Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.
—CELEBRITY PSYCHIC CRISWELL, AT THE BEGINNING OF THE ASTRO-FICTION FILM PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)
The thought of manned spaceflight, especially of landing on the moon, seized the American imagination in the days of consternation following Sputnik. Once NASA was established, astronaut mania swept the land. Although the timing of the Mercury rollout emanated from Cold War concerns, the public enthrallment with space grew as much out of its frontier heritage and football fanaticism. In popular publications, test pilots were called “space cowboys” or “space jocks.” Space exploration was marketed by Collier’s and National Geographic as a heart-racing adventure performed by brave test pilots willing to risk their lives to be pioneers in space. The days of the Wrights’ lowly twelve-horsepower engine had been replaced by the loud thrust of space-bound rockets. Questing held a “mystical lure of the unknown,” historian Ray Allen Billington wrote about postwar America, because it answered the “call of the primitive, the dominance of the explorer impulse.”
NASA wasn’t inventing the notion of the space frontier in the late 1950s for it was already part of the national DNA. Somehow going to the moon seemed to be part of America’s destiny. Science-fiction novels were called “space-opera Westerns,” and Disneyland in California had Frontierland (Wild West) next to Tomorrowland (space). When von Braun contributed a series of articles to Collier’s, his first effort was titled “Crossing the Last Frontier.” In the wind-up to announcing the Mercury Seven astronauts NASA used words such as frontier, adventure, pioneer, challenge, and explorers to stoke the public enthusiasm. Designer David Clark and pilot Scott Crossfield convinced NASA to make the astronaut space suits silver to give them a futuristic look.
While dozens of top military aviators made the NASA “consideration” list to become Mercury astronauts in early 1959, only seven would be selected. Those eventually chosen to “conquer space” needed three characteristics shared by Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Doolittle, and Charles Lindbergh: drive, self-reliance, and guts. (The only European NASA regularly evoked in its public relations blitz was Christopher Columbus, an honorary American for “discovering the New World” in 1492.)
Because the winning seven would be going into space alone, in one-man capsules, the phenomenon reminded some citizens of Buck Rogers and the Lone Ranger. For others Mercury astronauts were great team players, like baseball stars Al Kaline and Ernie Banks. NASA basically tested, then overtested, its 160 serious applicants to discover if they had a genuine “pioneering spirit,” or “the right stuff,” as Tom Wolfe so memorably titled his New Journalism classic about Project Mercury.
On April 9, 1959, the so-called Mercury Seven, the test-proven astronauts chosen after a two-month selection process, were introduced to America at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC. Although Eisenhower had initially been inclined to keep the identities of the seven men low-key, if not secret, NASA’s announcement that afternoon became a PR coup, complete with simple but effective stagecraft: as Administrator Keith Glennan addressed a packed press briefing in Washington, DC, a curtain was pulled open, revealing the seven astronauts, all clad in civilian clothes befitting NASA’s status as a civilian agency. “It is my pleasure to introduce to you,” Glennan said, “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!” When asked who wanted to be the first space traveler, each man raised his hand, eliciting loud laughs even from the hard-bitten reporters.
Appealing to a youthful audience hungry for adventure, the handsome astronauts—three from the air force (Cooper, Grissom, and Slayton), three navy (Carpenter, Schirra, and Shepard), and one marine (Glenn), all possessing stoically all-American faces atop lean and rangy frames—received a standing ovation and an outpouring of adulation, becoming overnight heroes. Their camaraderie was palpable. Ranging in age from Glenn (at thirty-seven) to Gordon Cooper (thirty-two) and all standing shorter than five feet eleven, they were almost interchangeable. All were white and male—a given in this chauvinist, pre–1960s civil rights/women’s movement era. All had a patriotic avidity for space adventure, held college diplomas (Glenn using the combination of Muskingum and Patuxent as a fudge); were seasoned jet test pilots, with a proven record of aviation proficiency; could barrel-roll or figure-eight loop; knew aircraft mechanics inside out; possessed an unwavering devotion to beating the Soviets; and had the mental and physical requirements to handle zero gravity. Even though pilots were killed in crashes caused by mechanical or structural malfunctions, none of the chosen astronauts obsesssed about mortality. They were masters of the sky, prepared to be masters of space. “We didn’t know what was going to happen,” Glenn later recalled. “We were making up the music as we went along.”
