Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.

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.

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

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

Hey Ridley, that Machometer is acting screwy. It just went off the scale on me.

I have flown in just about everything, with all kinds of pilots in all parts of the world - British, French, Pakistani, Iranian, Japanese, Chinese - and there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between any of them except for one unchanging, certain fact: the best, most skillful pilot has the most experience.

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.