Gus Grissom

It was especially hard for me, as a professional pilot. In all of my years of flying - including combat in Korea - this was the first time that my aircraft and I had not come back together. In my entire career as a pilot, 'Liberty Bell' was the first thing I had ever lost. ”

The flight crew for the orbital mission has been picked, and I'm not on it. Of course I've been feeling pretty low for the past few days. All of us are mad because Glenn was picked. ”

I was stationed at the flight test center at Wright-Patterson, and I was flying a wide range of airplanes and giving them a lot of different tests. It was a job that I thoroughly enjoyed. ”

This is what I wanted all along, and after I finished my studies and begun the job of testing jet aircraft, well, there wasn't a happier pilot in the air force. ”

If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life. ”

They don't hand out Ph.D.s in test piloting, but you pick up a tremendous amount of scientific and engineering knowledge along the way. After all, when you take up a brand new plane and put it through its paces to see if it will hang together, you are really flying somebody's theory. ”

I had thought training for Mercury was rigorous. Once we got caught up in the Gemini training program, our Mercury training looked pretty soft. ”

I was sent to Korea, which was excellent training for what came later. I was assigned to remain on duty until I completed one hundred combat missions - or got knocked out - whichever came first. ”

I met Betty Moore when she entered Mitchell High School as a freshman, and that was it - period, exclamation point! ”

When I was studying at Purdue, we learned our thermodynamics from an antique steam engine. When I went back in 1964, I found the laboratories packed with the most modern equipment for the study of thermodynamics, some of which had been built by the students themselves. ”