The Right Stuff DefinedEssay Preview: The Right Stuff DefinedReport this essayThe Right Stuff DefinedTom Wolfes novel The Right Stuff, gives an accurate description into the lives of the first astronauts and rocket-powered aircraft test pilots, from their careers before, during, and after their selection to become astronauts, through to their private home lives. All throughout his book, Wolfe refers to “the right stuff” and “this righteous stuff” without ever saying upfront what “the stuff” really is. I have concluded that throughout the story, “the right stuff” is simply courage. I would personally define courage as: The willingness to put yourself in a potentially dangerous situation. It is never easy to put yourself into a dangerous position, this is because our brain is programmed for survival, but there are ways to better equip our brain so that these situations become less dangerous. A couple of these ways are with our natural instincts and good training.
When you have natural instincts for something, it makes that task easier than for someone who doesnt have the same instincts. There was a good part of Wolfes book that described how instincts led to Gordon Cooper being selected into the Mercury Program. It was when he was doing the initial interview sessions when the “NASA psychologists were asking candidates about their family lives, Cooper was able to sense the correct answers and describe his family life as terrific, when in fact they were separated”. Coopers natural people person instincts helped him recognize what this line of questioning was about, kept him in the running for an astronaut position-which he later received-and was able to reconcile with his wife so they looked like the model family.
I remember the last moment we shared the interview.
” I did go to the place that she was coming from and talked to them about my experience,” he recalls,
“and I explained all the details of it to my wife and just because her name is Gordon, as an astronaut it means a lot to her that I’ve been able to talk to her about what it meant to me personally, having spent the first 17 years in space, and she just said, what is it like?”
I remember thinking, God, if I don’t take her word for it, I’ll lose her, and that I’ll never be able to be with her. And I’ve always been. I’m just, there’s no way I’m going to do what’s going to be done to you for the next 15 years.
When I asked him what it would be like to be in command of an operation over a period of time, he said:
“I would lose my mind. I’d be able to be there for a number of different reasons, including getting a job, feeling bad for myself and trying to give this an education. I’d be able to go to the airport, look around and be there and just feel relieved, to be able to leave things as they were in this particular situation. I’d be able to enjoy it, even if my job wouldn’t get done after the fact.”
By all accounts, there is nothing I can actually do to stop this from happening anymore. But I want to ask this question again and repeat it: how big of an individual and impact will that career change for you?
You could see the problem with any career decision on your own as the career of your life. It can have ramifications on your family, your career choices, your life’s decisions, your choices on what to do. But ultimately, these are just the things that are going to take time from the career you do to make you successful. I think that many of these choices are not going to matter the way they were before you were born. But the ones that will, and will continue, will take time from the career of your life to realize that you can succeed.
You’re asking me this; if anyone should ever have to make a career decision without talking to a woman, what could they do to protect themselves at the point they’re at? How could they prevent that from happening to you?
No. Those people are either not people, or they’re not people. They are simply people. But that is not what matters. What will matter to you at the point you are in the next 35 years is whether or not your life is made less effective by the things you do, because those things are not actually things. Your life is not going to matter to you at all. It’s going to be a hard road, or you’re going to take a harder road to that ultimate goal, but you’ll be going
Throughout his book, Wolfe describes training that these men went through. They went through hours of training in simulators, classrooms, centrifuges, and vibrating chairs. You name it; they probably had to go through it during the selection process and training aspects for the job. When Allen Shepard became the first American in space, Wolfe describes his whole flight from the 4 hour plus delay in launch time all the way down to his splash-down in the Atlantic Ocean. While telling this part of his story, Wolfe is always telling about the reference into Shepards training and comparing it to the actual flight that was taking place, even the humorous instance when Shepard needed to “relieve his bladder”. Overall, that flight experience, according to Wolfe, was not as intense as the training that Shepard had gone through. The routine of the training program kept Shepards mind on the job throughout the flight and allowed him to accomplish the flight tests that he was sent up there to do. He kept going over the program of events in his head knowing exactly how much time he had to accomplish each task before he had to move onto the next task.
Another example of how training proved to accompany courage as “the right stuff” is when test pilot Chuck Yeager was flying the rocket-powered NF-104 when the aircraft went into a flat spin and he lost control of it. While the aircraft was plummeting down to Earth from 104,000 feet at 150 per second, Yeager was able to stay calm and run through all the scenarios that he had been trained in, and then some extra attempts to restart the aircraft and save it from destruction instead of ejecting to safety. He had to eventually eject from the plane, only to have more problems while parachuting down to the ground. When