Word: astronaut
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Neil Armstrong, ex-astronaut on jogging: "I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises...
...novel opens, Kinsman is 21, an idealistic Air Force test pilot. He loves to fly, and he wants to be an astronaut. He is told: "You don't believe they'll actually give you what you want, do you? They'll use you for cannon fodder... They'll put you in a war plane and order you to kill people." Kinsman, already straining his Quaker heritage by joining the military, vows he won't be a pawn of a system he does not like but must deal with to get what he wants--into space...
...style of journalism will have to agree that behind the mannered realism of The Right Stuff thumps the heart of a traditionalist. The organizing principle of the book is an old-fashioned fascination with, and admiration for, the test pilots and fighter jocks of the U.S.'s first astronaut team: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton. In addition, the book has a superhero, Chuck Yeager, a World War II combat veteran who broke the sound barrier in 1947 and rewrote aviation history in experimental rocket-powered planes...
...astronauts were sensitive about their missions' being controlled by earth-bound technicians. The chosen seven had pulled out of enough tight corners and survived enough glitches to rise to the top of what Wolfe, in a seizure of cliché avoidance, calls "the ziggurat." As a reminder that he was there too, Yeager told reporters he did not want to be an astronaut because they did no real flying. He then rubbed it in by saying that "a monkey's gonna make the first flight." Shepard, Glenn and company bucked back, demanding and getting concessions like an override...
Brown's assurances did not satisfy Senator John Glenn, the Ohio Democrat who has devoted hundreds of hours to studying the complex verification issue. As a former astronaut with some firsthand knowledge of how highly sophisticated electronic devices work-or fail -Glenn is looked to for guidance on verification by many of his Senate colleagues. Said Glenn last week: "I want to vote for SALT, but I want to know that the Soviets are living up to it." He believes that the loss of the Iranian posts left the U.S. with no way of sufficiently monitoring Soviet missile testing...