Word: testings
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...same stone as Columbus, Magellan, Daniel Boone, Orville and Wilbur Wright. But there was a difference. 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...
...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 services...
Torture & Triumph. The seven Astronauts of Project Mercury were winnowed out by the most searching tests man could devise and machine could execute. Last winter, just after new Space Administrator T. Keith Glennan ordered the space shoot, the Air Force, Navy and Marines selected the nation's no likeliest military test pilots (requirement: at least 1,500 flight hours). Clattering IBM punch-card selectors pared the list to 69 men of optimum size, health, intelligence. Offered a chance to volunteer...
Chance & Confidence. For the next two years, the seven will alternate between cosmic-secret isolation and fishbowl visibility.*Operating from Langley Research Center at Hampton, Va., the Astronauts will work along with the engineers-as experimental test pilots always do. Each man will help design one component of the space capsule: communications system, propulsion, instrumentation, etc. To toughen up for the physical trials and psychological terrors of space, they will spend hours in low-pressure chambers, wind tunnels, human cocktail shakers; they will be jolted on supersonic rocket sleds, flown in balloons and supersonic aircraft and eventually test-rocketed...
...Colorado, '49 (aeronautical engineering). Scott Carpenter went back into the Navy in 1949 to complete flight training interrupted at World War II's end, logged part of his 2,800 flight hours (300 in jets) in Korean combat (aerial mining, antisub patrols), then went through Navy Test Pilot School, General Line School, Air Intelligence School, became air intelligence officer of the carrier Hornet. He recalls: "When I was notified that I was being considered [for Mercury], I was at sea, and so my wife called Washington and volunteered...