In addition to the boiling spit thing, he was rammed at Mach 1 into -57C air at 15km altitude, without wearing some fancy astronaut suit, coming out of a space vehicle disintegrating around him. Then he regained consciousness en route down to Earth and unbuckled the seat. How was the whole ordeal survivable - I can't even begin to imagine.
Yeager famously survived an accident with a modified F-104 that was in some ways quite similar to the SpaceX craft (i.e. a plane with a rocket that can fly an arc up out of the atmosphere). Quite a few of these rocket-plane flights were considered spaceflight at the time, though they don't meet the modern (100km) definition.
This is the real man of steel.