The press gushed enthusiasms for these new instant space cadet heroes in no uncertain terms. Leading the charge was the New York Times’s James “Scotty” Reston, who was enthralled by all things Project Mercury. “Those gloomy students of the American character who think we’ve lost the hop on our fast ball should have been around here this week when seven young American men dropped into Washington on their way to outer space,” he marveled. “Somehow they had managed to survive the imagined terrors of our affluent society, our waist-high culture, our hidden persuaders, power elite and organization men, and here they were, aged 32 to 37 and all married, in the first stages of training for the first manned rocket flights into space. . . . [W]hat made them so exciting was not that they said anything new, but that they said all the old things with such fierce conviction.”
Among the other shared attributes of the “Magnificent Seven,” as the press soon dubbed them, was their ability to survive Dr. Randy Lovelace’s endurance tests in New Mexico, which included swallowing a two-foot rubber hose, parachuting at night, cycling in place past the point of lassitude, and having jets of ice water gushed into their eardrums at ten-second intervals. Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins best described the Lovelace experience as being “poked, prodded, pummeled, and pierced” in a hellish torrent where “no orifice is inviolate, no privacy respected.” Psychologists also administered thirteen varied “personality and motivation” tests to the chosen astronauts. And at the Lewis Research Center, the Mercury astronauts completed disorientation flights on a three-axis space simulator.
What made the Mercury Seven story so powerful was the bedrock faith the men had in one another. Even though these aviators were all super-achievers with competitive drives and immoderate egos, they bonded like brothers. To avoid duplication, each of the men took on special responsibilities. Cooper and Slayton mastered the art of booster-monitoring the Redstone rockets (army missiles built by Chrysler) and the Atlas (air force missiles by Convair). Shepard put his navy background to work interacting with the branch’s spacecraft recovery forces, based in Norfolk. The most trusted astronaut on cockpit layout issues was Glenn. Always tinkering with gadgetry, Grissom was the flight control maestro. Schirra was responsible for the life-support systems, including oxygen intake procedures while in space. And Carpenter, who liked radio communications, was the chief navigator of the Seven. “I’d go so far as to say that the most significant achievement of the space program was a concept of teamwork,” Schirra believed. “A guy like Chuck Yeager is thus really out of place in my profession. I hesitate to snipe at Yeager, but he asks for it. He boasts about not being a team player.”
The public ate it up. Barely a week went by without a major story praising the Mercury Seven and predicting grand American achievements in space. Life magazine bought the exclusive rights to their personal stories. There was great national pride in the openness of NASA compared with the secrecy of the Soviet space program, and a sense of shared adventure that trickled down to the army of technocrats, physicists, engineers, and rocket scientists underpinning the Mercury program. In the culture at large, space was the place. Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon became popular again. Architect and designer Eero Saarinen, best known for the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, created curvy womb chairs that made sitters feel space-capsule snug. The aesthetic interior of new art museums, the so-called ice-white cube look, grew out of NASA culture. “Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon,” Beat Generation bard Allen Ginsberg prophesied in Kaddish and Other Poems. “He promises the stars he’ll make us a new universe if it comes to that.”
With the media frenzy came rekindled interest in the life and legacy of Dr. Robert Goddard, whose patented innovations had been used in designing engines for the Atlas, Thor, Jupiter, Redstone, and Vanguard rockets—the oomph that boosted NASA to space. On May 1, 1959, the NASA facility in Greenbelt, Maryland, was named the Goddard Space Flight Center in long-overdue appreciation of this undersung genius. As Goddard’s biographer Milton Lehman put it, the rocketeer had “opened the door to the Space Age.”
The von Braun team in Huntsville was ecstatic about Project Mercury, which would fulfill their long-held dream of achieving manned spaceflight. While NASA officials thought of the Mercury Seven astronauts as dexterous test pilots in silvery flight suits, von Braun saw them as field scientists exploring the contours of outer space, courtesy of his Mercury-Redstone launch vehicles. “Man is still the best computer that we can put aboard a spacecraft,” he said, “and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.” But he also knew the Seven needed to be supported by technology that didn’t yet exist. For instance, he envisioned a control protocol whereby astronauts circling Earth could communicate with the ground via a global network of NASA tracking systems; this was soon achieved. Computers in 1959 existed only as huge mainframes that filled rooms. What von Braun envisioned, and NASA contracted from IBM, were smaller computers for the Goddard Space Flight Center that would provide “mission critical” data analysis for NASA in a hurry. These new IBM transistorized computers helped NASA determine “trajectory dynamics” during the launch and early orbit phases.
