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Not the right stuff

Nov 1, 2000

In Tom Wolfe's account of the early days of the US space programme, The Right Stuff, he describes how astronaut Scott Carpenter almost ran out of fuel on a test flight: "Carpenter's flight agenda had been loaded with Larry Lightbulb experiments. The scientists, lowest men in the NASA pecking order up to now, had been given their heads on this flight...Carpenter had taken all this Mad Professor stuff seriously, and that was what led to his problems." The conclusion among the astronauts, writes Wolfe, was that "all this science nonsense could wait".

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