Page:This New Ocean, a history of Project Mercury, Swenson, Grimwood, Alexander (NASA SP-4201).djvu/12



ANKIND in the past few years has sailed on one of its greatest adventures, the exploration of near space. Men have cast off their physical and mental moorings to Earth, and a few have learned to live in balance with their gravisphere and above their atmosphere. Transgressing old laws of terrestrial navigation and amending newer laws of aerodynamics, man has combined the experience gained from aviation and rocket technology with the science of celestial mechanics, thus to accomplish for the first time manned orbital circumnavigation. The initial American voyages in this new epic of exploration and discovery were products of Project Mercury, an intensive national program mobilizing creative science and technology to orbit and retrieve a manned Earth satellite.

This book is an attempt to describe the origins, preparation, and nature of America’s first achievements in manned space flight. Neither a history of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) nor a comparative study of the competition in space between the United States and the Soviet Union, this narrative spans the basic events in the managerial and technological history of Project Mercury.

The authors have no illusions that this single volume is complete or "definitive" (if any work of history ever can be). Writing only a few years after the events described, we inescapably suffer from short perspective, but perhaps our scholarly myopia is balanced by our having had access to a multitude of still-dustless documents and to most of the main participants in Project Mercury. Within obvious limitations of chronology and the sensitivities of persons still active in the conquest of space, we have tried to make this narrative as comprehensive and accurate as possible in one volume.

Already Project Mercury has come to be regarded as a single episode in the history of flight and of the United States. Rather, it was many episodes, many people, many days of inspiration, frustration, and elation. Journalists and other contemporary observers have written millions of words, taken thousands of photo-graphs, and produced hundreds of reports, official and otherwise, on the origins, development, failures, successes, and significance of this country’s first efforts in the manned exploration of space. The foremost image of Mercury emerging from its mountainous publicity was that of seven selected test pilots called "astronauts." Central as were their roles and critical as were their risks in the individual manned flights, the astronauts themselves did not design, develop, or decide the means and