Was it accidental/coincidental when Turner Classic Movies aired “The Right Stuff,” the flick about NASA’s original astronauts, the Mercury Seven, while Boeing’s Susi and Butch are alarmingly stranded at the International Space Station indefinitely?
Space exploration was important science we studied in school, articles we read in newspapers/magazines and TV news broadcasts every evenin’ and, so we thought, a unifying cause for celebrating being Americans Cold-Warring against Russia. People are also reading… Deke, an Air Force guy, was your scribe’s favorite astronaut, so it came as no surprise, even then, Deke would be the only Mercury flyboy who never left Cape Canaveral/Kennedy strapped atop a billion-horsepower rocket designed and built, in no small part, by refugee German scientists who came to Huntsville and waged space war against their former WWII Nazi coworkers who’d chosen to be Russian comrades.
Between them, Grissom flew Liberty Bell on July 21, 1961, but your scribe only watched launch replays on evening news programs.