I saw the movie, it’s one of my favorites. Is the book much better than the movie? (I guess they almost always are better)
Although at the time, the film was criticized as a campaign film for John Glenn, I always thought the movie was a hagiography for Yeager.
The film seems to want to show that Yeager and the “seat of the pants” flyboys were the true heroes and the astronauts were just celebrity dilettantes. They didn’t even fly their own craft (“They’re sending a monkey!”).
Specifically I refer to the scene near the end, where the astronauts are being given this huge banquet, with fan dancer Sally Rand, intercut (and perhaps happening at the same time) with the scene where Yeager “steals” the F104 and attempts a record flight, only to eject and nearly die. Contrast the somewhat silly fan dance scene with a burned and blackened Yeager walking across the lake bed with the smoking wreckage of his plane in the background, and tell me which one give you the most goose bumps? Do you want to be spam in a can, or Yeager?
Plus the movie really assassinated Gus Grissom’s memory. He wasn’t a “squirmin’ hatch blower”, and if he hadn’t died in Apollo 1 he likely would have been the first man on the moon. NASA thought he was just fine.
I don’t remember any of that from the book.
Just as a side note, Yeager being too old was my first thought, too, but he wasn’t. He was older than Armstrong or Aldrin, but he was about the same age as Alan Sheppard and two years younger than John Glenn. From an age standpoint he could easily have been part of MISS or the Mercury 7. If Ranger Jeff is right that he was excluded for not having a B.S. degree, that would have been pretty stupid. From the sounds of it, though, his personality could have been a huge [disqualifying] deal.
Yeager has admitted that he thinks the Edwards brass assigned him to the X-1 program because he’d be less missed than any other test pilot there. 
Although it must be “fruit of the vine”, it need not be red wine, though. White wine or white grape juice cut with water would look pretty clear. And Aldrin himself reports it explicitly as wine.
(BTW, to be exact in this particular case it would be Presbyterian, not Catholic, rite)
I just read that bit in Rocket Men. It was “a few drops of wine” and a single host.
Very enjoyable read. This bit really brought home the magnitude of the endeavor:
The book is MUCH better than the movie. It goes into the psychology of test pilots and the world they lived in. It goes into how one press conference shattered that world. And it goes into the infighting between the astronauts and the rest of NASA and between the astronauts themselves. Read the book. It’s an engrossing and entertaining read, especially for non-fiction.
Um, did you get the impression I meant NASA said, “We don’t want Yeager, so we’ll disqualify him because he doesn’t have a B.S. degree”? It wasn’t like that at all. First of all, at its inception, there wasn’t any piloting planned for the Mercury program. Astronauts were just going to be used as medical test subjects. All flight operations were to be either automated or controlled from the ground. Remember, a chimpanzee was going to make the first flight! They just wanted to see if humans could survive in a space capsule. NASA had originally planned open hiring which would have resulted in a flood of applications from race car drivers, trapeze artists, high dive ‘artists’, etcetera.
President Eisenhower put a stop to that when he said the astronauts would be test pilots. Military test pilots on active duty…
Hell, just read this.
Yeager never would have volunteered for Mercury anyway. In the world of test flight in his time, the goal was to be selected to make the first flight in an aircraft. In Mercury, a monkey made the first flight.
Wasn’t the first woman the Russians flew a gymnast?
Jeff, thanks for the info. That link was a good read too.
(URL here also: http://www.spaceline.org/astronauts/nasagroup1.html)
From what I remember of the movie The Right Stuff, it was consistent with the info on that page.
I’m on a 2-wk business trip and picked up a paperback copy of The Right Stuff just before leaving and started it. Am looking forward to it.
Do you think the plan was they could be sure she stuck the landing?
She was a skydiver.
Somewhat more practical than gym.
Mea culpa.
Especially because she flew as part of the Vostok program, which required the cosmonauts to eject from the descending spacecraft and land via parachute.