KSC-2012-1477

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Mercury astronauts, John Glenn, left, and Scott Carpenter, talk to Mercury Project workers and other guests in the Astronaut Encounter Theater at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. The pair participated in 50th anniversary events at the launch site of Glenn's first orbital flight aboard NASA's Friendship 7 capsule, which launched Feb. 20, 1962, aboard an Atlas rocket. At right, is Jack King, who was chief of Kennedy's Public Information Office during Project Mercury. Glenn's launch aboard an Atlas rocket took with it the hopes of an entire nation and ushered in a new era of space travel that eventually led to Americans walking on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Glenn soon was followed into orbit by Carpenter, Walter Schirra and Gordon Cooper. Their fellow Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard and Virgil "Gus" Grissom flew earlier suborbital flights. Deke Slayton, a member of NASA's original Mercury 7 astronauts, was grounded by a medical condition until the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975. Photo credit: Kim Shiflett