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

It's your duty to fly the airplane. If you get killed in it, you don't know anything about it anyway. Duty is paramount. It's that simple if you're a military guy. You don't say 'I'm not going to do that - that's dangerous.' If it's your duty to do it, that's the way it is.

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.

At the moment of truth, there are either reasons or results.

What good does it do to be afraid? It doesn't help anything. You better try and figure out what's happening and correct it.

Everybody that I've ever seen that enjoyed their job was very good at it.

The secret of my success is that I always managed to live to fly another day.