Mercury and Gemini: The History and Legacy of NASA’s Groundbreaking Spaceflight Programs

“We're not up there in space just to joyride around. We're up there to do things that are of value to everybody right here on Earth.” – John Glenn

Today the Space Race is widely viewed poignantly and fondly as a race to the Moon that culminated with Apollo 11 “winning” the Race for the United States. In fact, it encompassed a much broader range of competition between the Soviet Union and the United States that affected everything from military technology to successfully launching satellites that could land on Mars or orbit other planets in the Solar System. Moreover, the notion that America “won” the Space Race at the end of the 1960s overlooks just how competitive the Space Race actually was in launching people into orbit, as well as the major contributions the Space Race influenced in leading to today’s International Space Station and continued space exploration.

The successful Apollo 11 mission was certainly an astonishing technological triumph, but what is less well remembered now are that many programs preceded Apollo and were essential to its success. Project Mercury was one of those, and in many ways it represented the greatest step forward in terms of the conquest of space. Before Project Mercury, there was no certainty that a human could survive the rigors of a space launch or live outside Earth’s atmosphere. There was no agreement on just what an astronaut should be, and various individuals involved debated whether they should be pilots, technicians, scientists, or even merely observers in an automated craft. Before Project Mercury, no one was entirely certain what a rocket capable of taking a person into space would look like, or even whether building such a craft was within the capabilities of engineering in the 1950s.

Project Mercury lasted for less than five years, but the missions were some of the most momentous and intense years in the history of space flight. When Project Mercury began in October 1958, no person had traveled to space and some people still believed that this was impossible. By the time that it ended in June 1963, the Apollo Program that would place an American on the Moon in 1969 had begun, but without Project Mercury, there could have been no Apollo Program.
In some ways, Project Gemini is a neglected part of the US space program. Sandwiched between the excitement of Project Mercury and the euphoria of the Apollo Moon landings, Gemini was a step forward rather than a dramatic leap. However, this project achieved many important firsts, including the first spacewalk, the first rendezvous and docking between two spacecraft, the first flights of more than one week’s duration and many more. And all this was achieved in a staggeringly short space of time – in just twenty months, Project Gemini made ten manned flights, a record that has yet to be broken by any other space program.

Gemini also marked another important milestone as America finally surpassed the Soviet Union in space technology. Before Gemini, the US was playing a desperate game of catch-up as it attempted to match Soviet accomplishments. The last Project Mercury flight launched in May 1963, and before then, Russia had put the first satellite in Earth’s orbit and the first man in space and had followed these with longer flights than the tiny Mercury spacecraft. In terms of military significance, it was recognized that the ability to dominate space was very important, and to many people in America, it seemed that Russia was well on the way to doing this. No one could have guessed that it would be almost three years before the next American manned space flight occurred when Gemini 3 left the launch pad in March 1965. It seemed to many people that the Russian lead in space exploration had become unassailable and, in order to reestablish the credibility of the US space program, the Gemini flights simply had to succeed.