Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Rarely were history's explorers and discoverers so clearly marked in advance as men of destiny. Within approximately two years, one of the seven would be chosen -perhaps by lot-to test for the first time whether a human can be shot beyond the atmosphere to orbit the earth from 125 miles up at 18,000 m.p.h. and return to tell about...
Three Uniforms. For spacemen, the seven were remarkably down to earth. Despite the TV lights and the press-agentry at a packed Washington press conference, they showed such a basic earnestness and airman's conditioned self-possession, that 200 hard-to-impress capital reporters lustily applauded them. All were veteran test pilots, skilled in wringing out all manner of aircraft for the design engineers. Three were naval officers (two Annapolis graduates), three from the Air Force (no West Pointers), and one was-as he put it-"a lonely marine." Obviously the selectors of the seven had remembered the separate...
Identity & Independence. More than a superb physical specimen, the U.S. was looking for the mature man, well adjusted to life on earth and with a keen appreciation of his own importance and identity. The mission needed the strongly motivated team player-because Mercury will be a team project-who also is sufficiently self-assured and experienced in peril to act effectively on a solo mission, when he can rely only upon himself and his ship. Such versatile men best survived the shipwrecks of World War II and the prison camps of Korea...
...move because they are eight times heavier than normal. Consciousness clouds, and for a moment he will wait in heavy, silent oppression. Weightless World. Then his body will become suddenly light, as the rocket burns out at last, and he commences the fall toward the center of the earth that will continue for 4^ hours. He will have dropped, as if over a precipice, into a still and weightless world. He will feel no motion. He will not rock and sway. He will only fall. He will be gravity-free. If he moves an extremity, he will find that...
...magnificent mulishness. For centuries, pigs, bulls, dogs and horses were gravely tried and executed if they caused a human death. In 1890 a sardonic Hungarian lawyer left his estate to the relative who could best answer 1) What is eternal and finite on earth? 2) Why do people need money? 3) Why do people carry on lawsuits? Litigation raged for 55 years among his kinfolk; all offers of compromise were rejected; and the case ended only when the estate was wiped out by inflation. The multiplicity of lawsuits may be partially explained by a U.S. attorney who, 20 years...