The Project Mercury was the first manned space program of the United States. It lasted from 1958 to 1963 and aimed to bring a human in orbit around the Earth.
Taken over from the US Air Force by the newly created civil space agency NASA, it carried out 20 unmanned development flights (some with animals) and six successful astronaut flights.
The astronauts were known as the “Mercury Seven,” and each spacecraft was given a name ending in “7” by its pilot.
In order to run this program, various systems had to be designed and tested. A program for fully automatically controlled parachute landings was developed at the Langley Research Center. In addition, the missiles were selected with the help of the United States Air Force, which already had experience in this field. However, since these had so far only been used for military purposes, they had to be further developed for the planned use as a manned carrier. These were primarily the Atlas and Redstone rockets. The German group led by Wernher von Braun was also involved in the development of the Redstone.
The Mercury program formed the basis for the Gemini program, which carried two astronauts in each capsule and perfected the docking maneuvers required for manned lunar landings in the subsequent Apollo program, announced a few weeks after the first manned Mercury flight.
