An immediate search for astronauts began.
NASA established strict guidelines for astronaut candidates. Applicants had to be under the age of forty, in excellent physical shape, and less than 5 feet 11 inches tall (1.5 meters 27.9 centimeters). They were also required to have logged over 1,500 flight hours as a test pilot. More than five hundred people applied. Through vigorous testing, NASA reduced the pool of applicants to thirty-two. After subjecting the men to a battery of difficult and exhausting tests, on April 9, 1959, NASA announced its selection of the Mercury 7: M. Scott Carpenter (1925–), L. Gordon Cooper Jr. (1927–), John Glenn Jr. (1921–), Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom (1926–1967); Walter Schirra Jr. (1923–), Alan Shepard Jr. (1923–1998), and Donald K. "Deke" Slayton (1924–1993). The men became instant heroes.
For the engineers working on Project Mercury, their challenge was designing and building a craft that could protect a human being from the extreme hot and cold temperatures that would be experienced during space travel. They needed a craft that could both handle the pressures of vacuum (emptiness of space) and radiation and protect the astronaut from the temperature change upon reentry.
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