Mercury Program
Retroactive logo designed from 1964 Mercury Seven astronaut memorial
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|
| Country of origin | United States |
|---|---|
| Responsible organization | NASA |
| Purpose | Manned Earth orbital flight |
| Status | completed |
| Program history | |
| Cost | $277 million (1965) |
| Program duration | 1958–1963 |
| First flight | September 9, 1959 |
| First crewed flight | May 5, 1961 |
| Last flight | May 15–16, 1963 |
| Successes | 11 |
| Failures |
3 |
| Partial failures | 1: Big Joe 1 |
| Launch site(s) | |
| Vehicle information | |
| Vehicle type | capsule |
| Crew vehicle | Mercury |
| Crew capacity | 1 |
| Launch vehicle(s) | |
3
Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States, running from 1958 through 1963. An early highlight of the Space Race, its goal was to put a man into Earth orbit and return him safely, ideally before the Soviet Union. Taken over from the U.S. Air Force by the newly created civilian space agency NASA, it conducted twenty unmanned developmental flights (some using animals), and six successful flights by astronauts. The program, which took its name from the god of travel in Roman mythology, cost $277 million in 1965 US dollars, and involved the work of 2 million people. The astronauts were collectively known as the "Mercury Seven", and each spacecraft was given a name ending with a "7" by its pilot.
The Space Race began with the 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1. This came as a shock to the American public, and led to the creation of NASA to expedite existing U.S. space exploration efforts, and place most of them under civilian control. After the successful launch of the Explorer 1 satellite in 1958, manned spaceflight became the next goal. The Soviet Union put the first human, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, into a single orbit aboard Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961. Shortly after this, on May 5, the U.S. launched its first astronaut, Alan Shepard, on a suborbital flight. Soviet Gherman Titov followed with a day-long orbital flight in August, 1961. The U.S. reached its orbital goal on February 20, 1962, when John Glenn made three orbits around the Earth. When Mercury ended in May 1963, both nations had sent six people into space, but the Soviets led the U.S. in total time spent in space.
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