'He was a hundred thousand feet up, dropping towards the ocean like an enormous cannonball ... Either the parachute deployed and took hold or it didn't.'

The early days of the space race possessed a glamour and intensity that made every little boy want to be an astronaut. But one might also ask: why would a grown man choose to sit on top of a huge firework and wait for another guy to set it off? Tom Wolfe’s modern classic tells the thrilling story of the heady beginnings of the United States’ space missions. Everyone involved knew this was where the action was. Alan Shepard, Charles Yeager, Gus Grissom, John Glenn... were all crack aviators with the ‘right stuff ’, that elusive quality beyond mere bravery which propelled the first Americans into space, battling the Russians for control of the heavens.

From the x-1 test flights through to the Mercury missions, Wolfe looks at the men behind the mirrored visors, describing their fantastic individual achievements and incorporating interviews with the astronauts themselves: Yeager breaking the sound barrier in 1947 (‘There’s something wrong with this ol’ machometer ... it’s gone kinda screwy on me’), Shepard’s pioneering suborbital flight; Grissom escaping a flooded capsule (‘I was lying there minding my own business when the hatch blew. It just blew’), and Glenn piloting America’s first manned orbital flight. Tom Wolfe was one of the pioneers of the New Journalism of the early 1970s, built on an idea we now take for granted: that factual writing could be as lively and arresting as fiction.

With dramatic photographs of the space missions, this edition of The Right Stuff captures the rocket-fuelled spirit of the late-20th century’s greatest adventure.