Overview

“What, not another space saga!” For six years, the public has been stuffed with stories on our space activities. No pioneering scientific development has been better covered. The development of atomic power was shrouded in secrecy, while the beginning of aviation, the invention of the light bulb, the telephone, and the steam engine, all came before the era of mass media of communication. In the movies, we have relived the excitement of the discoveries of Edison, Fulton, Whitney, and Bell. But not till the space age could the public live the day-to-day adventure of discovery as it happened. This they did, questioning the decisions, cursing the delays, and praying with the launches.

Despite the volumes that already crowd our libraries, I believe that at least one or two good stories remain to be told - and I would like to tell them. Except for the ghost-written We Seven, none of the original group in Project Mercury has yet published his memoirs. Much remains which went unsaid in the pressure, confusion, and excitement of the early days of the space program. I believe that most of us who lived through that period feel the full story has yet to be told. Further, with the immediate pressure off, it is possible now to view the events of those years in the light of the results of both our program and that of the Russians. If we are in danger at this point of succumbing to the smugness of the Monday morning quarterback, we do have the perspective which time lends to philosophy. Where on a day-to-day basis every hour brings a crisis, now a year after completion, the individual cobblestones fade into the major curves and hills of the highway.

This story will follow in roughly chronological order my own experiences in Project Mercury. It begins with the day in October 1958 when I first joined the group of two to three dozen scientists who were about to embark on the mad project of putting man in space. It describes the selection and training of the astronauts, the building of the space vehicle and the worldwide network, and finally the exciting days of the first launches. The book will end with the flight of Gordon Cooper and a brief back-over-the-shoulder look at the significance of the project to history.

The central theme running through the book will be man’s contest with his own creation -- his effort to find a place for himself in a world (and out of it) where electro-mechanical devices seem to be doing things so much better than he can. This half-Pygmalion, half-Frankensteinian problem of automation was a central controversy running through the program. The original group of engineers who initiated Project Mercury came from the “Pilotless Research Division” at Langley Field. They were used to developing automatic equipment and had the greatest faith in their capability to design unmanned space vehicles. They felt that if a man had to go along, then he should be a passenger and keep his hands off the controls. However, the highly trained test pilots selected for Mercury had no desire to be glorified chimpanzees. They had strong confidence in their own abilities, but a healthy skepticism in the reliability of automatic equipment. Mercury was a result of the interaction of these two forces. The solutions which were evolved for Mercury had to be based on a good understanding of the nature of the capabilities and limitations of men and machines. Such knowledge leads not only to a definition of man’s role in space, but may throw some light on his place here on earth.