Steve Austin who? Few people know there was a real $6 million man: Bruce Peterson, a NASA Dryden Research pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in the 1960s, was a pioneer in the testing of lifting bodies. His all-too-real 1967 crash at Edwards was used in the opening credits of the 1970s television show "The Six Million Dollar Man," starring Lee Majors as Austin. A former Marine Corps pilot, Peterson joined NASA in 1960 as an aeronautical engineer and was a project pilot on the Rogallo paraglider research vehicle, or Parasev, program. Parasev evaluated the use of an inflatable, flexible...