Notably, Deke Slayton, an astronaut who was part of the original seven astronauts selected for Mercury, never flew during the program. He was sidelined due to a heart condition. He eventually made ...

Donald "Deke" Slayton was one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts — but he never flew in that program. Because of a heart condition, he was grounded for decades before being approved and flying ...

What started as a commemoration of the Mercury Seven astronauts has grown significantly. Marsha Ivins, who flew on five space shuttle missions and also spent time on the former Russian space ...

Tom Wolfe's 1979 novel, "The Right Stuff" (turned into a hit movie a few years later), told the story of the Mercury Seven, America’s first class of NASA astronauts, and included tales of these ...

Both men were among the Mercury Seven, the group of astronauts that piloted America's first manned spaceflights in the 1960s. Now, both astronauts are gone and Matt says the brothers want the ...

John Glenn was the only one of the Mercury Seven astronauts to fly on the space shuttleon STS-95 in October-November 1998. The flight came 36 years after his only other space mission, Mercury ...

The Astronaut Scholarship is funded by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation (ASF), a nonprofit organization created by the Mercury 7 astronauts in 1984. The foundation strives to aid the U.S. in ...

The first class of NASA astronauts, dubbed the ‘Mercury 7,’ were put through a series of rigorous tests to prepare them for space, from heat chambers to to simulated weightlessness.

The tests were exhausting and at times brutal. Since no one knew what zero gravity would do to the human body, Lovelace tested everything he could think of.