NASA Selects Mercury Seven: America Enters the Space Race

NASA introduced America's first astronauts to the press on April 9, 1959, and the seven men who walked into the ballroom at Dolley Madison House in Washington, D.C., were instantly transformed from anonymous military test pilots into the most famous people in the country. Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton were selected from 508 candidates who had been subjected to a brutal screening process involving centrifuges, isolation chambers, psychiatric evaluations, and invasive medical examinations that several later described as dehumanizing. The selection criteria reflected the program's engineering constraints rather than any romantic vision of space exploration. Project Mercury's capsule was tiny, so astronauts had to be under 5 feet 11 inches and weigh less than 180 pounds. They needed at least 1,500 hours of flight time in jet aircraft and an engineering-related bachelor's degree. The test pilot requirement effectively limited the pool to military aviators, and all seven selected had flown combat missions in Korea or served as test pilots at facilities like Edwards Air Force Base and the Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent River. The press conference was pandemonium. Reporters gave the seven a standing ovation before a single question was asked, a response that shocked NASA officials who had expected skepticism about the program's feasibility. The astronauts were articulate, modest, and telegenic. John Glenn, whose clean-cut earnestness and facility with cameras made him the most quotable, dominated the proceedings. Life magazine paid $500,000 for exclusive access to the astronauts' personal stories, ensuring sympathetic coverage and creating the mythology of the astronaut-hero that shaped American culture for a generation. The reality of Project Mercury was less glamorous than the publicity suggested. The astronauts fought continuously with NASA engineers over the degree of control they would have inside the capsule. Engineers wanted an automated vehicle; the astronauts demanded manual controls and a window. The compromise produced a spacecraft that could be operated either automatically or manually, giving the astronauts the ability to take control in an emergency. Shepard flew first, on May 5, 1961, a 15-minute suborbital flight that made him the second person in space after Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight three weeks earlier.