# USAF NEWS PROJECT MERCURY / ATLAS BOOSTER PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT 72922B

This short newsreel discusses how the U.S. Air Force oversaw the Project Mercury program, including the development of the Atlas booster and hardware and a scrupulous quality control regimen. Shortly after this film was made the program was stripped from the Air Force as part of the effort to demilitarize the nation's space program, and put under the control of the civilian NASA. Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States, running from 1959 through 1963. An early highlight of the Space Race, its goal was to put a solo human into Earth orbit and return the person safely, ideally before the Soviet Union. Taken over from the US Air Force by the newly created civilian space agency NASA, it spanned twenty unmanned developmental missions involving test animals, and successful missions completed by six of the seven Mercury astronauts. The Space Race had begun with the 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1. This came as a shock to the American public, and led to the creation of NASA to expedite existing U.S. space exploration efforts, and place most of them under civilian control. After the successful launch of the Explorer 1 satellite in 1958, manned spaceflight became the next goal. The Soviet Union put the first human, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, into a single orbit aboard Vostok 1 in April 1961. Shortly after this, on May 5, the US launched its first astronaut, Alan Shepard, on a suborbital flight. Soviet Gherman Titov followed with a…

- Kind: Film
- Genres: News, Industrial and advertising
- Archive: [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/72922BProjectMercury)
- Licence or status: none stated by the archive
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/ia/72922BProjectMercury?play=1)