Chapter 15, "The High Desert" Summary

Yeager, thirty-nine, has returned to Edwards Air Force base. He is now commandant of the new Aerospace Research Pilot School, part of the Air Force's plan to dominate the astronaut selection process and set up a separate and purely military space program. Yeager is not much changed, but these days Edwards is air conditioned and heavily populated, and Yeager's students, hankering after "the goodies," aspire to be astronauts. This means that they need to be good, but not necessarily brilliant, pilots, since a combination of flight skills and engineering seems the safest route. Yeager can outdo most of them in both flying and caution, as illustrated when the computer-like Neil Armstrong, insisting that the data indicates a good landing surface, mires their plane in mud against Yeager's warnings. "Well, Neil, in a few hours it'll...