In the future, passenger flight into space is likely to become as routine as air travel. In the early twenty-first century, however, opening up the space frontier is the duty of a select cadre of highly trained individuals. In the United States, the early pioneering days of human spaceflight gave rise to individuals with what author Tom Wolfe called the "right stuff." These individuals were tough-as-nails experimental aircraft test pilots. They were critical to getting America's human spaceflight program, quite literally, off the ground. During the 1960s, and continuing through the 1970s, a unique corps of astronauts flew in the U.S. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab programs.

Today, after some forty years of human sojourns into low Earth orbit and to the Moon, roughly 400 people have departed Earth, heading for orbit. Beginning in 1981, a majority of these individuals have been boosted there courtesy of a...