A look back at local, national and world events through Deseret News archives. On April 9, 1959, NASA introduced the “Mercury Seven,” its first seven astronauts: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John ...

CC0 Usage Conditions ApplyClick for more information. Project Mercury was the United States' first human spaceflight program. Delmas D. "Del" Burchfield (1926-2016) was an engineer at McDonnell ...

"In January 1959, after an exhaustive search through military service records, a number of America's elite test pilots received orders to attend a series of top-secret briefings in Washington, D.C.

Those were the words Alan Shepard used 60 years ago Wednesday to note his cockpit timepiece had begun running. This meant his Redstone rocket booster had left the ground sending him and his one-man ...

With the death of John Glenn at the age of 95 on Dec. 8, none of the original seven Project Mercury astronauts, whose names were announced in April 1959, remain alive.

Mickey Kapp, a record producer who, after forging a somewhat improbable connection with several Mercury 7 astronauts, went on to provide later space explorers with customized mixtapes to listen to ...

When George Nield, PhD, was growing up in the Annandale and Springfield areas, he watched the Mercury astronauts’ launches on ...