(Updated February 13, 2006) Project Mercury is now history. In its
short span of four years, eight months, and one week as the
Nation's first manned space flight program, Mercury earned a unique
place in the annals of science and technology. The culmination of
decades of investigation and application of aerodynamics, rocket
propulsion, celestial mechanics, aerospace medicine, and
electronics, Project Mercury took man beyond the atmosphere into
space orbit. It confirmed the potential for man's mobility in his
universe. It remains for Projects Gemini and Apollo to demonstrate
that potential. Project Mercury was not only a step in the history
of flight technology, it was a major step in national commitment to
space research and exploration and to man's struggle to fly. One
has only to contrast it with the Wright Brothers' achievements of
sixty years ago, when two meticulous men, with a bicycle shop, a
handmade wind tunnel, determination and industriousness, and little
financial means or support, accomplished controlled, powered
flight. The austere contrast of the Wrights or of Professor
Goddard's rocket work with today's Government-sponsored, highly
complex space program, involving thousands of persons and hundreds
of Federal, industrial, and university activities, is eloquent
testimony to the new prominence of science and technology in our
daily lives. The evolution and achievements of Project Mercury
offer an outstanding example of a truly national effort in the
advancement of knowledge and its application. The Project Mercury
story must be examined in the full context of its fundamental
features - scientific, engineering, managerial - in the dynamic
human environment of national and international life. Indeed, the
national commitment to Project Mercury and its successors requires
a valid perspective on the potential accomplishments of science and
technology as well as on the response of a democratic society to
the challenges of its day. This chronology of Project Mercury
represents only a beginning on the full history, just as Mercury
was only a first step in the development of American space
transportation. No chronology is a history. This volume is but a
preface to what is yet to come. Yet it offers us a catalog of
processes by which man progresses from ideas originating in the
human mind to the physical devices for man's travel to the moon and
beyond.
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