If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing.

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.

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.

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.

There is no kind of ultimate goal to do something twice as good as anyone else can. It's just to do the job as best you can. If it turns out good, fine. If it doesn't, that's the way it goes.

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

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