It’s worse than I thought. Thanks.
Don’t forget: General Yeager has a long-standing grudge against NASA. When they were considering candidates for the initial astronaut cadre, Yeager was rejected almost immediately, for a several of reasons.
First, despite his outstanding record as a combat pilot and test pilot, Yeager never earned a college diploma, while many of those selected by NASA had strong engineering backgrounds and many had graduate degrees. In other words, he didn’t fit the mold that NASA was trying to establish for its astronauts—a mold that still exists today.
Secondly, General Yeager is plain-spoken to a fault, and I’m sure that NASA was fearful of him rocking the boat, or saying something “inappropriate” in front of the wrong crowd. True, many of the early astronauts were hell-raisers and two-fisted drinkers, but they knew how to play the game, and turn on the charm when big wigs and reporters were around. Yeager would have never played that game, another reason that he was never a serious candidate for the astronaut cadre.
And finally, as detailed in “The Right Stuff,” Chuck Yeager had serious differences with NASA and its approach to space flight. While Yeager and the other test pilots at Edwards were flying X-craft to the edge of space, the Mercury astronauts were essentially along for the ride, their craft flown largely by computers and controllers on the ground. Chuck Yeager referred to them (famously) as “spam in a can.” From NASA’s perspective, that was the ultimate sin, one reason that General Yeager spent the last decade of his Air Force career flying operational B-57s and F-4s.
Chuck Yeager is a great American—a hero in every sense of the word. But you’ve got to remember that he’s had a standing feud with NASA for more than 50 years, and it won’t end until he makes that final flight.