NASA Chooses the Mercury Seven

by michael shinabery
New Mexico Museum of Space History

They were the first American idols to rocket to fame. NASA selected them on April 2, 1959, and seven days later “introduced the Mercury Seven to the public,” the website history.nasa.gov cited. The men reported for duty on April 27, each hoping they’d be not just the first American in space, but ultimately the first man to go there.

Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, Wally Schirra and Deke Slayton all made the cut from an original pool of 508 men, the astronauts cited in their 1962 book, “We Seven” (Simon and Schuster). To apply, one had to be less than 40 years in age, five-foot 11-inches or shorter, have earned a bachelor’s degree or equivalent, hold a jet rating and been graduated from test pilot school, and have a minimum 1,500 flight hours.

The future had to be daunting to the men who knew they’d eventually be atop rockets that were crashing and burning during unmanned tests. Soon after a Mercury-Atlas 1 lifted off on July 29, the “bird plunged into the ocean,” according to “Wernher von Braun” (National Space Institute, 1976). On Nov. 8, 1960, Little Joe 5, boosting Mercury Capsule 3, crashed 16 seconds after launch. On Nov. 21, “when the countdown reached zero” for the Mercury-Redstone 1, “the only thing that left the ground was the escape tower.”

Pundits howled, sometimes with righteous indignation, other times with laughter.

“If half the engineering efforts and public interest that go into the research on the American female bosom had gone into our guided missile program, we would now be running hot dog stands on the moon,” Li’l Abner cartoonist Al Capp said.

“The Space Race” (Chilton, 1962) pointed out the problem – in part – was that NASA was second fiddle. At the time, the government was giving priority to the Air Force for “rockets coming off the assembly line.” Regardless, astronaut training forged ahead and, as it did, each man undertook a specific task.

“It was obvious to us from the start,” Slayton wrote in “We Seven,” “that Project Mercury was much too complex and far-reaching for all seven of us to learn everything there was to know about it in every detail … so we split up the work between us.”

The Sept. 14, 1959 Life magazine profiled the new Astronaut Corps. Shepard’s area of “responsibility,” he said in the article, was “the recovery of the Astronaut.” On May 5, 1961, aboard Freedom 7, Shepard had the honor of being the first American in space. He did not, however, get the distinction of being the first man to travel there. That went to Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who flew aboard Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961. Shepard made his second flight in January 1971, commanding Apollo 14, during which he walked on the Moon.

Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, “specialized in cockpit layout and control functioning,” nasa.gov said. His mission was in February 1962, aboard Friendship 7.

“Many times every day I think of taking off in that missile. I’ve tried a thousand times to visualize that moment,” Glenn said in Life.

He had a second mission as well. After waiting 36 years, Glenn was a crew member on the Space Shuttle Discovery.

In retrospect, Grissom’s words in Life were eerie: “Occasionally I lie in bed at night and think, now what in the hell do I want to get up on that thing for? Especially I think that way when I consider the two boys and my wife. Why do I want to risk my life?” he said. “The answer is that I’m a career military officer and, I think, a deeply patriotic one.”

Grissom’s area was control systems, both manual and automatic. His first flight, in Liberty Bell 7, launched on July 21, 1961. In March 1965 he was “command pilot on the first manned Gemini flight,” jsc.nasa.gov documented. Grissom died two years later when the Apollo 1 capsule, during a launch pad test, erupted in smoke and flames.

Carpenter was headed out to sea for two years on an aircraft carrier when got the word he’d been chosen.

“I paid hurried last respects to my … somewhat irritated captain five minutes before the ship left San Diego,” Carpenter said in Life.

He was packing when his landlord brought by new tenants.

“Are you one of the spacemen?” Carpenter said one of them, a woman, asked.

Yes, he replied. She responded, “Well, you’re a nut.”

Carpenter, whose area of expertise was communication and navigation, orbited Earth three times in May 1962, aboard Aurora 7. Three years later he went underwater, living aboard Sealab II.

Cooper said he first flew when he “was 7 or 8,” taking the stick with his dad, “a retired Air Force colonel (who) was a friend of Wiley Post’s and Amelia Earhart’s.” He soloed at 16, and dreamed of going even higher.

“I used to read Buck Rogers in the funny papers and listen to the radio program,” he said.

Cooper worked on boosters, and in May 1963 piloted Faith 7. In August 1965 he commanded Gemini 5. He and Pete Conrad established “a new space endurance record,” jsc.nasa.gov documented. Cooper was also “the first man to make a second orbital flight.”

NASA assigned Schirra to environmental control which, he said in Life, “has to do with all equipment inside the capsule that keeps the pilot healthy.” In 1962 he became the fifth astronaut in space, orbiting Earth six times aboard Sigma 7. Subsequently, he commanded Gemini 6A, “the first rendezvous of two manned, maneuverable spacecraft,” nasa.gov said. In 1968 he “commanded Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo flight.”

Slayton, whose responsibility was “mating” the capsule to Atlas, along with the Atlas booster’s capability for orbital missions, said in Life that when he first saw the “huge” rocket he proclaimed: “This is going to be one hell of a thrill.” He had to wait 16 years for that moment, however. During Mercury, NASA removed him from flight status over a heart irregularity, and named him Coordinator of Astronaut Activities. The agency reinstated him in 1972, and Slayton was 51 when he finally flew, in July 1975, on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.

When Slayton was chosen, he couldn’t swim. Revealing that would likely have washed him out of the Corps. So at home, Carpenter wrote in “For Spacious Skies” (Harcourt, 2002), he surreptitiously prepared by filling “the kitchen sink with water and, dunking his head in, rotated it for the swimmer’s side breath, and then face down to exhale.” Slayton, according to Carpenter, became “the first nonswimmer to graduate from the Navy’s tough water-survival program.”

Michael Shinabery is an education specialist and humanities scholar with the New Mexico Museum of Space History. E-mail him at michael.shinabery [at] state.nm.us.