Abstract
Three years after the selection of the seven Mercury astronauts in the early months of 1959 there was a significant acceleration in NASA’s manned space flight program. It was fueled by massive additional funding following President John F. Kennedy’s bold — even audacious — commitment to the nation, directing NASA to place men on the Moon by the end of the decade. This, in turn, had been sparked by a provocative and unsettling number of headline-grabbing space “firsts” in the Soviet Union’s burgeoning space program. These factors, coupled with an expected increase in the frequency of U.S. space missions, created the need for five to ten more astronauts to commence training for the complex two-man flights that would build on the success of Project Mercury.
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References
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Ibid
Ibid
NASA Space News Roundup, issue June 13, 1962, MSC Personality: Flt, Crew Ops Chief W.J. North Took Training With Astronauts, MSC, Houston, TX, pg. 10
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Burgess, C. (2013). Announcements and volunteers. In: Moon Bound. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3855-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3855-7_1
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