NASA introduced the Mercury Seven, America's first astronauts
On this day · 9 April 1959
Seven test pilots walked into a Washington ballroom and walked out as instant national heroes.
On April 9, 1959, NASA formally introduced the seven men chosen for Project Mercury, the nation’s first human spaceflight program. Administrator T. Keith Glennan presented them in alphabetical order in the ballroom of the Dolley Madison House on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C.
The Mercury Seven were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton — all military test pilots winnowed from an initial pool of hundreds. They fielded reporters’ questions for some 90 minutes, their first taste of the celebrity that would follow.
Time magazine compared them to “Columbus, Magellan, Daniel Boone, and the Wright brothers.”
Mercury’s modest goal was to learn whether a human could survive and function in space at all. Within three years John Glenn would orbit the Earth, and the seven became the public face of America’s race to the Moon.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
