Stuff

The very end of The Right Stuff (the book) describes the transition of the Mercury 7 from famous "single-combat warriors," battling The Chief Designer and the rest of the Soviet Union, to men at the “top of the pyramid,” the elite of military pilots who, nonetheless, would no longer be known by name. The Mercury mission launched on May 15, 1963 would be the last, and it simply wouldn’t be the same for the Next Nine, the new members of the astronaut corps. Mr. Wolfe sketches the transition in terms of the end of the Cold War: The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on August 5, the establishment of the Moscow-Washington Hotline on August 30,  and associated cooling of rhetoric about the need for orbital weapon systems meant the Us vs. Them attitudes unnecessary.

The era of America’s first single-combat warriors had come, and it had gone, perhaps never to be relived.

Perhaps. That the period of transition maps directly to the move from First to Second Turning may mean it was not unusual, another instance of this cycle that repeats with unexpected persistence. One could compare the idea of astronauts as knights in shining armor with the contemporaneous Camelot. Or for a more rugged parallel, think of the single combat warriors as  white-hat cowboys, similarly active after the Civil War.  In any case, the new standards of the Awakening were overtaking the dreams and hopes of the High, and the fame of those first astronauts was just another unwanted relic. But not completely, at least not until after landing on the Moon made JFK's dream a reality.