Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
by Adam Higginbotham · 14 May 2024 · 523pp · 204,889 words
and tamped the blow-holes closed with a broom handle
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Chuck Yeager
Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster
by Allan J McDonald and James R. Hansen · 25 Apr 2009 · 787pp · 249,157 words
and had been repaired by my boss with a broom handle and some extra vacuum putty by packing holes and volcanoes in the putty with additional putty after assembly and
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and introduced General Chuck Yeager
The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation
by Scott Carney and Jason Miklian · 28 Mar 2022 · 553pp · 153,028 words
and “without foreign interference.” Nixon then sent World War II ace Chuck Yeager
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broom handles. A few others bore shovels. The group attacked again, and
Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart
by James R. Doty, Md · 2 Feb 2016 · 201pp · 67,553 words
dust in my mouth—gritty and weedy like the rabbitbrush and cacti that battled the desert sun and heat to survive. My family had little money, and I was often hungry. I didn’t like being hungry. I didn’t like being poor. Lancaster’s greatest claim to fame was Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier
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at nearby Edwards Air Force Base some twenty years earlier. All day long planes would fly overhead, training pilots and testing aircraft. I wondered what it would be like to be Chuck Yeager flying the Bell X-1 at Mach 1, accomplishing what no human had ever done before. How small
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accepted a scholarship from the army. I felt a deep obligation to serve my country, and I wanted to give back. I remembered so vividly my dreams of being Chuck Yeager flying over Lancaster and breaking the sound barrier, and my pride in wearing the uniform of a Law Enforcement Explorer. One thing I learned
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of discovery. He wanted to see just what man was capable of achieving when pushed to his limits. Even with two broken ribs and so much pain he had to jerry-rig a broom handle to help him close the hatch of the plane, he would not be deterred. Who was I? Was I the
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of my life trying to reconcile my inner Slick Goodlin and my inner Chuck Yeager. I had empathy for others who had struggled like me, who were in pain
How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight
by Julian Guthrie · 19 Sep 2016
Chuck Yeager, who would swing by to visit on occasion. Yeager was appointed to the commission and
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broken ribs from an accident the night before—as Yeager had done—and
The Right Stuff
by Tom Wolfe · 1 Jan 1979 · 417pp · 147,682 words
could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager. Yeager had started
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for October 14, 1947. Not being an engineer, Yeager didn't believe the "barrier" existed. October 14 was a Tuesday. On Sunday evening, October 12, Chuck Yeager dropped in at Pancho's, along with his wife. She was a brunette named Glennis, whom he had met in California while he was in
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time the goddamned motorcycle hits a pebble in the road, his side hurts like a sonofabitch. The doctor in Rosamond informs him he has two broken ribs and he tapes them up and tells him that if he'll just keep his right arm immobilized for a couple of weeks
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get enough leverage with your left hand. Out in the hangar Yeager makes a few test shoves on the sly, and the pain is so incredible he realizes that there is no way a man with two broken ribs is going to get the door closed. It is time to confide in somebody
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inspiration. He tells a janitor named Sam to cut him about nine niches off a broom handle. When nobody's looking, he slips the broomstick into the cockpit of the X-1 and gives Yeager a little advice and counsel. So with that added bit of supersonic flight gear Yeager went aloft. At seven
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drawlin' hot dog. But no one would contest the fact that as of that time, the 1950's, Chuck Yeager was at the top of the pyramid, number one among all the True Brothers. And that voice… started drifting down from on high. At first the tower at Edwards began to notice that
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before the fact… upon our little Davids… before they got up on top of the rockets to face the Russians, death, flames, and fragmentation. (Ours all blow up!) Chuck Yeager was in Phoenix to make one of his many public appearances on behalf of the Air Force. By now the Air Force couldn
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holders for getting good press and whining appropriations. The only problem was that, in terms of publicity, every other form of flier was now overshadowed by the Mercury astronauts. As a matter of fact, today, in Phoenix, what was it the local reporters wanted to ask Chuck Yeager about? Correct: the astronauts.
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be the first human being to go into space—would have an eminence that not even Chuck Yeager had ever enjoyed, because he would belong not just to the history of aviation but to world history. And who would this one man be? Well… who else would it be but John Glenn!
