On a spring afternoon in the ballroom of the Dolley Madison House in Washington, D.C., NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan introduced seven men to a waiting nation. They were not yet household names, but within the hour Malcolm S. Carpenter, Leroy G. Cooper, John H. Glenn, Virgil I. Grissom, Walter M. Schirra, Alan B. Shepard, and Donald K. Slayton would become the Mercury Seven—the first American astronauts. The selection process had been unforgiving. From 508 military test-pilot service records screened in January 1959, 110 men met minimum standards; 69 volunteered for interviews and exhaustive medical and psychological testing at the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque and the Wright Aeromedical Laboratory in Ohio. The final eighteen were so uniformly excellent that the selection committee, led by Charles J. Donlan and Robert R. Gilruth, could not pare the roster to six. Gilruth recommended seven. Each was an engineering graduate, an experienced test pilot, a family man, and physically fit beyond any standard ever applied to flyers before. They would serve as the human focal points for a program that had only begun six months earlier, when NASA itself was born. In their plain civilian suits, the seven appeared unremarkable; yet they carried the hopes of a nation suddenly aware that the sky was no longer the limit.