Home : Armed Forces : USAF :Project MercuryI believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-term exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.
Few Americans, in Congress, the media, the general public, or even within NASA itself, have ever had as broad an understanding of the importance of space exploration to the daily activities of the nation as President Kennedy. He championed the space effort as an idealistic, noble endeavor of human adventure, with its wisdom self-evident, its necessity self-sustaining. He also understood the practical threat that the Soviet space advantage posed to the delicate global political landscape of the early 1960s. At the height of the cold war, struggling to convince uncommitted nations of the efficacy of their particular system of government and way of life, the United States and USSR both sought to validate their claims of technical, political, and social preeminence by developing a superior space program. But while Khrushchev used the Soviet achievements as a bludgeon, Kennedy defined the American space agenda as something larger and more important than merely an easy source of propaganda or rhetoric. Framing the task as a great adventure on an ultimate frontier, Kennedy saw the daunting cost and required technical expertise as an opportunity to bridge some of the distances between nations here on earth. Late in 1959 he expressed his preference that the effort be "placed on an international footing as soon as possible," with U.S. allies playing a significant role; despite the climate of the times, he even publicly entertained the idea of a joint effort with the Soviets. He elegantly expressed that possibility in his 1961 inaugural address: "Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars."' Given their leadership position, however, the Soviets had little incentive to pursue the idea. In fact, Khrushchev had vastly different plans in mind to celebrate the next great step forward in space exploration. It was against this backdrop of global misadventure and tense superpower posturing that the first manned U.S. space program, Project Mercury, achieved its initial success. Mercury had been given life back in 1958, with three objectives: to orbit a manned spacecraft around earth; to investigate human beings' ability to function in space; and to safely recover the astronaut and spacecraft with which it would accomplish the first two goals. Mercury's success would depend on the massive deployment of technology, equipment, and industrial manufacturing capability, as well as a small group of individuals who would become America's first astronauts - and in the process, certified American heroes. The Mercury Seven were introduced to the public by NASA administrator T. Keith Glennan on April 9, 1959. At age thirty-six, John H. Glenn Jr., a U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, was the oldest of the seven, and the senior astronaut in terms of rank. He also was the only Marine of the group. Lieutenant Commanders Walter M. "Wally" Schirra Jr. and Alan B. Shepard Jr. and Lieutenant Malcolm Scott Carpenter represented the U.S. Navy, and Captains Donald Kent "Deke" Slayton, Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr., and Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom were assigned to NASA by the U.S. Air Force. They were all experienced test pilots with distinguished service records, and had survived an intensive five-part battery of physical and psychological tests prior to their selection. Intelligent, personable, and patriotic, the first astronauts were also independent and strong-willed. They shared an esprit de corps even more intense than the legendary empathetic loyalties of test pilots, and their common respect and admiration would grow in the coming years. The public and the media embraced them immediately as heroic figures destined to redeem America's flagging pride in the race with the Soviets.  The Mercury astronauts standing beside a Convair 106-B aircraft. They are, left to right, M. Scott Carpenter, L. Gordon Cooper Jr., John H. Glenn Jr., Virgil I. Grissom, Walter M. Schirra Jr., Alan B. Shepard Jr., and Donald K. Slayton. In January 1959, the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation won the contract to build twenty space capsules for the Mercury program. A whole new image for Americans accustomed to thinking of a spacecraft as a cylindrical flying-saucer type object, the Mercury capsule was cone-shaped, tapering to a small round cylinder at its uppermost point. The craft's rounded bottom end was covered by an ablative heat shield, designed to deflect the 3,000-degree heat of reentry into the earth's atmosphere by partially evaporating. The retro-rockets that would propel the craft out of orbit at mission's end were also attached to its wide blunt end. The Jupiter intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) was developed by the Army's Ballistic Missile Agency at the Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, under Dr. Wernher von Braun. However, in 1956 the Department of Defense limited the Army's operational employment of missiles to those with less than a 200-mile range and when the Jupiter became operational in 1959, it was placed under USAF control. The Atlas rocket was developed by the U.S. Air Force to be the nation's first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) capable of boosting a nuclear warhead to any target on earth. The program began in the early 1950's with the first successful launch in December 1957. The liquid-fueled Atlas served as one of the primary ballistic missiles until it was phased out of strategic missile service in 1965. It was replaced by the Minuteman ICBM. The Atlas became one of the nation's most important boosters for the Air Force, NASA, and Department of Defense orbital payloads. The Atlas also became the launch vehicle for the Project Mercury manned orbital flights. Although the emphasis on technology reuse specified that existing missiles be used as launch vehicles, a great deal of thought went into the safety precautions suddenly made necessary by the prospect of setting a capsule containing a human being on top of the explosive rockets needed to propel the craft past the earth's atmosphere." Redstone rockets were used for the first two Mercury missions, which were suborbital flights, and Atlas launchers were used for the program's four orbital missions. Modifications to the Atlas included the addition of an early-warning system to alert controllers of an impending failure of the launch vehicle, and a nineteen-foot escape tower was attached to the top of the capsule to pull the capsule and crew away from the massive launch rocket in the event of an emergency. Alan Shepard climbed into that tiny workspace early on the cloudy Florida morning of May 5, 1961. Each of the astronauts named the particular capsule he would fly, adding the number 7 in honor of the teamwork they shared. Shepard's choice for this first American spaceflight was Freedom 7, appropriate enough for the task of breaking the bonds of earth's atmosphere and aptly describing the manner in which