Scott Carpenter's Guest Essay #4

Must-See History: Project Mercury on Film

by Mark Gray

If you’re interested in the early history of the manned space program, you want to see just as much of the audio-visual documentation as you can. Such was the reason we started Spacecraft Films six years ago. We wanted to see as much of this stuff as we could and to make it available to others. We knew that if we applied today’s technology, it could look better than ever. And we were right.

Although Spacecraft Films first took on the Apollo moon missions, the Project Mercury set was much anticipated. We knew the program must have been heavily documented and were not disappointed. The Mercury footage resides mainly with the National Archives (NARA) as nearly all the Mercury materials were transferred from NASA, including the onboard photos and film. Project Mercury fascinates for many reasons. With the visual record so deep, it is possible, now nearly 50 years later, to understand the fascination.

When delving into the archives of motion picture material, one is immediately struck by the casual nature of the era. Technicians work on the spacecraft in street clothes. They use mattresses like moving pads to cushion the million-dollar space capsules on flatbed trucks. Cigarettes and overflowing ashtrays are ubiquitous; nearly everyone smokes, everywhere. Even astronauts grabbed a postflight smoke aboard the choppers, destroyers, and carriers that plucked them from the sea.

Our heroes were fashioned of sterner stuff then, and they were the era’s superstars—even bigger than their movie star and superstar athlete contemporaries. Everyone wanted to be seen with them, and the Mercury astronauts stacked up honors and accolades like cordwood. The footage of presidential visits and wide vistas of parades and honorary dinners abound. Cameras are everywhere.

The camera lingers on postflight champagne and shrimp cocktail feasts, luxuries worthy enough to use expensive film to record. The knowing grins of the Original Seven shine through the earliest footage: the men know they’re the anointed ones. Yet there is also apprehension. All glory is fleeting, after all, especially when glory requires that you strap yourself to a missile pointed skyward.

NASA exposed plenty of footage on the hardware, too, in order to see how it worked, what burned, what didn’t, how mechanical linkages worked in super–slow motion. Footage that once served to develop the technology of spaceflight now provides unique, surreal views of how all the hardware functioned without it all flying apart. Amazing stuff.

With manned spaceflight not yet a reality in 1959 and 1960, the footage of foam- rubber support-couch experiments with Yorkshire pigs, crude model drops from the tops of water tanks, wind-tunnel work, and grueling centrifuge runs and medical tests are all preserved, their twisted record of misery intact. The film continued to roll.

One of my great delights during the work on the Mercury set was to discover that the photographic branches of the U.S. Air Force preferred 35mm color. Why shoot on the 16mm when you can use 35mm at more than twice the price? With NASA so young and with Mercury preparing on and launching from U.S. Air Force property, the Air Force handled much of the motion picture documentation. Later, 16mm was NASA’s format of choice NASA, but the 35mm shot by the Air Force makes such splendid pictures on 21st Century telecines. This simple choice has preserved certain aspects of the spaceflight history record, allowing us to glimpse much of Mercury through a colorful, robust lens. Even the onboard-sequence cameras reveal so much more detail through new transfers, allowing us to travel along on those pioneering rides into space as if we were right alongside.

Nearly fifty years may have passed since these images were seared onto film. While the cars look different and the technology looks crude, we are still not so removed that we do not know these people. Yes, much has changed, but these movies show an American culture of innovation, boldness, perseverance, and wonderment at our accomplishments and an astonishment at what might come next. May we always keep this sense about ourselves.

I do not know the people who shot these films. Many, no doubt, are no longer among us. But I thank them. Some of what they shot is exciting, some is tedious, but all of it, in one way or another, instructs us about Project Mercury. Their work recorded the beginning of the space age for us and for future generations, preserved forever in a majesty befitting the pioneering of a new age. Only this time we get to see it in Technicolor.