George Pyle: ‘Deaths by despair’ due to a sick system, not sick people

“Dear Lord, please don’t let me f--- up.”— The Shepard’s Prayer(Alan Shepard, first American in space, May 5, 1961)“The Right Stuff,” Tom Wolfe’s amazing book about the early days of the U.S. space program, is about the pilots who were brave enough to have themselves launched into space atop experimental rockets, every piece of which, in Shepard’s words, was built by the lowest bidder.Outside the fame of the Mercury 7, American test pilots ha