It wasn't that the X-1 would kill you, it was the systems in the X-1 that would kill you.

In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.

That to me is a bunch of crap trying to shoot guys up into damned space. What they're going to do is they're going to wipe out half a dozen people one of these days, and that will be the end of it.

As we went through mach one, the nose started dropping, so we just cranked that horizontal stabilizer down to keep the nose up. We got it above mach one, and once we got it above the speed of sound, then you have supersonic flow over the whole airplane, so you have no more shock waves on it that are causing buffeting...You really don't think about the outcome of any kind of a flight, whether it's combat, or any other kinds of flights, because you really have no control over it.

You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can't, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don't give up.

Unfortunately, many people do not consider fun an important item on their daily agenda. For me, that was always a high priority in whatever I was doing.

After about 30 minutes I puked all over my airplane. I said to my self, "Man, you made a big mistake."