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.
— 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.
I thought it would be good for the engineers and workmen who were building my spacecraft to see the pilot who would have to fly it hanging around. It might make them just a little more careful than they already were and a little more eager to get the work done on time if they saw how much I cared.
In the Air Force, you get some weird orders, but you obey them no matter what.
I met Betty Moore when she entered Mitchell High School as a freshman, and that was it - period, exclamation point!
By the time I got into test work, it was dying out. It wasn't really flight test at all; it was mostly testing new gadgets.
I had never been much of a science-fiction or Buck Rogers fan. I was more interested in what was going on right now than in the centuries to come.
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.
I did not think my chances were very big when I saw some of the other men who were competing for the team. They were a good group, and I had a lot of respect for them. But I decided to give it the old school try and to take some of NASA's tests.
As I told a friend of mine once who asked me why I joined Mercury, I think if I had been alive 150 years ago, I might have wanted to go out and help open up the West.
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.
There's always a possibility that you can have a catastrophic failure, of course. This could happen on any flight.
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.
Do good work.
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 never did get hit, and neither did any of the leaders that I flew wing for.
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.
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.
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 suppose I built my share of model airplanes, but I can't remember that I was a flying fanatic.
