Why Chuck Yeager Claimed He Had No ‘Right Stuff’

Frank Borman did not expect to hear a congratulations from Chuck Yeager one day in 1962—and that’s just as well because he didn’t get one. It wasn’t a surprise that Yeager wouldn’t extend much courtesy to the likes of Borman. There were rules, after all, and there was a hierarchy after all, and Yeager, who on Dec. 7 died at the age of 97, was then the commander of the flight school at Edwards Air Force Base in California, where test pilots were trained. Borman was just one more young Air Force officer who had scrapped and competed to be assigned to so coveted a billet as learning under Yeager—the first person to break the sound barrier, a feat he’d accomplished 15 years earlier. At the time, a lot of Yeager’s officers were being seduced away by NASA, which promised them the chance not just to fly jets through the atmosphere, but rocket ships high above it. Neither man could know in 1962 what history had in store for Borman—that he would become not just any astronaut, but a figure on the space age’s Mt. Rushmore, commanding Apollo 8 in 1968, the first mission to orbit the moon. All they knew, as Borman told me in a conversation in 2015, was that he was one more young defector from Yeager’s flying family—and that would not make for an easy audience with his commander. “Colonel,” Borman said when he presented himself before Yeager, who was seated at his desk going through paperwork, “I jus...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news