The Mercury program brought forth an era in Americans flying in space. This project was developed by NASA in 1959 and had a series of unpiloted test flights and six piloted missions between the years 1961 and 1963. The Mercury project was the building blocks for the great space exploration we have now and due to it, we gradually increased and in one decade we reached the moon.
The Space Race
The Mercury project was like signing a contract saying your entering the space race. Due to this, the two countries that had the ability to win the space race were America and Soviet Union. When the USSR made the first piloted space flight, the USA shot the Mercury project into high gear so America could reach the moon by the end of the decade and beat the Soviet Union.
Mercury Space Capsule
The ship they used in the Mercury program was the Mercury space capsule. The Mercury space capsule was bell shaped and was about 2.7 meters tall and 1.8 meters wide. It could only hold one astronaut at a time. There was a chair for the astronaut to sit in and it was built to fit his body and be comfortable and safe. The bottom of the capsule was surrounded by a heat shield for reentry to Earth. When the capsule was through the atmosphere a cushion would replace the heat shield and a parachute would release for an easy descent. In the beginning of the Mercury project, it was launched by Redstone rockets but later changed to Atlas rockets.
The Mercury 7
The Mercury 7 were the original seven astronauts and were chosen from the top US military pilots. They were M. Scott Carpender, L. Gordon Cooper Jr., Joun Glenn Jr., Virgil Grissom, Walter Schirra Jr., Alan Shepard Jr., and Donald Slayton. All of the pilots flew on Mercury missions except Slayton because he had an irregular heartbeat so was put in NASA's Astronaut Office until he got NASA to make him a part of the Apollo-Soyuz Test project in 1975.
Qualifications
The qualifications were grueling. You had to be in a branch of the military, under 40 and shorter than 5 ft 11in (the capsule was only big enough for that height), have perfect eye sight, an excellent physical condition, hold a bachelor's degree or equivalent in engineering, be a qualified jet pilot and a graduate of test pilot school; and have at least 1,500 hours of flying.
Mercury Firsts
The first Mercury flight was on May 5, 1961 by Alan Shepard. The trip was 15 minutes and the ship reached an altitude of 186 kilometers and traveled a distance of 485 kilometers. At one point the ship reached a speed of 8,234 km/hr.
The first orbit mission was made by Joun Glenn in February 1962 and was in a capsule known as the Friendship for five hours that took him around Earth three times. There was a problem on that mission as the heat shield came loose and even with the adjustments made by the astronaut he saw pieces of his capsule break apart on descent, but he did survive.
The fifth piloted Mercury capsule was the Sigma which launched on October 1962 with Walter Schirra. During the six orbits around Earth he did the very first telecast from space. The longest piloted Mercury flight was by Gordon Cooper in the Faith capsule, which took off in May 1963, and did twenty-two orbits in thirty-four hours and nineteen minutes. In this flight, Cooper released a sphere with a flashing lights and this was the first satellite deployed from a spacecraft.
After Mercury
After Mercury, NASA started the Gemini program where twelve spacecraft were launched between April 1964 and November 1966. Those flights knocked the problems out of travel into space and paved the rode for the Apollo flights.
