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During the summer Ke
No one, and certainly not the men themselves, could comprehend the meaning of this for the role of the astronaut, however. The new President, Lyndon Johnson, proved to be even more of a proponent of the space program than his predecessor. Due partly to the political genius of James E. Webb, who now came into his own, the Congress swung about and gave NASA a blank check for the missions to the moon. Nevertheless, the fact remained: the Cold War was over.
No more ma
The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. The mantle of Cold Warrior of the Heavens had been placed on their shoulders one April day in 1959 without their asking for it or having anything to do with it or even knowing it. And now it would be taken away, without their knowing that, either, and because of nothing they ever did or desired. John Gle
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The writing of this book would have been impossible without the personal recollections of many people, pilots and non-pilots, who were intimately involved in the begi
The NASA history office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston was unfailingly helpful, especially in giving me access to transcriptions of the post-flight debriefings of the astronauts. I should mention in particular NASA historian James M. Grimwood, the author, with his colleagues, Loyd S. Swenson, Jr., and Charles C. Alexander, of This New Ocean: a History of Project Mercury. Other books I would like to acknowledge are Always Another Dawn, by A. Scott Crossfield with Clay Blair, Jr.; Starfall, by Betty Grissom and Henry Still; Across the High Frontier, by Charles E. Yeager and William Lundgren; The Lonely Sky, by William Bridgeman and Jacqueline Hazard; X-15 Diary, by Richard Tregaskis; and We Seven, by the seven Mercury astronauts.
The names of four figures appearing briefly in the narrative have been changed: Bud and Loretta Je