This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury

NASA SP-4201, the first volume in the NASA Historical Series and the program history against which every later NASA History Office volume in this collection is measured.

Prepared with full access to program records and participants but written independently of any NASA editorial line, it opens with the deep background of manned rocket flight—Verne and Wells, Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, and Goddard, wartime and postwar X-series research aircraft—before tracing Mercury in three parts: research (the human-factors and NACA-to-NASA transition work of 1948–1958), development (spacecraft design, man-rating the machines, and machine-rating the men through 1961), and operations (the suborbital and orbital flights themselves, ending with Cooper’s 22-orbit Faith 7 mission in May 1963). Extensive appendices tabulate the program’s organization, flight data, personnel growth, and costs.