Page:This New Ocean, a history of Project Mercury, Swenson, Grimwood, Alexander (NASA SP-4201).djvu/14

PREFACE the broadly political and social context surrounding all of the organizing, contracting, innovating, manufacturing, training, and testing before the time in 1961 when men first rocketed into space. Costs, schedules, and "quality control"—the range of procedures designed to ensure reliability during space vehicle manufacturing and preparation for flight—were far less dramatic than the flights themselves. But the NASA Space Task Group, primarily responsible for the development of Mercury, had an exciting life of its own as it evolved into the Manned Spacecraft Center. The Mercury team was much larger than the Space Task Group, or even than NASA, but the focus in Part Two on the field managers of the project should be meaningful for anyone wishing insight into the enormity and intricacy of modern government-managed technological programs.

Part Three, entitled "Operations," describes the fulfillment of Project Mercury and the only part of the program witnessed by most contemporary observers. This section begins with the successful suborbital flight of Astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr., in May 1961; proceeds through the completion of the orbital qualification of the Mercury spacecraft and the Atlas rocket; and ends with the four manned orbital missions, stretching from three to 22 circuits of Earth, in 1962 and 1963; Part Three is allied with a heroic tradition, the history of exploration and discovery.

Cosmonaut Yuri A. Gagarin first made a space flight around Earth on April 12, 1961, and four months later Gherman Titov's 17-orbit flight pushed the U.S.S.R. still further ahead in the cold war space competition. With American technological prestige damaged in the court of world opinion, the United States responded after Shepard’s suborbital ride, when President John F. Kennedy proposed and an eager Congress agreed to make Mercury the first phase of an epochal national venture in the manned exploration of the Earth-Moon system.

Although the Soviet Union succeeded in orbiting more space travelers, for longer periods, and sooner than the United States, Project Mercury still appears magnificently successful. It cost more money and took more time than originally expected, but no precaution was overlooked and no astronaut was lost. And as the "space race" broadened into the "space olympics," Mercury evolved from a "dead-end" endeavor, pointed solely at achieving orbital flight and recovery, into a prerequisite course in what was needed to reach and return from the Moon.

If Mercury was not all that it might have been, it was certainly more than it originally was supposed to be. Less than three and a half years after its inception, its prime objectives were attained with the three-orbit flight of Astronaut John H. Glenn, Jr. In all, the Mercury astronauts flew two ballistic, parabolic flights into space and four orbital missions. Each flight went almost as well as planned, thereby substantially enlarging man’s knowledge of near space, of his psychophysiological behavior beyond Earth’s atmosphere, and of the impending requirements for cislunar travel. By June 12, 1963, when James E. Webb, the second NASA Administrator, announced its termination, Project Mercury had