If you don’t use your experience, your past is wasted, and you are betraying yourself.

Because of the suit I was wearing, I couldn’t make a good pivot on the swing. And I had to hit the ball with one hand.

The first plane ride was in a homemade glider my buddy and I built. Unfortunately we didn’t get more than four feet off the ground, because it crashed.

There’s no question that all the generations got excited about the first flights, with Kennedy’s inspiration to go to the moon, leaving the planet for the first time, and fortunately coming back.

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.

The suit was so clumsy, being pressurized, it was impossible to get two hands comfortably on the handle and it’s impossible to make any kind of a turn. It was kind of a one-handed chili-dip.

I’d like to say I was smart enough to finish six grades in five years, but I think perhaps the teacher was just glad to get rid of me.

Then I thought, with the same clubhead speed, the ball’s going to go at least six times as far. There’s absolutely no drag, so if you do happen to spin it, it won’t slice or hook ’cause there’s no atmosphere to make it turn.

I woke up an hour before I was supposed to, and started going over the mental checklist: where do I go from here, what do I do? I don’t remember eating anything at all, just going through the physical, getting into the suit. We practiced that so much, it was all rote.

We had some adverse conditions in the ’60s, in the ’70s and the ’80s. The agency has risen above that in the past and will rise above that again.