American aviation legend Chuck Yeager is generally considered one of the best pilots of all time. In 1947, Yeager flew a Bell X-1 experimental aircraft to a record-breaking 45,000 feet in elevation, reaching a blistering speed of Mach 1.05. He was the first human confirmed to travel faster than the speed of sound. Just a few years later, rival pilot Scott Crossfield bested that record, taking his D-558-II Skyrocket aircraft to more than twice the speed of sound.
At the dawn of the space age, test pilots like these were snatching records from each other left and right, risking their lives to push aviation to speeds and heights unimaginable just 50 years earlier. And when the American space program was ready to start sending humans beyond the boundary of space, they trusted test pilots with the first pioneering missions into the final frontier.
These test pilots were said to embody “the right stuff,” as laid out in American journalist Tom Wolfe’s book of the same name. According to Wolfe, astronauts and test pilots at the beginning of the space race didn’t talk about fear or courage.
"Any fool can put his hide on the line and throw away his life in the process," Wolfe wrote in the series of Rolling Stone articles he’d eventually base his book on. "The idea is to be able to put your hide on the line — and then to have the moxie, the reflexes, the talent, the experience, to pull it back in at the last yawning moment — and then be able to go out again the next day and do it all over again — and, in its best expression, to be able to do it in some higher cause, in some calling that means something."
