The First Ten In Space Part II

While immediately the joint flights looked quite impressive, neither ship was equipped with any kind of docking mechanism. The double flights were an obvious stunt once more information became available, but they were still an impressive show of ability. While Glenn and Carpenter were staying in orbit for mere hours, Nikolayev and Popovich were orbiting in space simultaneously for several days.

After the space spectacular of Vostok 3 and 4, NASA was ready for another Mercury launch. On October 3, 1962 Wally Schirra completed 6 orbits in 9 hours aboard his Mercury capsule nicknamed Sigma 7. The mission was flawless, although the world hardly noticed; his flight occurred during the Cuban missile crisis. Regardless, America was proving that they could effectively put people into orbit. Schirra would go on to command the precision flight of Gemini 6, and act as the commander of the first Apollo mission in 1968. Schirra is the only astronaut to have flown in a Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft.

Gordon Cooper conducted the tenth spaceflight in the history of human civilization on May 15, 1963. Eight months after Schirra's mission, NASA was ready to end the Mercury program with its most ambitious mission yet. Cooper completed 22 orbits around the Earth in 34 hours. Amazingly, he rode out the failure of virtually all of Faith 7's capsule systems and tested it to the very limits of its capabilities. His mission was a fitting conclusion to Mercury because he proved what the program had set out to do: show an astronaut could work and live in space and control his own spacecraft. America was now ready to start the Gemini flights with all of the experience and data that Mercury had provided. After Mercury, Cooper along with Pete Conrad, broke all space endurance records at the time by staying in space for 8 days aboard Gemini 5 in 1965.

Perhaps it is interesting to note that a later analysis shows that the Russian space program was incredibly sporadic in its mission sequences in the 1960's. Instead of building slowly and surely one mission after another they instead chose to put all of their resources into one spectacular, but hollow, mission. The end result is that the mission may have been spectacular in the newspapers around the world, but technologically they were dead ends. Meanwhile, the Mercury program may have looked primitive and unspectacular compared to the Vostok launches, but each

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