I've been watching the Chasing the Moon series. The part about
Ed Dwight, a Black astronaut candidate, getting sabotaged by Chuck Yeager and NASA was really depressing.
That article talks about that as well as this interesting insight:
The idea that early astronauts must first be test pilots, like the hotshots at Edwards, was not a foregone conclusion. Voas imagined a nationwide competition that could include deep-sea divers, arctic explorers or racecar drivers. The most important characteristics for the first classes of astronauts headed into the unknown would be the ability to respond coolly if something went wrong and levelheadedness in the face of hostile environments.
Riding a rocket had little in common with flying a plane, aside from being airborne. “The basic thing you have to understand,” Dwight explained recently, “is everything that happens on that spaceship, from the time you crawl into that seat to the time it touches down, is controlled from the ground. There’s no one thing that makes a good astronaut. I don’t know any person with determination and will that can’t go to space.”
It would have been really interesting if the Mercury astronauts weren't all these wahoo Top Guns.