Is the movie, The Right Stuff about pilots training for the Apollo project?”
The Right Stuff is a 1983 American film adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book The Right Stuff about the test pilots who were involved in high-speed aeronautical research at Edwards Air Force Base as well as those selected to be astronauts for Project Mercury, the United States’ first attempt at manned spaceflight. The story contrasts the “Mercury Seven” and their families with pilots like Chuck Yeager, who was considered by many test pilots to be the best of them all, but was never selected as an astronaut. The Mercury Seven were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton. In some aspects of the film its creators undertook great efforts to make it historically accurate. In others, they took some artistic freedom, downplaying and sometimes ridiculing the collective scientific and technical effort of the Mercury program, emphasizing instead the individual adventure and heroism of the test pilots and astronauts.
