The death last December of Chuck Yeager, combined with the 60th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's 110 minutes of history, triggered a number of memories of historical reflections. Yeager became a popular legend primarily as a result of Tom Wolfe's book and subsequent film The Right Stuff. The book perhaps more than the film, focused on pilots and piloting and emphasised the bravery of chaps usually flying beyond the envelope for a basic salary. There was no PR machine to publicise the Bell X-1, or many of the other dangerous products of the early supersonic era. Times would change with the advent of the X-15 and especially with the selection of the Mercury 7 astronauts - 'spam in a can' to true pilots like Yeager - but increasingly part of an ambitious NASA publicity campaign. Gagarin was always part of a Soviet ideological campaign, but the nail-biting nearly lethal first flight showed real courage - and the last leg by horse and cart an earthy touch for a son of the proletariat.
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