Mankind in the past few years has sailed on one of its greatest adventures, the exploration of near space. Men have cast off their physical and mental moorings to Earth, and a few have learned to live in balance with their gravisphere and above their atmosphere. Transgressing old laws of terrestrial navigation and amending newer laws of aerodynamics, man has combined the experience gained from aviation and rocket technology with the science of celestial mechanics, thus to accomplish for the first time manned orbital circumnavigation. The initial American voyages in this new epic of exploration and discovery were products of Project Mercury, an intensive national program mobilizing creative science and technology to orbit and retrieve a manned Earth satellite. This book is an attempt to describe the origins, preparation, and nature of America’s first achievements in manned space flight. Neither a history of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) nor a comparative study of the competition in space between the United States and the Soviet Union, this narrative spans the basic events in the managerial and technological history of Project Mercury.