The Mercury Seven: How America Picked Its First Astronauts in 1959

The Space Race · April 9, 1959

The Mercury Seven, NASA's first astronaut group, photographed in pressure suits in 1960

The Mercury Seven, NASA's first astronaut group, photographed in pressure suits in 1960 · NASA photograph, public domain (PD-USGov-NASA), via Wikimedia Commons

They were introduced at a press conference in Washington on April 9, 1959, and the country decided on the spot that it liked them: seven military test pilots, all married, all fathers, all photographed in silver pressure suits that had barely been invented. Nobody in the room had been to space. Nobody on Earth had.

The selection had been narrowed from 508 service records to 110 candidates to 32 who reported for testing, and the testing was famously strange — ice water in the ear canal, isolation chambers, treadmills tilted until the heart gave up an answer. What NASA was really looking for was not strength but tolerance: men who stayed calm while something unfamiliar happened to their bodies.

The seven were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton. Six of them would fly a Mercury capsule; Slayton was grounded by a heart murmur and waited sixteen years for his flight. If you were a boy in the early 1960s, these were the faces on the classroom wall.

On the record

  • Announced April 9, 1959 at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
  • All seven were military test pilots — the requirement was set by President Eisenhower to narrow an unmanageable field.
  • Deke Slayton was grounded in 1962 for an irregular heartbeat and finally flew in 1975 on Apollo-Soyuz.
  • Alan Shepard flew first, on May 5, 1961 — a fifteen-minute suborbital hop, three weeks after Gagarin orbited.

🎵 This was the music playing while all of it happened — 1950s doo-wop and slow-dance ballads, new albums every week on the lovesong1950s channel.

Music on this channel is composed and produced with AI tools; the songs, stories, and artwork are original works created for lovesong1950s.

Sources: NASA — Project Mercury Overview · Image file at Wikimedia Commons.

More to read: the lovesong1950s home page · every post from September 2026

More stories to explore

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Postcard Heart – The 1950s Doo-Wop Love Letter That Never Needed a Stamp v.21

Image
Story Behind the Song · Postcard Heart , Track 1 ▶ The player starts right at this track (00:00). Let it keep playing for the full album. He only meant to buy a postcard. Blue sky, a little red canoe — the kind you send to someone far away with a line like "wish you were here." He was still writing it in his neatest hand when she walked past the postcard stand, and suddenly there was no faraway town worth wishing about. That is the whole heart of this song, and of the album that takes its name from it. The doo-wah harmonies bounce like a stamped envelope skipping across a mail sorter, while the lead vocal keeps one hand on the counter, half in love already. By the second verse they are taking the long way past the square, and a small heart drawn next to a name has quietly re-addressed his whole life. If you have ever mailed your feelings to the wrong distance, this opener sets them straight: the only address that matters is standing right in front of you. I...
Read more

August 23, 1950: The Flood After the Great Assam Earthquake

Image
Today in 1950 · Wednesday, August 23, 1950 Crew on the deck of a Brahmaputra River steamer, Assam region, 1895 — the river basin devastated by the 1950 earthquake · William Henry Jackson, Library of Congress, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons In late August 1950, the aftermath of one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded was still unfolding in northeast India. The magnitude 8.6 Assam-Tibet earthquake of August 15 — among the ten most powerful instrumentally recorded quakes in history — had sent enormous landslides into Himalayan river valleys, damming rivers including the Subansiri. About a week after the quake, the natural dam on the Subansiri burst. An eyewitness account preserved by the Assam Times records that the river 'remained blocked for five days' before a midnight flood surged through with twelve to fourteen feet of water, obliterating everything in its path. In the villages of Torajan and Ghasigaon, the account says, there were no survivors — not even...
Read more

Crying in the Chapel: The Orioles' 1953 Hit and Songwriter

Image
The Story Behind the Song · The Orioles, 1953 The Orioles in an early press photo by James J. Kriegsmann, taken before 1954 · Shaw Artists Corporation, published without copyright notice, public domain Who wrote Crying in the Chapel? Artie Glenn wrote "Crying in the Chapel," first recorded by his son Darrell Glenn on Valley Records. The Orioles recorded their version on June 30, 1953, and Jubilee released it that July. Their recording became a No. 1 R&B hit and crossed over to the pop charts. The Orioles’ Crying in the Chapel: the 1953 charts What happened next is the part worth remembering. By the Billboard issue dated September 5, 1953, the Orioles' record stood at No. 1 on both of the magazine's rhythm-and-blues charts at once — National Best Sellers and Most Played in Juke Boxes. A week later it was No. 11 on the pop Best Selling Singles chart. And it was not alone there: on a single page of that September 12 issue, four different versions of the sam...
Read more