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in mid-1960; well, it was now mid-1960, and they didn't even have the capsule ready for unmanned testing. NASA's prime pilot for the X-15 project was Joe Walker. He looked like a young towheaded version of Chuck Yeager, the country boy who loved to fly. He talked like
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did the astronauts go for their parabolic rides in the F-100Fs, to experience weightlessness? To Edwards. Chuck Yeager himself had flown the first weightless parabolas for the Air Force, and then Crossfield had flown them for NASA. Edwards pilots took the astronauts up in the back seat. For the most part,
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said: "All right, I'm cooler than you are. Why don't you fix your little problem… and light this candle." Light the candle! he says. The words of Chuck Yeager himself! The voice of the rocket ace! Oddly enough, it seemed to do the trick. Realizing the astronaut's irritation, they
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in both worlds. Oh, yes, it was the perfect balance of the legendary Edwards, the fabled Muroc, in the original Chuck Yeager and Pancho Barnes days… now brought forward into the billion-volt limitless-budget future. The truth was that the fellows had now become the personal symbols
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in that scene, the new simple truth. Grissom didn't even feel angry. There was nothing that Joe Walker could say or do—and nothing that even Chuck Yeager himself could say or do—that would change the new order. The astronaut was now at the apex of the pyramid. The rocket pilots
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picked for the first flight, and there was no getting around that. He had been the first American to go into space. It was as if he were the project pilot for Mercury. The best Glenn could hope for was to play Scott Crossfield to Shepard's Chuck Yeager. Yeager had broken the
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. He had merely made the first suborbital flight, which now looked like nothing at all. He was now more like Slick Goodlin to John's Chuck Yeager. Slick Goodlin had, technically, made the first flight of the X-1. But it was Yeager who made the flight that counted, the flight
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in which they first tried to push the bird supersonic. As Slick Goodlin to John's Chuck Yeager—what was Al supposed to do, cheer about it? And Betty Grissom—who never even got a parade down the poor dim dowdy main street of Mitchell, Indiana—was she supposed
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entire day in space, of course, and he had put the United States back in the ball game with the Soviets. The role of single-combat warrior seemed more glorious than ever. * * * 15 - The High Desert By the time of Gordon Cooper's flight, Chuck Yeager had returned to Edwards Air Force Base
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been the precise location on the map of the apex of the pyramid of the right stuff itself. And now it was just another step on the way up. These boys were coming through Chuck Yeager's prep school so they could get a ticket to Houston. The glamour of the space program
A Man on the Moon
by Andrew Chaikin · 1 Jan 1994 · 816pp · 242,405 words
Chuck Yeager
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and awkward, like steering a loaded wheelbarrow down the street with a long broom handle
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Chuck Yeager’s space school, had applied for the astronaut program and
Speed
by Bob Gilliland and Keith Dunnavant · 319pp · 84,772 words
and a half official victories and once shooting down five planes in a single day. Chuck Yeager had something special, and
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broom handle, which his buddy was able to manipulate successfully to seal the hatch. When he saw Ridley with the broom handle, Cardenas put two and two together and
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Chuck Yeager, Amelia Earhart, and
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and without a scratch.” Gilliland did not bury a myth like Chuck Yeager
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Chuck Yeager and Leo Janos; Scrappy: Memoir of a U.S. Fighter Pilot in Korea and Vietnam, by Howard C. Johnson and
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Chuck Yeager
The Glass Castle: A Memoir
by Jeannette Walls · 15 Mar 2005 · 304pp · 99,699 words
and heard the thunk thunk thunk again. Mom went upstairs to investigate, then came down and explained that Erma was hitting the floor with a broom handle
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Chuck Yeager visited Welch High that year. I'd been hearing about Chuck Yeager
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and then insisted we rehearse the interview. He pretended to be Chuck Yeager and
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Chuck Yeager took my hand and
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Chuck Yeager. "And
Stealth
by Peter Westwick · 22 Nov 2019 · 474pp · 87,687 words
complete set-your-hair-on-fire-and-let’s-go kind of guys. We’re pretty methodical, risk-averse guys.”26 The younger ones, especially, represented a gradual shift within the test pilot fraternity, from barnstormers to engineers, from cowboys to calculators—in short, from Chuck Yeager to Neil Armstrong.27 Many
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cabinet in the corner of the hangar and, figuring that “steel is steel,” cut the cabinet into small panels. That was not his last improvisation on Have Blue.32 Broomsticks loom large in the history of American aviation. Many know the story of Chuck Yeager’s 1947 flight to break the sound
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barrier, when his flight engineer jury-rigged a cockpit door handle with a sawed-off broom. For Have Blue’s maiden flight thirty years later Bill Park was in the cockpit on the runway, as Lockheed and Air Force brass
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through the opening. Park kept asking, “What’s going on back there?” Murphy, to Park: “No sweat!” He spotted a push broom nearby and grabbed it—the broom handle just fit, Murphy snagged the cap, and he called to Park: start the engines.33 The first flight was uneventful, but subsequent flights revealed design
The Vast Unknown: America's First Ascent of Everest
by Broughton Coburn · 29 Apr 2013 · 313pp · 95,361 words