Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in ... - The Black Vault

14 First Steps into Space: Projects Mercury and Gemini
test pilots as their potential astronauts allowed NASA to choose from
a cadre of highly motivated, technically skilled, and extremely disciplined
pilots. 46
In addition, since most NASA personnel in Project Mercury came out of the
aeronautical research and development arena anyway, it represented almost no
stretch on the Agency’s part to accept test pilots as the first astronauts. (It also
guaranteed, as Weitekamp notes, that all of the original astronauts would be
male.) After all, NACA had been working with the likes of them for decades and
knew and trusted their expertise. It also tapped into a highly disciplined and
skilled group of individuals, most of whom were already aerospace engineers,
who had long ago agreed to risk their lives in experimental vehicles. 47
NASA pursued a rigorous process to select the eventual astronauts that
became known as the Mercury Seven. The process involved record reviews, biomedical
tests, psychological profiles, and a host of interviews. 48 In November
1958, aeromedical consultants working for the Space Task Group at Langley
had worked out preliminary procedures for the selection of astronauts to pilot
the Mercury spacecraft. They then advertised among military test pilots for candidates
for astronauts, receiving a total of 508 applications (I-20). 49 They then
screened the service records in January 1959 at the military personnel bureaus
in Washington and found 110 men that met the minimum standards established
for Mercury:
1. Age—less than 40
2. Height—less than 5’11”
3. Excellent physical condition
4. Bachelor’s degree or equivalent
5. Graduate of test pilot school
6. 1,500 hours total flying time
7. Qualified jet pilot
This list of names included 5 Marines, 47 Navy aviators, and 58 Air Force
pilots. Several Army pilots’ records had been screened earlier, but none was a
graduate of a test pilot school. 50 The selection process began while the possibility
46. Margaret A. Weitekamp, “The Right Stuff, The Wrong Sex: The Science, Culture, and
Politics of the Lovelace Woman in Space Program, 1959–1963,” Ph.D. Diss., Cornell University, 2001,
p. 98. Dr. Weitekamp’s dissertation has been published as Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women
in Space Program (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2004).
47. In some cases this was literally the case. The best example is Neil A. Armstrong, who
worked with the NACA and NASA as a civilian research pilot on the X-15 program at its Flight
Research Center in the Mojave Desert prior to selection for astronaut training in 1962. For an excellent
account of flight research at NACA/NASA see Michael H. Gorn, Expanding the Envelope: Flight
Research at NACA and NASA (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001).
48. This process is well told in Swenson et al., This New Ocean, pp. 140–164.
49. “Invitation to Apply for Position of Research Astronaut-Candidate, NASA Project A,
Announcement No. 1,” 22 December 1958. Folder 18674, NASA Historical Reference Collection,
NASA History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
50. See Swenson et al., This New Ocean, pp. 155–165; Joseph D. Atkinson, Jr. and Jay M. Shafritz,
The Real Stuff: A History of NASA’s Astronaut Recruitment Program (New York: Praeger Publishing, 1985),
pp. 8–12.