Pictures of Planes from The Right Stuff
Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff is a great book, but a great book that didn’t feature any pictures of the amazing planes, jets, and rockets that populate its stories. Chuck Yeager, Scott Crossfield, Joe Walker, Al White, the Mercury 7, and many other possessors of the right stuff thrusted through the sky in these vehicles. This list is roughly chronological.
X-1
X-1A (Yeager broke the sound barrier in this)
X-2
D-558-1
XF-92A (book refers to it as “horrible”)
D-558-2 (book refers to it as “beautiful”)
X-3 (book should’ve described this as “needle-nosed”)
X-15 (the plane that was to be a bridge towards the X-20 and manned ground to space flight)
F-104 Starfighter (Yeager’s crash towards the end of the book happened in one of these)
Mercury-Redstone and Mercury-Atlas rockets
X-20 Dyna-Soar (never flew)
Planes Dropped from Motherships
Typical X-15 Mission (alleged)
P-51 (what Yeager flew in WWII)
My Favorite Zen Koan
A man walking across a field encounters a tiger. He fled, the tiger chasing after him. Coming to a cliff, he caught hold of a wild vine and swung himself over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Terrified, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger had come, waiting to eat him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little began to gnaw away at the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine in one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!
Zack Parsons sent me this. I never knew why but that could describe most of our conversations. It moved me so much that I have, to this day, never forgotten it.