The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

“But let me warn you. Project Mercury isn’t a continuation of anything. Nobody’s ever gone into space before. It’s completely new; it’s untried, there are many uncertainties ahead. If for any reason whatsoever you decide it’s not for you, you can go back to your respective service with no questions asked.”

None of us were looking back, however. After Bob’s brief introduction, we tried to get to know the men we were going to be working with.

I had met some of the others who’d been chosen, but didn’t know them well. They may have known a little more about me, as a result of the cross-country speed run and Name That Tune, than I knew about them.

Al Shepard had worked on the Crusader. We had attended meetings together; and comments he had made revealed a sharp, analytical mind. A couple of times Annie and I had been in groups that included him and his wife, Louise, but we didn’t know them well. I knew Scott Carpenter and Wally Schirra, because they, like Al, were Navy – I didn’t know Wally’s work or personality; but Scott had been in my group during the testing at Wright-Patterson. We shared an open-minded curiosity that had made us like each other right away.

The Air Force guys, Gordo Cooper, Gus Grissom, and Deke Slayton, I didn’t know at all. I had met them for the first time when we were going through some of the testing.

One thing we did know, from our own histories and what we had gone through at Lovelace and Wright-Patterson, was that we were all extremely competent. The Langley meeting bolstered that impression. The way each man walked, stood, and shook hands exuded confidence, and maybe just a little arrogance. The fact that we had been selected meant we stood on a high step on the test pilot ladder. We were part of an elite group, an exclusive fraternity. Talking to each other, we didn’t need preliminaries.

I learned quickly that several of the others had flown in Korea. Gus had about a hundred F-86missions under his belt. Wally had served as an exchange pilot with the Air Force, as I had, and had shot down two MiGs. Scott had flown P2Vs, a long-range patrol plane; he had only about two hundred hours of jet time, which made his selection a little surprising. Deke and I were the only two who also had flown in combat during World War II; he had done bombing runs in B-25s over Europe. More recently, he and Gordo had been test pilots at Edwards. They had been flying the hottest of the Air Force jets, the Century series, although Deke was in fighter ops and Gordo was in engineering. Gus had been doing electronics testing at Wright-Patterson.

The final seven became known as the Mercury Seven and were introduced to the public. Glenn:

Walt shambled to the podium while people handed out press kits with our names and information about Project Mercury. Then we waited for a few minutes with flashbulbs going off in our faces while the reporters with afternoon deadlines scrambled for the phones to alert their offices. They came back, and T. Keith Glennan, NASA’s director who had served in the same capacity at NACA, stood up and said, “It is my pleasure to introduce to you – and I consider it a very real honor, gentlemen – Malcolm S. Carpenter, Leroy G. Cooper, John H. Glenn Jr., Virgil I. Grissom, Walter M. Schirra Jr., Alan B. Shepard Jr., and Donald K. Slayton… the nation’s Mercury astronauts.”

The competition from the Soviets made the whole business urgent. Glenn:

And then there were the Soviets. Their strides in space, combined with our fear of their intentions, placed the astronauts in the front line of the war for not only space supremacy but – in many minds – national survival. The Soviets seemed so joyless and ideologically grim, and we didn’t want to be like them. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had said, “We will bury you.” Americans knew a threat when they heard one.

In May 1959 training began in earnest – the first trial launch of the Atlas missile was a failure. Glenn:

We had been in training for about three weeks when NASA took us to Cape Canaveral for our first missile launch. We gathered on the night of May 18 on a camera pad about half a mile from one of the big gantries where an Atlas D waited to lift off.