Chuck Yeager never went to the moon, but he was pretty much father to all the astronauts. Perhaps the greatest pilot ever, the first one to ever break the sound barrier, the Colonel guested on What’s My Line? in 1964.

From a 1983 People account of Yeager’s greatest feat: “October 14, 1947. He is strapped inside an orange, needle-nosed firecracker with stubby, razor-thin wings, dangling nearly five miles above the rattlesnake ridges and skeletal Joshua trees of the California high desert. Around him gurgles an incipient hellfire of alcohol and liquid oxygen, just waiting to erupt. His right side hurts like a sumbitch: Two days ago, on a wild midnight horseback ride, he’d been thrown and sprung two ribs—all part of what author Tom Wolfe in his 1979 panegyric to the aces of aerospace, The Right Stuff, calls ‘the military tradition of Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving.’ No drinking today, but right quick now he’d be driving…

Straight toward the Barrier.

It hangs out there somewhere ahead: invisible, murderous—a zone of wild turbulence that can flip even the best-prepared aircraft into a wing-shredding spin. Already the Barrier has claimed the life of a top test pilot, Britain’s Geoffrey de Havilland, son of the famed aircraft designer. De Havilland’s DH-108 was hammered to bits, like a macerated moth, as it neared the Barrier.

Now it is Yeager’s turn to try. At 26,000 feet the B-29 mother ship goes into a shallow dive and unloads its ordnance. The firecracker with the man in its belly—known as the Bell X-1 but christened ‘Glamorous Glennis’ by its pilot—drops like a bomb. As Yeager lights off the four rocket chambers, fire leaps from the orange tail pipe, and the plane surges skyward into the sun.”