“You want the earth to shake and spit fire, you want the sky to split apart and for God to pour out.”
-Bruce Springsteen



There's an element to the movie that ties it to The Rookie, but that element's not
just Dennis Quaid or any sentimental “hero” or “childhood dream” fluff. It has
more to do with a more rare quality in Hollywood films. The film successfully
captures a slice of America usually looked upon by elite Hollywood with brief
condescension. The fine cast of the movie use a more technocratic strand of the
normal “redneck” vernacular spoken by blue color Americans, just as it really
was, I reckon. Being upwardly mobile members of the Cold War military, they
live as drifters, and pushing the envelope of the right stuff, they live in an almost
necessary “roughneck” culture.

These terms “redneck” and “roughneck” in the
elite white color culture have negative connotations to the point most directors or authors can't treat these people as more than crude abreactions. Therefore we're fed the night-riding racist illiterate archetype of Walker Texas Ranger. But Philip Kaufman and Tom Wolfe give us the earnest, diligent, casually honest people that really come out of the coal country of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, and the similar ethics of the blond freckled Ohio Presbyterian. At the same time, Wolfe, a writer who has a background in journalism, didn't let them get away with painting
a portrait of sainthood, either. But that wasn't a problem, the pilots cooperated, let
him into their cult of personality. Because, quite frankly, they were tired of having
to “put on the halo and lie.”

They cursed, drank, and caroused dangerously under the pretense of proving the had the endurance worthy of the right stuff.

A major theme of the movie was that the uneducated one, Yeager, was at the top
of the totem even without going to space. He was the purest, dedicated to the
profession of piloting. It is implied he wasn't really passed over for lack of a
formal college education, but because he wouldn't compromise himself by
performing the same duty a “college-trained monkey” could do. This implied he
had dignity, a pride in his work ethic, an unwillingness to take a free ride. Being a
passenger, an astronaut, on a capsule for chimps wasn't worthy of the right stuff.

The Mercury Seven, once they learned the truth, felt vulgar, as low as test
dummies, even if the not-yet-cynical press and public didn't see it that way. After
all, our rockets always blow up. So, in the height of a national crisis (President
Eisenhower had a heart attack around that time, Jeff Goldblum frantically
dispatches urgent news about the Russians), the astronauts- no!- pilots, refuse to
go up without stick-and-rudder control... and a window!

The German scientists are appalled by their demands. No bucks, no Buck Rogers. But NASA complies,
allowing the pilots to retain the self-value that comes with the mystic of the right stuff.

In the end, it turned out the pilots weren't in complete control of what it meant to
have the right stuff. They believed flight hours in a worthy machine, a fighter,
counted a great deal. The scientists disagreed. Abnormal vital signs could sideline
a pilot. Something as trivial was how fast Grissom's heart beat could make the
guys in lab coats question his aptitude for flying. No matter. To save their cult of
personality, they adapted. From then on, they'd compete for lowest pulse and
blood pressure. The bipolar Shepard always settled into his cooler persona, to the
point of performing his trademark ethnic humor in the capsule. Cooper became for
frigid than Hannibal Lecter. To the German scientists, this was perplexing. Our
rockets always blow up. The pilots must be fatalists! They were just adaptable to
evolving standards. If they weren't, they wouldn't have been combat and test
pilots.

Afterward

Chuck Yeager was the commandant of the military space flight school until LBJ

closed it down. He returned to combat, this time in Vietnam, where he flew B-57s.

He also got an F-4 Wing, before becoming the Air Force's adviser to Pakistan. After retirement, he flew in the private sector as none-other-than a test pilot. He made a cameo in the movie, and flew chase for the secret B-2 stealth program. The last I checked, he was flying a piston engine Mustang at air shows.

John Glenn joined the senate in Ohio before and after returning to space as the world's oldest astronaut. He never achieved his goal of being elected POTUS.

Al Shepard actually got to touch the moon. He was also for a time the President of the RC Cola Company.

Sources Cited

The Right Stuff, directed by Philip Kaufman

The Right Stuff, written by Thomas Wolfe

Yeager written by Chuck Yeager and Leo Janos