"I'd always wanted to be a pilot, ever since I could remember," Bean said in the 1998 NASA oral history. "I think a lot of it just had to do with it looked exciting. It looked like brave people did that. I wanted to be brave, even though I wasn't brave at the time. I thought maybe I could learn to be, so that appealed to me."

Source: Los Angeles Times May 26, 2018 19:40 UTC