Mercury
Project Mercury, 1958 to 1963: America's first human spaceflight programme. Six crewed flights, one astronaut each, from Alan Shepard's fifteen minutes in May 1961 to Gordon Cooper's twenty two orbits in May 1963.
Project Mercury, 1958 to 1963: America's first human spaceflight programme. Six crewed flights, one astronaut each, from Alan Shepard's fifteen minutes in May 1961 to Gordon Cooper's twenty two orbits in May 1963.
Mercury asked the narrowest possible question: could a person survive a launch, a flight in orbit and a return through the atmosphere? Nobody knew. Between May 1961 and May 1963 six Americans flew its one-seat capsule, every flight broadcast live on television, and a new word slipped into everyday speech: astronaut, coined for a profession that did not quite exist yet. NASA had no photography department when John Glenn asked to take a camera on Friendship 7. He bought a 35mm Ansco Autoset in a Cocoa Beach drugstore for $40, and the pictures he brought home on 20 February 1962 were the first handheld colour photographs of Earth from orbit. Eight months later Wally Schirra took a Hasselblad on Sigma 7, the first of the Hasselblads that went on to fly with NASA crews for decades.
These prints include Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 flight seen from 116 miles up, his capsule lifted from the Atlantic, John Glenn's Friendship 7 on the pad and Gordon Cooper alone for twenty two orbits. The collection starts in January 1960, with a rhesus monkey named Miss Sam in a model of the astronauts' couch.