Project Mercury

NASA created Mercury in 1958 from the rubble of a military program and the urgency of losing the satellite race. The design requirement was simple and brutal: put a human in a capsule, survive the launch, keep him alive, bring him back. The capsule was so small the astronauts called themselves spam in a can. Alan Shepard flew fifteen minutes on May 5, 1961, a suborbital arc over the Atlantic that barely constituted space by international standards. Gus Grissom flew the same arc, then nearly drowned when his hatch blew prematurely and the capsule sank. John Glenn orbited three times in February 1962, the flight the country needed. Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper followed. The program cost $384 million and produced six flights. It proved that weightlessness did not produce the cognitive collapse some physicians had predicted. It proved that manual control was achievable. Kennedy announced the Moon program four weeks after Shepard's flight. Mercury had made the ambition credible.