The Right Stuff

V. In Single Combat

Mercury 7

Gus Grissom

Scott Carpenter

Deke Slayton

Gordon Cooper

John GlennWally SchirraAlan Shepard

The Project Mercury astronauts with a model of an Atlas rocket, July 12, 1962.

James Reston of The New York Times“What made them so exciting,” he wrote, “was not that they said anything new but that they said all the

old things with such fierce convictions…They spoke of ‘duty’ and ‘faith’ and ‘country’ like Walt Whitman’s pioneers…”

(page 94)

Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom

“He was a short man with sloping shoulders, a compact build, black crew-cut hair, and black bushy eyebrows, a broad nose, and a face given to very dour looks.”

(page 87)

Malcom Scott Carpenter

Donald K. “Deke” Slayton

“… taller than Gus Grissom, more rugged, rather handsome, in fact, and quite intelligent, once you penetrated the tundra.”

(pg 112)

Leroy Gordon Cooper

“… a thin, apparently guileless soul, handsome in a down-home manner.”

(pg 112)

Alan B. Shepard, Jr.

Smilin’ Al of the Cape and the Icy Commander

(pg 137)

Wally M. Schirra, Jr.

John H. Glenn, Jr.

“[He] had all the verbal skills…. He looked like a balding and slightly tougher version of the cutest-looking freckle-faced country boy you ever saw. He had a snub nose, light-hazel eyes, reddish-blond hair, a terrific smile, and thousands of freckles. He had the sunniest face in ten counties.”

(page 91)

This Mercury Project astronaut was born in Mitchell, Indiana. Gus Grissom

This Mercury Project astronaut was invited onto a TV show, Name That Tune, with a child singer, Eddie Hodges, as his partner.

John Glenn

This father of this Mercury Project astronaut was a railroad worker.Gus Grissom

This Mercury Project astronaut had never been in a fighter squadron. Scott Carpenter

This Mercury Project astronaut had flown a hundred missions in combat in Korea and had won the Distinguished Flying Cross, after breaking formation to chase away a MiG-15 that was about to jump one of his outfit’s reconnaissance planes.

Gus Grissom

This Mercury Project astronaut made the first coast-to-coast non-stop supersonic flight in 1957.John Glenn

“It was as if the press in America, for all its vaunted independence, were a great colonial animal, an animal made up of countless clustered organisms responding to a single

nervous system. In the late 1950’s (as in the late 1970’s), the animal seemed determined that in all matters of national importance the proper emotion, the seemly sentiment, the

fitting moral tone should be established and should prevail; and all information that muddied the tone and weakened the feeling should simply be thrown down the memory

hole. In a later period this impulse of the animal would take the form of blazing indignation about corruption, abuses of power, and even minor ethical lapses, among public officials; here, in April of 1959, it took the form of a blazing patriotic passion for

the seven test pilots who had volunteered to go into space.”(page 95)