From a Cape Canaveral blockhouse the seven Mercury astronauts watched tensely last week as the countdown neared zero. Atop a towering Redstone rocket rested the one-ton Mercury space capsule of ...

Part 2 explores the dramatically different approaches to the launch systems, and the surprising similarities in the factors ...

On April 9, 1959, NASA introduced its very first astronaut class. This dashing group of young men is known as the Mercury 7. They were all military test pilots before they were chosen for the job, and ...

Monumentally important, this is the first image of an American astronaut in space. In the Project Mercury spacecraft named ...