Those you who have never seen Philip Kaufman's excellent film
The Right Stuff, based on a book by Tom Wolfe, might want to give it a look. It recounts the story of the original seven US astronauts from their early days as test pilots through the orbital missions of John Glenn and Gordon Cooper. It actually opens a decade before the Mercury program began with a depiction of Chuck Yeager's flight that first broke the sound barrier. The cast is excellent, and I had my first screen crush in quite a while watching Barbara Hershey portray Yeager's wife Glennis. The horseback riding scene with Hershey and Sam Shepard as Yeager near the start of the movie is beautifully directed and subtly erotic.
Test pilots clearly had to be "calm under pressure" since the chances were good that they would crash and burn. As I recall the odds were about one in six (!) that a test pilot would not return. Both the book and the movie spend a lot of time with the men's wives who spent their days out on the high desert cringing in fear that they would become widows.