I remember it so well. I was a kid growing up in South Carolina when the first astronauts were named 50 years ago. It was a very big deal back then. I wrote each of them and requested their pictures, which I hung on a wall in my room. I remember each of their names and, in later years, met several of them. I even went to John Glenn’s ticker tape parade in New York City after his second trip in space.
The Mercury Seven were magical heros to my generation. They were the best and brightest of their time and chosen from 69 candidates. The name Mercury came from a mythological Roman god who was the symbol of speed.
In later years, I would live at Cocoa Beach, Florida, home of the Kennedy Space Center. I was a newspaper reporter for Cocoa TODAY and met a couple of the original astronauts in area bars. Others I met at NASA press events. It was always exciting to encounter one of these special men.
The candidates to be Mercury astronauts could be no taller than five feet, 11 inches and weigh no more than 180 pounds. That was due to the small size of the space capsule. If you want some perspective on how tiny the capsules were, go to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. to view the actual Friendship 7 space capsule that Glenn rode for three orbits around the Earth. It makes a Mini Cooper look roomy!
The initial Mercury flights took off throughout the early 1960s, though some astronauts were active in later flights. Alan Shepard was the first man to fly in space. John Glenn, perhaps the most famous of the original spacemen, became a United States senator from Ohio. He was the first American to orbit the earth. Of the original seven, only John Glenn and Scott Carpenter survive today.
The original Mercury Seven Astronauts
The Friendship 7 capsule that John Glenn used to orbit the Earth. It looks much larger in the picture than it really is. Your cell phone today has far more computing power than this capsule had.
