In the 1984 movie The Right Stuff (based on Tom Wolfe’s novel of the same name) Sam Shepard plays test pilot Chuck Yeager, who ultimately was bypassed for the astronaut program in favor of guys like John Glenn. In a famous line from that movie, Shepard/Yeager refers to Glenn and his fellow Mercury astronauts as “spam in a can” (see trailer, here). Turns out, in addition to being a pretty good test pilot, Yeager was a prophet.
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This is one of those “Do you remember where you were when you heard the news?” stories. On This Day in History, 1986… The Challenger Explodes.
I was driving a SuperShuttle van at LAX. One of my passengers had a transistor radio turned on in back. Yes, people actually still carried around transistor radios in 1986. Imagine that.
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The doomed Challenger flight of January of 1986 marked the first time that “a regular citizen” was selected to go up into space. In this case, it was 37-year-old high school social studies teacher Christa McAuliffe – certainly no test pilot. After the disaster, she and the six other Challenger astronauts were mourned, and celebrated as national heroes. But Yeager’s “spam” pronouncement rang prophetically true. As it did again in the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, which claimed the lives of seven more of NASA’s finest.