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Personal Recollections of the
Selection The selection of the first astronauts is only one episode in the long history leading up to manned space flight. So let us first place this half-year period I’m going to tell you about into historical perspective. Perhaps it all started with the invention of the rocket by the ancient Chinese. Not until then did the world have a propulsion device that could operate in a vacuum. Or perhaps the beginning was as recent as March 1926—the “Kitty Hawk” of rocketry—when Dr. Robert Goddard successfully fired the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket. Only then did we have fully controllable rocket propulsion that could be shut off and reignited at will, and with high thrust per pound. These were necessary precursors of space flight. 
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ALLEN O. GAMBLE'S BIO
Dr. Gamble was the manpower director at the NACA from 1948 to 1955 and again at NASA from 1958 to 1964. His first account of his role in Phases I and II of the 1959 Project Mercury selection process was published in 1961 and informed NASA’s first historical accounts of space medicine. The version provided here was written for a speech Dr. Gamble gave on March 10, 1971, to the Men’s Club of the United Methodist Church in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Gamble, who was born in 1910, died in 2001. We thank the Gamble family for kindly providing the Carpenters with this tribute to an important moment in manned spaceflight history.
Scott Carpenter's Guest Essay #6
of the First Seven Astronauts by Allen O. Gamble, Ph.D.
But we all know that the real space age began on October 4,1957, when Russia’s Sputnik I became the first man-made object to orbit the earth. And on October 1,1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was established, one year after Sputnik startled the world and galvanized the United States into action. It was based on the old National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA. Only one week later, on October 7, NASA started a small man-in-space organization called the Space Task Group, located at the Langley Research Center near Norfolk, Virginia. Dr. Robert Gilruth became director of the Space Task Group, which later became the Manned Spacecraft Center based in Houston, Texas.
That same October and November, while many at the new space agency were being assigned to hardware projects like spacecraft, booster rockets, and communications, a few of us were assigned to work toward selecting the first humans to fly in space. The leader (and the first person assigned) was an engineer, Charles Donlan, who was assistant director of Project Mercury, NASA’s first man-in-space project. The second was Warren North, a former NACA test pilot. I became the third the following day after returning to NASA from three years at the National Science Foundation. There I had been computerizing and expanding the National Register of Scientific and Technical Personnel. Now I was once more NASA’s manpower director, in charge of qualification requirements, recruiting, examining, performance evaluation, and training programs.
This new assignment came as quite a surprise to me since I had known nothing about what was going on. In addition, there were three military officers assigned on temporary duty to NASA: Air Force flight surgeon Dr. Stanley White, Army flight surgeon Dr. William Augerson, and Navy psychologist Dr. Robert Voas. We six had continuous full-time jobs for five months on this project. Others worked with us from time to time as needed, including a high-level Special Committee on Life Science appointed in late November.