When I was studying at Purdue, we learned our thermodynamics from an antique steam engine. When I went back in 1964, I found the laboratories packed with the most modern equipment for the study of thermodynamics, some of which had been built by the students themselves.

Gus Grissom

If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.

Gus Grissom

inspirational life death

There is a clarity, a brilliance to space that simply doesn't exist on earth, even on a cloudless summer's day in the Rockies, and nowhere else can you realize so fully the majesty of our Earth and be so awed at the thought that it's only one of untold thousands of planets.

Gus Grissom

space earth summer

How do you expect to get us to the Moon if you people can't even hook us up with a ground station?

Gus Grissom

apollo moon people

The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.

Gus Grissom

nasa risk space

No, you sort of have to put that out of your mind. There's always a possibility that you can have a catastrophic failure, of course. This can happen on any flight. It can happen on the last one as well as the first one. You just plan as best you can to take care of all these eventualities, and you get a well-trained crew, and you go fly.

Gus Grissom

lasts care mind

If we die, do not mourn for us. This is a risky business we're in, and we accept those risks. The space program is too valuable to this country to be halted for too long if a disaster should ever happen.

Gus Grissom

business acceptance country

Do good work.

Gus Grissom

good good-work work

I had never been much of a science-fiction or Buck Rogers fan. I was more interested in what was going on right now than in the centuries to come.

Gus Grissom

right more never now

I suppose I built my share of model airplanes, but I can't remember that I was a flying fanatic.

Gus Grissom

model flying share remember

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.

Gus Grissom

test new work time

They don't hand out Ph.D.s in test piloting, but you pick up a tremendous amount of scientific and engineering knowledge along the way. After all, when you take up a brand new plane and put it through its paces to see if it will hang together, you are really flying somebody's theory.

Gus Grissom

you together way knowledge

There's always a possibility that you can have a catastrophic failure, of course. This could happen on any flight.

Gus Grissom

happen you always failure

I met Betty Moore when she entered Mitchell High School as a freshman, and that was it - period, exclamation point!

Gus Grissom

she high high-school school

I was sent to Korea, which was excellent training for what came later. I was assigned to remain on duty until I completed one hundred combat missions - or got knocked out - whichever came first.

Gus Grissom

out first training duty

This is what I wanted all along, and after I finished my studies and begun the job of testing jet aircraft, well, there wasn't a happier pilot in the air force.

Gus Grissom

pilot job air-force force

In the Air Force, you get some weird orders, but you obey them no matter what.

Gus Grissom

weird you force matter

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.

Gus Grissom

test job flying giving

As I told a friend of mine once who asked me why I joined Mercury, I think if I had been alive 150 years ago, I might have wanted to go out and help open up the West.

Gus Grissom

friend go think me

I thought it would be good for the engineers and workmen who were building my spacecraft to see the pilot who would have to fly it hanging around. It might make them just a little more careful than they already were and a little more eager to get the work done on time if they saw how much I cared.

Gus Grissom

fly good work time

I never did get hit, and neither did any of the leaders that I flew wing for.

Gus Grissom

hit any get never