"I decided to write the story in the voice of this group of generic astronauts talking to a reporter. Wolfe was in Florida for the last Apollo launch, asking the question that so many reporters had asked the astronauts before: What's it really like to go up in space? "The question had become an inside joke," Wolfe said. What most excited me, though, was this theory of the Right Stuff. There was so much material, and what was supposed to be one story became four. "You know, I'm not really sure I can remember where it came from, or what I was thinking. "I suppose that might be," Tom Wolfe hesitates over the phone from his New York City home. What does post-orbital remorse mean, anyway? Is it, as Wolfe biographer and University of Florida journalism professor William McKeen suggests, a feeling that once you've ridden into space atop a rocket, nothing else you do in life will ever live up to that experience? Doesn't quite have the same ring as "The Brotherhood of The Right Stuff," which was the subtitle. Yep, "Post-Orbital Remorse." That was the collective title Wolfe gave to his four-part magazine piece on the astronauts in 1973.
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