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recruiting the Mercury Seven astronauts.
    Most who wished to apply hurried to Cape Canaveral, the place in those days considered vital, intensely exciting. It was in fact Florida’s new dream attraction for tourists.
    At night it was an all light show. Blinding searchlights surrounded its launchpads and blockhouses with their towering, shining rocket gantries. Support structures and hangars, even office buildings, were also awash with multicolored illuminations and soon it was obvious the bright lights were attracting the daredevils and the foolish.
    But NASA rejected them outright, sending home the race-car drivers and mountain climbers along with all others from outside the pioneering family of aeronautics. The new space agency wanted the Neil Armstrongs, the John Glenns, the Alan Shepards—stable, college-educated test pilots screened for mental difficulties—not anyone willing to step outside of present-day accepted flight norms.
    It was also unspoken that NASA did not want just experience. The agency did not want those getting on in years. This left out famed Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager, who had had his day in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
    Yeager broke the sound barrier October 14, 1947. What these new astronaut recruiters wanted more than a decade later was really NASA’s own research test pilots like Neil and Scott Crossfield. These NASA pilots were flying all sorts of cutting-edge machines including the X-15, a rocket plane capable of reaching space. They were considered head and shoulders above their military counterparts by those who knew.
    Unofficially Neil was asked to apply for Mercury. He found the invitation tempting, but he passed. He liked combining his engineering talent with test flights that had wings, and the X-15 had wings—not big wings, but wings, and even reporters were coming around calling it America’s first spaceship.
    The X-15 was really the most evil-looking beast ever put in the air. It was a 15,000-pound black horizontal rocket with little fins. It had a large blocky tail. Its black paint was there to absorb extreme heat generated by speed-induced friction in denser atmosphere. And best of all you could fly it—not into Earth orbit, yet, but that would come later with bigger rocket planes with heat shields. Neil simply could not warm to the idea of being strapped inside a capsule, a spacecraft like the proposed Mercury. It had no controls, no wings, no way to get you out of trouble bolted to the top of something trying to explode. But this was what NASA was building. A capsule you couldn’t fly … but, oh, they were planning an escape tower with an instant rocket to snatch you away from a failing booster. Chuck Yeager had a name for those who would ride in it, “Spam in a can.”

    Neil Armstrong and his stubbed-wing X-15 rocket plane. (NASA)
    Top pilots from military ranks welcomed the NASA recruiters. After weeks of tests that froze, roasted, shook, and isolated them in chambers so quiet their own heartbeats boomed like the loudest drum in the parade, NASA selected seven. April 9, 1959, the agency introduced them in a news conference in the nation’s capital.
    They were called the Mercury Seven: Malcolm Scott Carpenter, a Navy lieutenant from the Korean War; Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr., an Air Force test pilot who flew the hottest jets at Edwards; John Herschel Glenn Jr., a Marine lieutenant colonel and fighter pilot from two wars; Virgil “Gus” Grissom, a flyer of 100 combat missions for the Air Force over Korea; Walter M. “Wally” Schirra, a Navy lieutenant commander, veteran of 90 fighter-bomber missions in Korea; carrier and test pilot Alan B. Shepard, a Navy lieutenant commander; and famed Edwards Air Force test pilot and veteran of 63 World War II combat missions over Europe and Japan, Donald K. “Deke” Slayton.
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    Four days after the Mercury Seven were announced the Armstrongs had an announcement of equal importance. Karen Anne became Janet and