When you launch in a rocket, you're not really flying that rocket. You're just sort of hanging on.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The rocket had worked perfectly, and all I had to do was survive the reentry forces. You do it all, in a flight like that, in a rather short period of time, just 16 minutes as a matter of fact.
Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing.
If you're going to go to the moon, you don't shoot the rocket right at the moon. You have to go at it obliquely.
I've put a lot of my life into making it possible to fly in space at all.
I'm like a rocket - I go a hundred miles per hour.
Spaceflight, especially in the Mercury spacecraft, clearly wasn't going to be much like flying an airplane.
Now, I've never flown in space; but the folks who have say that on landing day, you know, you've just spent maybe a week and a half, sometimes two weeks in orbit and you're used to the things happening slowly in space.
Even though NASA tries to simulate launch, and we practice in simulators, it's not the same - it's not even close to the same.
We all fly. Once you leave the ground, you fly. Some people fly longer than others.
When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.