- In the book, the description of a crash site when the searchers realize that the 'strange fungus' on a tree damaged by the crash was in fact the pilot's head.
- The test injection given to prospective test pilots.
- Grissom nearly drowning. When the hatch popped and water rushed in, he bailed out quickly. The recovery helicopter effectively ignored him because the suits were buoyant, so they were trying to recover the capsule. But, when he went in the water, one of the hose valves on the suit was still open, letting water flow into the suit and weighing him down. As a result, he was desperately trying to get the recovery copter's attention as he sunk lower while they were returning what they thought were friendly waves.
- The early scene showing Trudy Cooper's nightmares that Gordon will be one day be killed. Made harsher by the fact that we know that her friend Betty Grissom will eventually be a widow to the space program.
- From the miniseries: Captain Gordon Cooper, USAF is introduced with his friend and fellow test pilot Captain Cal Cunningham taking a pair of Lockheed F-104 Starfighters up from Edwards AFB. Cooper, still hungover from getting sloshed the night before and nursing a laceration to his left hand from a broken shot glass, is hesitant to push his Starfighter to its limits, but Cunningham has no such reservations. We then get to see why the F-104 was notorious as an airplane that could fly very fast and very high, but was constantly trying to kill the men flying it. Cunningham attempts a high-g supersonic banking turn against Cooper's advice, generating too much angle-of-attack for the -104's stubby wings to handle. The jet is flipped sideways so violently that Cunningham's head is slammed against the canopy with enough force to shatter the bulletproof plexiglass, knocking him unconscious if not killing him outright. Cooper can only scream over the radio for Cunningham to eject as his friend's F-104 plummets out of the sky in an unrecoverable spin. The camera keeps switching between Cooper's face and a first-person view from Cunningham's cockpit as the Mojave Desert gets closer and closer.
Robert Gilruth: Test pilots have a very unusual tendency. A lot of them die. This list is out of date.