On the day the Mercury astronauts were introduced, John Kennedy was giving a speech in Milwaukee, but no distance from Washington could erase the impact Mercury would have on both the country and his own personal brand. Space was America’s Cold War Manifest Destiny, and the Mercury astronauts were its rough-and-ready trailblazers, following in the footsteps of Kennedy’s own World War II generation and almost two centuries of American adventurers before. Later that spring, journalist Ben Bradlee, JFK’s Georgetown neighbor, wrote in his private diary that “Kennedy identifies enthusiastically with the astronauts, the glamour surrounding them and the courage and skill it takes to do their jobs.” While Kennedy the seafarer identified with the mythos of the Mercury Seven, Kennedy the politician understood that to be identified with them, to be part of that magnificent fraternity, would be a bonus in his pursuit of the presidency.
On the other side of the political aisle, Vice President Richard Nixon was raising his own presidential stock by getting up in communism’s face. In late July 1959, while viewing a display of modern kitchen conveniences at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, Nixon goaded Soviet premier Khrushchev into a schoolyard quarrel on the virtues of democracy versus communism, an exchange that became known as the Kitchen Debate. Two months later, while touring the United States for thirteen days, Khrushchev was denied access to Disneyland, where Tomorrowland space rides were popular attractions with thrill-seekers.
As their leaders squabbled and positioned, scientists advanced. On January 2, 1959, the first of the Soviets’ Luna (or Lunik) spacecraft was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, on a trajectory intended to impact the moon. A malfunction caused Luna 1 to miss by some 3,600 miles, but the Soviets recast the mission as a success for becoming the first man-made object to escape Earth’s gravity and enter into a heliocentric orbit. Eight months later, on September 14, the three-thousand-pound Luna 2 probe completed its predecessor’s mission by crash-landing between the Archimedes and Autolycus craters on the lunar surface, becoming the first man-made device to connect with another planetary body. The event prompted elation from people around the world; for instance, the New York Times treated the news as the biggest story of the day. The data in those signals showed, among other things, that the moon has no significant magnetic field.
A month before Luna 2, the United States had scored its own coup when the newly launched Explorer 6 satellite sent back the first-ever photograph of Earth from orbit, showing a sunlit area of the central Pacific Ocean from an altitude of 17,000 miles. Two months later, the Soviet Luna 3 made further history by sending back the first photographic images of the far side of the moon. Meanwhile, operating away from public glare in Huntsville, von Braun had developed a rocket whose first stage could deliver 1.5 million pounds of thrust—an amazing start for a possible American moonshot. He called the rocket Saturn.
In Washington, the Eisenhower administration continued to push for global “freedom of space,” conducting U-2 reconnaissance flights over the USSR, and gearing up NASA for manned-space exploration. The president’s science advisors—prominent experts such as Caltech president Lee DuBridge, MIT president James Killian (who preferred robots to men in space), and engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush (who told a congressional committee that rockets couldn’t span oceans)—warned him not to be goaded by the Kremlin into rushing the manned spaceflight program. The administration’s methodical approach soon became fodder for Kennedy on the campaign trail, where he dismissed Eisenhower, Nixon, Bush, Glennan, Killian, and DuBridge as flat-out behind the times. America, JFK was soon saying, had a “space gap” with the USSR, which in the next year would choose twenty “cosmonauts” for its own manned spaceflight program, almost triple Project Mercury’s total. Under the continuing leadership of rocket designer Sergei Korolev, Soviet engineers had also devised a completely automated spacecraft in which a cosmonaut would ride as a passenger instead of as an active pilot.
Kennedy essentially agreed with a snarky Newsweek article that mocked Eisenhower’s space policy recipe: “start late, downgrade Russian feats, fragment authority, pinch pennies, think small, and shirk decisions.” Advanced technology, he believed, was a primary indicator of the economic health of a nation. While Ike methodically slow-walked into the future, Kennedy wanted a decisive American victory in space. As a senator, he pushed for NASA’s getting caught up with Russian space technology. Not yet saying directly that America would put an astronaut on the moon by 1970, he nonetheless guaranteed crowds that if he were U.S. president, the nation would not just be “first but, first and, first when, first if, but first period.”