अक्सर पूछे जाने वाला सवाल

He only had a high school education, a college degree was required to become an astronaut.

Many test pilots like Yeager also turned NASA down and didn't apply to be an astronaut. They didn't consider being launched in a capsule on a rocket to be for real pilots. When Gemini and Apollo came around high performance piloting skills were needed and used more.

It should also be added that Yeager was at the time already a squadron commander at the time the Mercury program was started, and also the concept of putting a man in a capsule atop a rocket to get into space was considered a quick and second-class method.

The Air Force had already tested control of high altitude rocket aircraft, including the X-1A and the NF-104A, both of which Yeager piloted. The NF-104A in particular tested the use of exhaust port control in extreme altitudes, where conventional aircraft controls were considered ineffective.

All of this was the lead in to the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar program, a flying wing that was intended to be a spaceplane. This was the intended path of US space research and development, and Yeager was central to that effort. The Mercury program was a panic reaction to the political setback of Sputnik and the Russian rocket program. While not yet flying in space, had the American efforts on the X-20 continued, most experts believe that the United States would have been flying spaceplanes into and out of orbit before the 1970's. In these areas, the US was way ahead of anything the Soviets were developing.

Many experts believe the NASA rocket programs actually harmed space development, and it was not until the Space Shuttle, and most recently the X-40 and X-37B spaceplane programs, that the United States has returned to where the initial efforts were made.