"Finally, if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere...."— John F. Kennedy, 1961
About the Exhibit
As part of Project Mercury, on February 20, 1962, Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel John H. Glenn, Jr. piloted the "Friendship 7" spacecraft on the first American manned orbital mission. John Glenn blasted into orbit as part of a space race between the United States and the Soviet Union in which the Americans were lagging. He completed three orbits around the earth. The mission duration from launch to impact was 4 hours, 55 minutes, and 23 seconds. As President Kennedy had hoped, the successful space flight did much to restore American prestige worldwide.
Later Glenn recalled: We were definitely in a race to see whether communism or our brand of democracy was going to survive. Against that backdrop (came) President Kennedy's declaration that we were going to go to the moon...we're going to set a goal and show the confidence in it that we could do it. And I gulped a few times when he made that pledge, but we did it. Back then, you know, some of the doctors had predicted even things like your eyeballs might change shape in extended weightlessness, or could you swallow, could you even control a spacecraft.
President Kennedy made clear his administration's priority for the United States to land a man on the moon before the Soviet Union in a White House meeting that took place on November 21, 1962. He later stated "We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
Exhibit Highlights
On display is a model of the Friendship 7 Project Mercury space capsule and the atlas booster rocket presented by Astronaut John Glenn to President Kennedy, a piece of hardware from the spacecraft’s Umbilical disconnect described in a letter to Kennedy from NASA chief James Webb as “the last link between the earth and the Mercury Capsule just before the moment of liftoff” and celebratory buttons from 1962 emblazoned with “Welcome Back to Earth Glenn”. The exhibit also features a video of Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Glenn's blastoff with commentary by CBS anchor Walter Cronkite; footage of Glenn in the orbiting capsule; and excerpts from President Kennedy's September 12, 1962 speech at Rice University in Houston, Texas where he restated the nation's resolve of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth before the decade was over.