Home » Politics & Society » Cold War » Boy, What A Fireball Ride!

Boy, What A Fireball Ride!

© Dane Mitchell Donato

Sitting on my desk is a copy of the Wednesday, February 21, 1962 "New York Mirror." My copy is yellow with age and musty from the long years it has managed to exist. I found this paper in a converted barn that now serves as an antiques store in the wilds of Northern Vermont. I purchased it for the princely sum of $2.50, a huge bargain, knowing that this isn’t (for me, anyway) simply an old newspaper, but something much more precious. In a sense, this old paper is a bridge to the days of the Mercury project, the first step America was taking to get our astronauts to the moon ahead of the Soviets. And a reminder that relations between our country and Russia was less than stellar back then.

That's saying the least. Aside from the refreshing fact that this paper dates to before my birth, the paper reminds me of the strange paradoxes built into the Soviet’s and American’s headlong technological race to get there first, and so define an imporant part of the Cold War. Pick any "first" you want -- we and they probably had that on some long and not so secret list. First to orbit the earth; first to space walk; first to map the dark side of the moon; first to walk on the moon.

And many other firsts, as well, from the mundane milestones that could only have been of interest to the armies of scientists and technicians who worked on the actual hardware,and then out to the spectacular goals that each subsequent mission reached and then exceeded.

And that's on both sides of the ideological rift.

For me, the heady early days of the space race, for all their roots in the end of WWII and symbolic of man’s overwhelming ability to wage nuclear war on one another, is one of excitement, hope and unvarnished optimism. Patriotism was a part of all this, too, but that is a dangerous word, and one I would prefer to avoid it for (at the very least) the time of this article. Let me just say that nationalism, while it had it’s negative side, does have a flip side that was embraced to the better on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Getting back to that old New York Mirror cover story, it is pretty much simply key transcription text from the mission tapes that captured conversations between Mercury Control (at Cape Canaveral, Florida) and Glenn as he blasted into orbit in his tiny capsule cabin. Nothing particularly worthy of a Pulitzer prize, I think, but fascinating stuff that still rings of the newness of it to a nation moving out of the drab, conformist 50’s and into the era that would see so much at all levels of society.

The copyright of the article Boy, What A Fireball Ride! in Cold War is owned by . Permission to republish Boy, What A Fireball Ride! in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.