Pictures of Planes from The Right Stuff

July 27, 2012

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)