Mercury Seven

The Mercury Seven were the group of seven astronauts selected to fly spacecraft for Project Mercury. They are also referred to as the Original Seven and Astronaut Group 1. Their names were publicly announced by NASA on April 9, 1959: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton. The Mercury Seven created a new profession in the United States, and established the image of the American astronaut for decades to come.

All of the Mercury Seven eventually flew in space. They piloted the six spaceflights of the Mercury program that had an astronaut on board from May 1961 to May 1963, and members of the group flew on all of the NASA human spaceflight programs of the 20th century – Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle.

Shepard became the first American to enter space in 1961, and walked on the Moon on Apollo 14 in 1971. Grissom flew the first crewed Gemini mission in 1965, but died in 1967 in the Apollo 1 fire; the others all survived past retirement from service. Schirra flew Apollo 7 in 1968, the first crewed Apollo mission, in Grissom's place, and became the only astronaut to fly Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. Cooper piloted the last Mercury spaceflight, Mercury-Atlas 9, in 1963, and in 1965 became the first astronaut to make a second orbital flight when he flew as command pilot of Gemini 5. Carpenter flew Mercury-Atlas 7 in 1962. He later took leave of absence to join the U.S. Navy SEALAB project as an aquanaut, but in training suffered injuries that made him unavailable for further spaceflights.

Slayton, grounded with an atrial fibrillation, ultimately flew on the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project in 1975. The first American in orbit in 1962, Glenn flew on the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1998 to become, at age 77, the oldest person to fly in space at the time. He was the oldest member of the Mercury Seven, and the last living member of the group when he died in 2016 at age 95.

The launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, started a Cold War technological and ideological competition with the United States known as the Space Race. The demonstration of American technological inferiority came as a profound shock to the American public. The Soviets followed up with Sputnik 2, which carried Laika, a Soviet space dog. American intelligence analysts assessed that the Soviets planned to put a man into orbit, which caused the United States Air Force (USAF) and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) to strengthen their efforts to achieve that goal.

The USAF launched a spaceflight project called Man in Space Soonest (MISS), for which it obtained approval from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and requested $133 million in funding. MISS encountered technical challenges, which in turn caused funding difficulties. This generated conflict with the two agencies that should have been supporting it, NACA and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). The core of the problem was the USAF's inability to articulate a clear military purpose for MISS.

Meanwhile, in response to the Sputnik crisis, the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, decided to create a new civilian agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which would absorb NACA and be responsible for the overall direction of the American space program. In September 1958, the USAF agreed to transfer responsibility for MISS to NASA, which was established on October 1, 1958. On November 5, the Space Task Group (STG) was established at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, with Robert R. Gilruth as its director. On November 26, 1958, NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan and his deputy, Hugh Dryden, adopted a suggestion by Abe Silverstein, the director of Space Flight Development at STG, that the human spaceflight project be called Project Mercury. The name was publicly announced by Glennan on December 17, 1958, the 55th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first flight. The objective of Project Mercury was to launch a man into Earth orbit, return him safely to the Earth, and evaluate his capabilities in space.

The STG had to decide on a name for the people who would fly into space. A brainstorming session was held on December 1, 1958. By analogy with "aeronaut" (air traveler), someone came up with the term "astronaut", which meant "star traveler", although Project Mercury's ambitions were far more limited. They thought that they had coined a new word, but the term had been used in science fiction since the 1920s. A three-man panel consisting of Charles J. Donlan, Warren J. North and Allen O. Gamble drew up a civil service job specification for astronauts. The panel proposed that astronauts be in civil service grades 12 to 15, depending on qualifications and experience, with an annual salary of $8,330 to $12,770 (equivalent to $89,852 to $137,744 in 2024). It described the duties of an astronaut: