Category:Mercury space programme

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The Mercury space programme was NASA's first generation of vertical rocket-based spaceflight, and was based around a single-seater capsule.

Project Mercury

Project Mercury (1958-1963) was America's first manned space programme. Triggered by the shock of the Soviets putting the unmanned radio beacon satellite Sputnik into orbit in 1957, and given a further push by Yuri Gagarin's manned orbit in 1961, "Mercury" was designed to test out some of the hardware and systems essential to the later Geminii and Apollo missions.

The Mercury Seven

The Mercury project included a select team of seven pilots drawn from the US Navy and Air Force, The Mercury Seven, consisting of Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton.

The seven were used intensively for publicity for the programme, giving TV interviews and interviews in LIFE magazine. As an indication of their impact, the five characters in Thunderbirds (Scott, Gordon, John, Alan and Virgil) were named after five of the Mercury Seven ("Gus" Grissom's real first name was actually Virgil).

After Mercury

Mercury was announced at the end of 1958 and used a "single-seater" capsule mounted on an existing rocket system. It was succeeded by the Gemini programme, so-named because its more advanced second-generation capsules seated a pair of astronauts. This was in turn succeeded by the Apollo missions, which produced the Moon landings.

The success of the Apollo missions and the landing of men on the Moon inevitably eclipsed the earlier successes, and nowadays when people talk about the 1960s US space programme, they tend to remember Apollo and forget about the earlier projects. However, to people who lived through the Sputnik and Mercury years, Mercury and the Mercury Seven made an impact on them that they will never forget.

External links

• Project Mercury (wikipedia.org)
• Mercury Seven (wikipedia.org)