The Right Stuff

In addition to titling the book with this phrase, Wolf introduces the notion of “the right stuff” in Chapter 2 to refer to the otherwise unnamed and unspoken qualities of a top military test pilot (17-18). Though bravery is obviously a component of “the right stuff,” Wolfe presents it as a complex concept. “No, the idea here (in the all-enclosing fraternity),” he writes, “seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawing moment” (17). For Wolfe, then, “the right stuff” constitutes a certain attitude in the context of the extreme flight conditions that boils down to the simple binary of “Right Stuff/Death” (25). To have “the right stuff” is not merely to brave test flight and survive, but to do so in a certain way, with a vague but unmistakable swagger.

For the military test pilot community, the ideal of “the right stuff” is embodied by Chuck Yeager, whose record-breaking flights involved close brushes with death. The challenge for the first American astronauts,