14 DAY TRIAL // The American space agency has reissued one of its most iconic images yesterday, to mark the 55th anniversary of Mercury Seven, also known as Original Seven or Astronaut Group 1. This is the first batch of astronauts ever presented by NASA to the general public. This group photo was snapped when the original announcement was made, on April 9, 1959.
The astronauts above were solely responsible for flying all American space agency manned missions in the Mercury program between May 1961 to May 1963, including the first American manned suborbital space flight, on May 5, 1961. The achievement came just a month after the Soviet Union had launched cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into space, a world first.
The first class of astronauts NASA ever assembled includes Walter M. Schirra, Jr., Donald K. Slayton, John H. Glenn, Jr., and M. Scott Carpenter (left to right in the first row), and Alan B. Shepard, Jr., Virgil I. Grissom, and L. Gordon Cooper, Jr. (left to right in the back row). Shepard piloted the Freedom 7 suborbital mission and later became the fifth man to walk on the Moon.
All people in this image were selected as part of the Mercury Program – led by the newly-formed US National Aeronautics and Space Administration – following an extremely grueling set of tests and trials. All seven were very well fit and psychologically strong and represented the backbone of the manned American space program in its earliest days.