The planned suborbital flights presented a controlled set of challenges. Taking off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and landing in the Atlantic at a spot approximately fifty miles from Turks and Caicos, the hurtling capsule would remain within communications range of Mission Control in Florida and the data centers in DC and Bermuda. Orbital flights—which sent the astronaut on one or more ninety-minute circuits around the globe, passing out of visual and radio contact with Mission Control, flying over unfriendly territory—upped the ante by a factor. Constant contact with the astronaut during every minute of every orbit was a prerequisite for the flight.
The task of building a worldwide network of tracking stations that would maintain two-way communication between the orbiting spacecraft and Mission Control fell to Langley. Langley put all available resources behind the $80 million project in 1960, putting the final pieces in place just before December 1960, the originally scheduled date for the first suborbital mission. The Mercury tracking network in and of itself was a project whose scale and boldness rivaled that of the space missions it supported. The eighteen communications stations set up at measured intervals around the globe, including two set up on navy ships (one in the Atlantic Ocean, another in the Indian Ocean), used powerful satellite receivers to acquire the radio signal of the Mercury capsule as it passed overhead. Each station transmitted data on the craft’s position and speed back to Mercury control, which bounced the data to the Goddard computers. The “CO3E” software program, developed by the Mission Analysis branch and programmed into the IBM computers, integrated all the equations of motion that described the spacecraft’s trajectory, ingested the real-time data from the remote stations, and then projected the remaining path of the flight, including its final splashdown spot. The computers also sounded the alarm at the first sign of trouble; any deviation from the projected flight path, evidence of malfunction on board the capsule, or abnormal vital signs from the astronaut, which were also being monitored and transmitted to doctors on the ground, would send Mission Control into troubleshooting mode.
The launch date for Project Mercury’s first manned mission slipped into 1961, a year that announced itself as unpredictable from the start: on January 3, the United States cut diplomatic relations with Cuba, another step down the road in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. President Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell speech in January 1961, railed against the United States’ growing military-industrial complex. On March 6, 1961, President John F. Kennedy, newly inaugurated, announced Executive Order 10925, ordering the federal government and its contractors to take “affirmative action” to ensure equal opportunity for all of their employees and applicants, regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin. Through it all, the Space Task Group, the Langley Research Group, the other NASA centers, and thousands of NASA contractors pressed forward on their aerodynamic, structural, materials, and component tests, closing in on a target launch date in May.
“We could have beaten them, we should have beaten them,” Project Mercury flight director Chris Kraft recalled decades later. In the midst of America’s high hopes for redemption in the heavens, the Soviets struck again. On April 12, 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became in one fell swoop the first human in space and the first human to orbit Earth. Unlike the disorientation, anxiety, and fear that Sputnik provoked, the agency absorbed the blow. It was painful, certainly, and embarrassing as well, but they turned the welter of emotion into renewed intensity for the mission, employing all of their talents and the principles of math, physics, and engineering to create a precise and thorough plan. Now they executed it with the knowledge that there was only one direction to move: forward.
It would take a total of 1.2 million tests, simulations, investigations, inspections, verifications, corroborations, experiments, checkouts, and dry runs just to send the first American into space, a precursor to achieving Project Mercury’s goal of placing a man into orbit. Every mission involved the Mercury capsule, though the rockets—Scout, Redstone, and Atlas—varied. Mercury-Redstone 1, or “MR-1,” the first mission to mate the Mercury capsule to the Redstone rocket, failed on the launchpad. MR-2, with Ham the chimpanzee as its passenger, overshot the landing spot by sixty miles and was nearly underwater when it was finally plucked from the ocean. Pulling back the curtain on three and a half years of work, NASA took the audacious step of deciding to broadcast the launch of Project Mercury’s first manned mission—“Mercury-Redstone 3,” carrying astronaut Alan Shepard—live. Forty-five million Americans would tune in to witness the ultimate success or failure of MR-3. When Shepard finally strapped into the disarmingly small capsule—just six feet in diameter and six feet, ten inches high—and rode the Redstone candle into space, reaching an altitude of 116.5 miles above Earth, it was a resurrection for the United States and a much-needed dose of adrenaline for NASA.
The suborbital flight in the capsule Shepard christened Freedom 7 lasted only fifteen minutes and twenty-two seconds and covered 303 miles, just about the distance between Hampton, Virginia, and Charleston, West Virginia. Freedom 7 was a pale technical achievement compared to Yuri Gagarin’s flight the month before, but its success emboldened President Kennedy to pledge the country to a goal significantly more ambitious: a manned mission to the Moon.
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” President Kennedy said before a session of Congress, not three weeks after Shepard splashed down. Every NASA employee involved with the space program, still burning the midnight oil working on Project Mercury, broke out in a cold sweat. The agency hadn’t yet achieved its mandate to place a human into orbit, and Kennedy already had them kicking up Moon dust?
It was a terrifying prospect—and the most exhilarating thing they had ever heard. Unspoken publicly until that moment, getting to the Moon, one of mankind’s deepest and most enduring dreams, had long been the private dream of many at Langley as well. But with only one operational success under its belt and with six Mercury missions to go—with the orbital flight still on the drawing board—NASA’s road to the Moon seemed unimaginably complex. The engineers estimated that the upcoming orbital flight, including the fully manned global tracking network, required a team of eighteen thousand people. The buildup to a lunar landing would demand many times more people than could be reasonably supported by Mother Langley.