Gus Grissom Quotes

Every time you go to an airport and get on a plane, you are basically taking advantage of the work that was done at Langley. Between World War I and World War II, they did just tremendous amount of fundamental research into basically making airplanes safer, making them more stable.

I had a great life at Boeing. I'd been there for 37 years and contributed to all the Boeing airplanes as a designer: the 707, 727, 37, 47, 57, 67 and 'triple 7' and the 87.

By the time I got into test work, it was dying out. It wasn't really flight test at all; it was mostly testing new gadgets.

My career has been spent developing airplanes.

All military and most commercial aircraft use our designs that process power from jet engines.

When you design it, think how you would feel if you had to fly it! Safety first!

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.

Then there was the challenge to keep doing better and better, to fly the best test flight that anybody had ever flown. That led to my being recognized as one of the more experienced test pilots, and that led to the astronaut business.

I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force. And then I went in and I had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages. And some 3,000 of those are flying. Of course, one of them is around-the-world Voyager.

The pilot looked at his cues of attitude and speed and orientation and so on and responded as he would from the same cues in an airplane, but there was no way it flew the same. The simulators had showed us that.

We were flying on a winged vehicle that would do reentry different than we had ever done before. So all of those were firsts. Test pilots truly love firsts.

They say any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

Trying to build a spaceship by making an aeroplane fly faster and higher is like trying to build an aeroplane by making locomotives faster and lighter - with a lot of effort, perhaps you could get something that more or less works, but it really isn't the right way to proceed.

What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?

From a very early age, I wanted to fly aeroplanes.

… to seek employment as a designer of large aircraft.

I had to tell somebody, anybody, that we’d busted straight through the sound barrier. But the transmissions were restricted. ‘Hey Ridley!’ I called. ‘Make another note. There’s something wrong with this Machmeter. It’s gone completely screwy!’

I was stationed at the flight test center at Wright-Patterson, and I was flying a wide range of airplanes and giving them a lot of different tests. It was a job that I thoroughly enjoyed.

On the first flight test of any spacecraft, you're going to find surprises.

It still amazes me, when I go out and fly the T-38, and I'm looking at those little, short, skinny little wings, and that thing's flying. It's just amazing to me, even now.

We returned home, after these experiments, with the conviction that sailing flight was not the exclusive prerogative of birds.

Aeronautics was neither an industry nor a science. It was a miracle.

I've always thought flight was fun and wanted to write about flight, and I knew a lot of househusbands who were having a really bad time with it. I thought flight might perk up a marriage here or there.

All astronauts, even civilians like me without pilot experience, have to learn how to co-pilot a jet called a T-38.

I wanted to be an aerospace engineer because I really like space. But I didn't go to the army.