At 74,700 feet (22,800 metres), and at 2.44 Mach speed, it began to roll uncontrollably, then spin upside down. Completely disoriented, battered by plus and minus g-loads, he remembered his helmet cracking the inner canopy, and not a lot else. At last the plane got upright and, at 25,000 feet, he popped it out of the spin. He had dropped 50,000 feet in 70 seconds. Back in radio contact, he gasped out: Christ! Boy, I'm not doing that any more. It was odd enough that he was in the air anyway. As a boy, running the hills or sitting with his grandfather learning to fish, he never got near a plane, except to see one in the sky. He had no ambitions that way and, with only high school behind him, not enough education.

He enlisted in the air force in 1941 as a mechanic, earthbound and easy, because he had already tinkered for years with engines, water-pumps and his father's cable tools for drilling for natural gas. He took up flight training mostly because pilots had beautiful girls on their arms, and hands that weren't dirty. But he became the most decorated pilot in America. In the same strange sort of reversal, he started out with no interest in space and ended up training astronauts. In the 1950s, when space was mentioned, he would dismiss it as a place where he wouldn't be flying, but sitting in a thing controlled by someone else. No doubt the views were pretty, but he couldn't have cared less. And anyway, he had no degree. His ideas changed as the government began to press the space programme and America, in his view, fell far behind the Soviets in developing space technology.

譯文由可可原創，僅供學習交流使用，未經許可請勿轉載。