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Comment by scj | Hacker News Reader

During the Apollo 1 investigation, he said something that suck with me when thinking of begrudging users who are willing to look past faults for utility:

"There's no question that it was a coffin, and I'd have flown it gladly."

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Explains the preference for test pilots -- when abnormal is normal, you're in rarified company.

Amazing when "the office" might kill you.

At the time, the career casualty rate for fighter pilots was one in five. Just from flying around, without any enemy.

Are you sure that number doesn't include Vietnam?

Yes.

Read "The Making of an Ex-Astronaut",[1] from someone who quit the program because the part about becoming a fighter jock was too dangerous. Four US astronauts died in jet aircraft accidents in the 1960s.[2]

[1] https://archive.org/details/makingofexastron0000unse/page/16...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...

This reminded me too of Jim Lovell's reaction when they switched the Apollo 8 plan at "the last minute" to actually be the first TLI mission. Something about the way he tells it, and just the sheer (and apparently extremely genuine) reaction of awe, wonder, excitement, mixed with a seeming complete lack of worry, concern, self-preservation instinct, just kinda signals to me those guys were just built different.

There's a good book, "The Right Stuff" [0] by Tom Wolfe, which goes into quite a bit of detail about the stories and some of the psychology around being a test pilot in those days, and in particular about the men chosen as the Mercury Seven astronauts, many of whom were also later involved in both the Gemini and Apollo programs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_(book)

Damn, what a badass comment and you know he meant it.

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