Not to take anything for granted.

Whenever things seem absolutely terrible, to see that you’re alive and that’s all that matters.

To have the courage to fail.

That further lessons await.

To me and, I think, to all of us, it was a realization that our world is finite, it is small, it is fragile, and we need to start thinking about how to take care of it.

My wife and I have always tried to explain to the girls — even when I had to go off on nine-month cruises in the Mediterranean or in the Pacific — why I was doing it, and what it was all about, that I felt that I could contribute to the military.

In those days, talking in terms of a hero — it had to be Charles Lindbergh. I was very young when he flew across the Atlantic, and very impressed.

I didn’t like it at all. This problem is called Meniere’s syndrome. It causes dizziness, nausea, lack of balance and so on. The prediction was that in some cases it was correctable. I said, “In my case it is going to be correctable.”

If it’s one thing, obviously it had to have been being selected to make the first manned space flight for the United States. That was competition at its best, not because of the fame or the recognition that went with it, but because of the fact that America’s best test pilots went through this selection process, down to seven guys, and of those seven, I was the first one to go. That always will be the most satisfying thing for me.

No, I didn’t. Certainly when I was in the one-room country school you described, I guess my ambition at that point was to get through with a creditable performance. Really, of course, nobody thought about astronauts in those days, but I didn’t really even start thinking about airplanes very much when I was in grade school. So that interest sort of came later on.