dramatised. As you say, he’s a novelist. But it’s just so compelling. Once you’ve started, you just can’t stop. It’s wonderful. The description of the breaking of the sound barrier is just inspiring and exciting. This is what people can do if people are single-minded and don’t take no for an answer. Yeager said, ‘I don’t believe the sound barrier exists, so I’m going to go and do it’. And so he did. And he did it with a broken rib! He’d fallen off his horse in the desert the day before. He didn’t want to tell anyone, because then they would’ve put someone else in the X1 to break the sound barrier for the first time. So, he got his navigator-engineer person to cut a length off a piece of wooden dowling. (In the film adaptation, it’s depicted as part of a mop, but I’m not sure if that’s true.) He fashioned it for a handle so he could keep his arm on his injured rib, and stick the handle in the door of the plane and yank it to close it. He was not going to be denied that first flight. And they knew every time they went up in these planes that there was about a one-in-three chance that they would die. In the Apollo missions—and this is when some of the kinks had been ironed out in the technology—they knew their chances of success were about 50/50. They knew this, and they did it anyway. Maybe it was folly, maybe it was hubris, but it is still amazingly wonderful hubris and it makes for a very good book. It gives you a really good sense of what it is really like to be in a rocket being fired up, and (especially on the re-entry) the physical strain that the body goes through under extreme accelerations. It’s all very well to say that on re-entry, they would be experiencing seven or eight or nine G, and they might black out, and so on. But we have transcripts of the actual radio communications with mission control about what these guys went through. They had monitors strapped to their entire bodies at the time and they were measuring everything. They were measuring magnetic field strength, and altitude, and pressure and acceleration—all these things. How extraordinary is it that people could actually do this, and that they actually wanted to? They wanted to put themselves on top of a bomb that was then lit up. How one experiences extremes of pressure and acceleration—there are really beautiful descriptions of those."