The LIFE Contract and the
Project Mercury Astronauts

In April of 1959, the seven military pilots chosen for Project Mercury—represented pro bono by Washington attorney Leo DeOrsey, president of the Washington Redskins—signed, along with their wives, a contract with LIFE magazine for their personal stories. It had been a speedy but prickly negotiation. Henry Luce, the owner and publisher of Fortune, Time, and LIFE magazines, was a man of great appetites and limitless energy. A Republican powerhouse and collector of people—including Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Madame Chiang, Hemingway, Picasso, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower himself, whose memoirs he had published—Luce always got what he wanted. And he recognized the journey into space as the story of the century: above war, politics, and even literature. For one million dollars, the personal stories of the pilots became his to publish.¹

Commercial contracts with professional military officers were, however, unique. And controversial. NASA resisted the arrangement. The military hierarchy tut-tutted. President Eisenhower—already annoyed by the unwelcome attention his grandchildren were getting in the press—favored housing the pilots’ families beyond anyone’s reach on a military base, much as the Russian cosmonauts were sequestered in their Star Village. Some advisors argued that the families should be protected from all the news outlets clamoring for time and attention. The pilots themselves were conflicted. Why should they be compensated for risking their lives, when risk had been part of their flying from the beginning? But interest in their pre-NASA work, risky as it was, was practically nil among the reading public. As newly fledged astronauts, they had become entirely different commodities. It was ultimately agreed that they could be compensated, under certain conditions. I remember the negotiations were largely fueled with the emotion of impending loss. It was feared that many pilots would die in the course of Project Mercury.
Rene, working on her launch-day story for
LIFE, May 24, 1962, Cocoa Beach, Fla.

NASA surrendered after insisting, and receiving assurances, that LIFE would have no access to the pilots immediately after their flights, not until NASA personnel had thoroughly debriefed them. In return NASA offered LIFE photographers and writers access to its training sites and hardware. Finally, regarding the families, NASA had no explicit objections to LIFE coverage of the personal stories on the day of the flight. In the end, this day-of-the-flight coverage was worked out informally, family by family, in return for LIFE’s compensation.

 

—Rene Carpenter