Those were the words Alan Shepard used 60 years ago Wednesday to note his cockpit timepiece had begun running. This meant his Redstone rocket booster had left the ground sending him and his one-man ...

CC0 Usage Conditions ApplyClick for more information. Project Mercury was the United States' first human spaceflight program. Delmas D. "Del" Burchfield (1926-2016) was an engineer at McDonnell ...

On May 5, 1961, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to go to space. He launched from Cape Canaveral on a Mercury-Redstone rocket in a space capsule named Freedom 7. This was the ...

America’s first astronauts of the1960’s “Project Mercury”, envisioned a place where former astronauts could be honored. In 1990, the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame was established. It is located at the ...

Scott Carpenter, one of two remaining astronauts from NASA’s Mercury program and the second American to orbit the earth, died Wednesday at the age of 88. His family did not specify a cause of death, ...

Although NASA’s Project Mercury and SpaceShipOne served very different objectives, a closer look reveals that both missions were powered by equal parts of competition, innovation, and a strong dose of ...

Part 2 explores the dramatically different approaches to the launch systems, and the surprising similarities in the factors that contributed to their success. Although they served very different ...