One thing that blows my mind about Tom Wolfe's book

Very true, but he really was labeled as such by the media and NASA had an inquiry into how/why Gus's hatch blew prematurely. NASA stuck with Gus but his reputation with the public and media never recovered. As NASA went forward, Gus was at the very forefront of Apollo, very likely to slide into the first or second Apollo mission. Unfortunately, he lost his life and never got a chance to fulfill his lunar dream.

Actually, Wolfe was vague about the circumstances of Grissom's capsule loss, as are we all since it's never been explained in the kind of detail NASA geeks like, instead Wolfe wrote a lot about how Grissom felt during the incident and the aftermath. Which is suspicious in of itself, because Grissom had died long before Wolfe started his wonderful book, and Grissom apparently wasn't given to talking about his feelings.

"The Right Stuff" is researched to hell and gone and is as deliciously readable as history gets, but some of the writing reaches such flights of fancy that some of it is hard to take seriously. Wolfe is the guy who told young writers "Don't write about what you know, KNOW MORE", after all, but he does like his purple prose.