Continuing in holiday mode, this evening we watched The Right Stuff . I read Tom Wolfe’s impressive book many moons ago, much admiring the juxtaposition of scholarship and his distinctive  journalistic style, but I never caught the movie. Well, it is well-filmed and well-acted. Contemporary documentary footage is cleverly interwoven to add authenticity. Sam Shephard is perfectly cast as test pilot Chuck Yeager – cool, handsome, noble, courageous, dark, thoughtful, and up for it, whatever ‘it’ happens to be. But the film makes, to my mind, a fateful break from the book’s analysis. Wolfe’s account is in part a paean to the last generation of test pilots – chivalrous, handsome and daring young men, like Chuck Yeager in the States and the UK’s Nevil Duke, that I would read about in my Eagle Annual as a young boy. The astronauts of the Mercury programme were, in contrast, substitutes for the monkeys that the scientists first wanted to send up (they had to send men up because the USSR had beaten them to it by sending Yuri Gagarin into orbit). Because the men would become bored they were given windows to look out of and switches to operate but, unlike the later stages of NASA’s space programme, they had nothing to do and certainly no control over their destiny in the way that a test pilot did. The film, aware of its potential audience, shied away from that truth and turns the seven astronauts into willful beings who are, somehow, in control. Though the astronauts enjoyed the subsequent limelight, the real heroes were the scientists back down on the ground, who were not all German nor bumbling as the film would have its audience believe. It’s strange to think that the Americans need to hitch a lift in a Russian rocket if they want to get to the Space Station now…