You concentrate on what you are doing, to do the best job you can, to stay out of a serious situation. That’s the way the X-1 was.

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.

I don't think about life everlasting. If something doesn't have scientific evidence to back it up, I don't believe it. I'm a straight shooter.

If you want to grow old as a pilot, you've got to know when to push it, and when to back off.

Later, I realized that the mission had to end in a let-down because the real barrier wasn't in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.

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.

Just before you break through the sound barrier, the cockpit shakes the most.