the flight was conducted, open to the world via the mass media. The long countdown to launch, during which the various systems and equipment necessary for the flight were carefully checked and readied, had begun at 8:30 the previous morning, with a built-in hold--NASAspeak for a planned delay-of fifteen hours kicking in when the countdown stood at six and a half hours before launch. Splitting the long process into two parts gave the huge NASA teams responsible for launching the rocket and the space capsule time to rest prior to the countdown's nerve-wracking final moments. By all accounts, the astronauts themselves seem to have been among the calmest of all those involved with the flights. By strong constitution, a sense of duty, long test pilot flight experience, or perhaps simple acceptance of the magnitude of their activities, the Mercury Seven lived up to the nation's enduring interest in them and in their space exploits. Their long training and congenial temperament prepared them well for their unique mission. The countdown to the launch of Freedom 7 resumed at 11:30 p.m. on May 4, and continued through the night; Shepard was transported to the launch pad when it reached two hours and twenty minutes before liftoff, or T minus two hours and twenty minutes. The long preparation, like the two years between the astronauts' introduction to the public and the moment of this first attempt, brought a new surge of public fascination, and a great deal of the nuts-and-bolts workings of the space program, including the arcane language of launch, flight, and recovery, became part of the American lexicon. The fits and starts of the launch sequence only served to heighten the suspense of the endeavor, the well-paced drama of getting Shepard to the launch pad, into the capsule, and then into space merely emphasizing the heroic nature of the task. And despite all the preparation - the hours the astronaut had spent practicing every detail of his mission in simulators; the trial runs provided by past test launches; and all available data, including the fact of Yuri Gagarin's recent successful flight, indicating that space flight could be accomplished without undue physical or psychological stress on the human being in the small metal podno one could really know what would happen once the huge Redstone rocketed past the low clouds. The emphasis on the Russian's initial successes and the United States' need to "catch up" did nothing to lessen the sheer human adventure of both programs' earliest days. There had been some thought of readying Shepard's Freedom 7 for an early April launch, giving rise to the possibility of beating the Soviets into space, and a final test launch of the Redstone took place on March 24. But the emphasis on safety and careful preparation was deemed more important than a headlong rush to compete with the more advanced Soviets, so the honor of being first in space went to Gagarin. In retrospect, and given the magnitude of the accomplishments of both American and Russian space travelers throughout the 1960s and during the decades since, the space race seems a quaint antique at best, and at worst a dangerous incursion of geopolitics on science and human exploration. But the political agenda fed the public's interest and gave both nations' programs a higher profile and priority than they would have had if they had been seen as purely altruistic endeavors. Defining the high human aspirations of celestial exploration in terms of industrial and ideological competition allowed each nation to focus vast resources on the peaceful application of their technology. Once Alan Shepard had entered his Mercury capsule, the countdown started up again, and ran almost continuously until T minus fifteen minutes. The trip was really on now; fifteen minutes is close enough to actually see the planned sequence of events in the mind's eye even for those who had not run through it thousands of times already, as Shepard and all those associated with the launch had. But during preparations for a space flight, the passing of fifteen minutes prior to a launch often takes much longer on the official clock than it does on a wristwatch in real time. At T minus fifteen minutes, fretting over the possibility that the historic launch and flight could not be properly photographed because of the low clouds that had been hanging over the pad all through the early morning hours, NASA officials decided to hold the countdown for about a half hour. During the weather-related hold, a new difficulty cropped up when one of the Redstone's power inverters developed regulation problems. The countdown was recycled to T minus thirty-five minutes and holding, and the inverter was replaced. Proof of the space agency's foresight in developing redundancies of systems and equipment, the entire episode with the inverter took only eighty-six minutes to resolve. There was one last hold while the craft's real-time trajectory computer was checked a final time before launch. It was found to be in excellent working order, so the clock was set running again. Then, at 9:34 a.m. on May 5, 1961, Freedom 7 lifted off atop launch vehicle MR-7 - the Redstone rocket. As the huge assembly blasted into the still slightly cloudy Florida sky, it simultaneously incarnated Alan B. Shepard as the first American hero of an entirely new age and launched the nation officially on the "new ocean of space," as President Kennedy had described the bold adventure some months earlier. Shepard's grand adventure was long on significance but short in duration. In accordance with the mission's limited objectives, the entire trip of the first American in space lasted just fifteen minutes and twenty-eight seconds. But the journey accomplished all of its objectives, large and small, from slimming the space race gap with the Soviets to test-firing the retro-rockets that would be necessary to later orbital flights. Freedom 7 flew to a height of 116 miles at its maximum, beyond earth's atmosphere into space, just short of orbit. Shepard became the first to manually steer a spacecraft - no small accomplishment for the pilot-centric American program, and a harbinger of things to come. His splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean, just off Grand Bahama Island, was as flawless as his flight, and he was quickly recovered. The short shot into space cemented the astronaut's place as the premier American space hero, and an adoring public eagerly watched his return and subsequent visit to the White House. Shepard's successful flight acted as a healing tonic for Kennedy, who continued to suffer embarrassing international setbacks. In the month following the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, the U.S.-supported government of South Korea was overthrown by a military coup. But with Shepard safely back on earth, the president saw in the space program a decisive means of surpassing the Soviets and securing American influence throughout the world. He would later describe his decision to champion the space effort as one of the most important of his time as president.
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