That rather assumes I have grown up.

A vet, but I wasn’t smart enough.

An actor. Then I grew out of that and became one by default. Or sort of one: “Not really an actor”, said Michael Billington.

A pop star: I loved music from a very young age.

I think all of us certainly believed the statistics, which said that probably 88 percent chance of mission success and maybe 96 percent chance of survival. And we were willing to take those odds.

And I think that still is true of this business — which is basically research and development — that you probably spend more time in planning and training and designing for things to go wrong, and how you cope with them, than you do for things to go right.

A little bit of overconfidence perhaps. A lack of attention to duty. Little insidious things that happened. You had this great team of dedicated, qualified people, but they get a little bit complacent, and boom! Pretty soon something goes wrong.

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.

It would have to be that one lady teacher in grade school. All six grades, one room, 25 students. She was about nine feet tall as I recall and a very tough disciplinarian. Always had the ruler ready to whack the knuckles if somebody got out of hand. She ran a very well-disciplined group. I think most of the youngsters responded to that. There were one or two that couldn’t handle it and obviously they dropped by the wayside. But that still sticks out in my mind.

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.