The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe Page B

for beer call. When Flickinger explained to him that the first flight of the Mercury system would be made by a chimpanzee… well, Crossfield wasn't even particularly interested any more. Nor were most of the other pilots who were in line to fly the X-15.
A monkey's gonna make the first flight
. That was what you started hearing. Astronaut meant "star voyager," but in fact the poor devil would be a guinea pig for the study of the effects of weightlessness on the body and the central nervous system. As the brethren knew, NASA's original civil-service job specifications for Mercury astronaut did not even require that the star voyager be a pilot of any description whatsoever. Just about any young male college graduate with experience in a physically dangerous pursuit would do, so long as he was under five feet eleven and could fit into the Mercury capsule. The announcement calling for volunteers did mention test pilots as being among the types of men who might qualify, but it also mentioned submarine crew members, parachute jumpers, arctic explorers, mountain climbers, deep sea divers, even scuba divers, combat veterans, and, for that matter, mere veterans of combat training, and men who had served as test subjects for acceleration and atmospheric pressure tests, such as the Air Force and Navy had been running. The astronaut would not be expected to
do
anything; he only had to be able to take it.
    NASA was ready to issue the call when the President himself, Eisenhower, stepped in. He foresaw bedlam. Every lunatic in the U.S.A. would volunteer for this thing. Every dingaling in the U.S. Congress would be touting a favorite son. It would be chaos. The selection process might take months, and the inevitable business of security clearances would take a few more. Late in December Eisenhower directed that NASA select the astronauts from among the 540 military test pilots already on duty, even though they were rather overqualified for the job. The main thing was that their records were immediately available, they already had security clearances, and they could be ordered to Washington at a moment's notice. The specifications were that they be under five feet eleven and no older than thirty-nine and that they be graduates of test-pilot schools, with at least 1,500 hours of flying time and experience in jets, and that they have bachelor's degrees "or the equivalent." One hundred and ten of the pilots fit the profile. There were men on the NASA selection committee who wondered if the pool was big enough. They figured that they would be lucky if one test pilot in ten volunteered. Even that wouldn't be quite enough, because they were looking for twelve astronaut candidates. They only needed six for the flights themselves, but they assumed that at least half the candidates would drop out because of the frustration of training to become passive guinea pigs in an automated capsule.
    After all, they already knew how the leading test pilots at Edwards felt. North American had rolled out the first X-15 in the fall of 1958, and Crossfield and his colleagues, Joe Walker and Iven Kincheloe, had become absorbed in the assignment. Joe Walker was NASA's prime pilot for the project, and Kincheloe was prime pilot for the Air Force. Kincheloe had set the world altitude record of 126,000 feet in the X-2, and the Air Force envisioned him as the new Yeager… and then some. Kincheloe was a combat hero and test pilot from out of a dream, blond, handsome, powerful, bright, supremely ambitious and yet popular with all who worked with him, including other pilots. There was absolutely no ceiling on his future in the Air Force. Then one perfectly sunny day he was making a routine takeoff in an F-104 and the panel lit up red and he had
that one second
in which to decide whether or not to punch out at an altitude of about fifty feet… a choice complicated by the fact that the F-104's seat ejected straight down, out of the belly… and so he tried to roll the ship