What percentage of Americans do you think supported the space race in the 1960s?
As with almost all statistics, it’s impossible to arrive at one conclusive answer, but I assumed the number would be high. Maybe 75%? Cold War rivalry ran deep, the story goes. Everyone took the losses to the USSR in space very seriously and wanted to pull ahead. But it turns out that isn’t so true. It turns out that public sentiment for space exploration is remarkably similar to what it was 60 years ago: it’s not worth the money. Throughout the 1960s, the majority of Americans did not support the outlay of funds to lunar exploration. The lone exception is when 53% supported it immediately after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969.
This was the major theme that stuck with me from Jeff Shesol’s new book, Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War. These specifics weren’t mentioned within the book, but the tenor of the conversation around space exploration (both politically and popularly) seemed to be comprised of both optimism and skepticism. Several times, people question what is to be gained by “winning the space race”. A few explanations are given in retort, mainly the familiar screeds about driving broader scientific development and winning a symbolic victory in the Cold War. However, these only seemed convincing enough to keep the space program going, not to win supporters out of its detractors. According to Shesol’s narrative, John F. Kennedy himself seems to have used the early “losses” in space as a method of rhetorically crapping on the Eisenhower administration, and he did not seem particularly interested in the space program until his other avenues of domestic political strategy were blocked by Congress. There were, as always, the symbols present in both a “win” and a “loss” in the space race. Shesol writes:
(What) Ted Sorensen said of JFK — “he thought of space primarily in symbolic terms” — was true of most Americans, and since Sputnik there had been no symbol of space supremacy more powerful than the image of Gagarin (the first man in space), in his Soviet Air Force uniform, standing with Khrushchev atop Lenin’s Tomb.

While questions about the budding space program comprise a major theme of Mercury Rising, it would be disingenuous to suggest that is what the book is “about”. As the title implies, the book follows the development not of the Apollo program but of the earlier Mercury program, which accomplished the task of first getting Alan Shepherd in space and then John Glenn to orbit the earth. The book centers on Glenn as both a human and an astronaut while also interspersing the narrative with the political machinations around the space program taken by Eisenhower, Nixon (as Eisenhower’s VP and then 1960 Presidential candidate), JFK (the center of most of the political action), and Lyndon B. Johnson. What is most compelling about Mercury Rising is how Shesol seamlessly navigates between the Glenn portions and the (mostly) Kennedy ones. The narrative combines the human with the political in a way that is uncommon and undervalued in nonfiction. One could not expect as much from a straight biography of an astronaut or of a simple political history of the space program. Only by deftly handling both do you achieve what Shesol has in Mercury Rising.
The heart of the book is John Glenn himself and the depths to which Glenn explores his character. Glenn is the perfect paradox of a man in the way he was extraordinary and ordinary at the same time. The fighter pilot and astronaut was also straight-laced and… normal. As Shesol explains:
He was conventional in all the familiar middle-American ways but was also, as a NASA official later put it, “supernormal”: an everyman-superman. Glenn might teach Sunday school, but he had also just flown across the country considerably faster than a speeding bullet.
He also had talents in areas not directly related to flying a plane or spacecraft. He was a wonderful speaker, one that commanded attention and respect. One of the most impressive parts of the book is when Glenn squashes a news story about one of his fellow astronaut’s “extracurricular activities” just by making some phone calls:
Glenn asked Powers to come by his room. They resolved to kill the story if they could. Glenn now made a series of calls: to the reporter, the photographer, the newspaper publisher. He reached all of them. He gave them one of those John Glenn speeches — the kind he gave to the press corps or the House committee. This one, though, had an edge. The United States, Glenn said, was falling behind the “godless Communists”; the press, he insisted, had to “let us get back in the race,” had to help America catch up. “I pulled out all the stops,” he recalled. When his alarm clock went off a few hours later, Glenn headed straight for the newsstand at the Kona Kai. The morning paper said nothing about Shepard. The publisher had suppressed the story.
I am new to the genre of astronaut-centered nonfiction, but I cannot imagine one that I would enjoy more than Mercury Rising. It deserves a place with the most popular astronaut biographies and histories as Endurance, Spaceman, Rocket Men, and Moonshot. If those topics interest you at all, Mercury Rising is deserving of your time.
I received a review copy Mercury Rising courtesy of W.W. Norton and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.

This one was so interesting because it’s about the space race what was going on in the world that would heat up the fight to get to space and then the moon first. It was a wild ride and I really appreciated the look into the geopolitical landscape.

A unique look at a pivotal event in the United States, MERCURY RISING, by Jeff Shesol, looks at the men and the politics of John Glenn's historic first American space orbit on February 20th, 1962. Rather than considering this monumental accomplishment from a scientific and mechanical point of view, Shesol looks at the people and the climate first and the technical part second. That being said, Shesol thoroughly describes the technical aspects of space flight, the ships used, and everything else that comes with space travel and covers those topics in ways that unscientific minds can understand. The focus of the book is mostly on Glenn, Kennedy, and the space race itself. I enjoyed reading about all of the politics along with Glenn's personal journey, but there are times in the book that just felt a little redundant. The delays before Glenn's launch to space generated frustration throughout the country, from politicians, to reporters, to Glenn, and even the general public. The book spend a lot of time taking the reader through each delay and it felt like I was reading the same few pages over and over again for a while. At the end though, when Shesol walks the reader through that amazing voyage, he expertly and efficiently describes everything, from the ship, to Glenn's perceptions and feelings, to everyone on earth's reactions to such an astounding flight.
For someone who was not around in 1962, I feel like I can better appreciate everything that led up to that first flight and how it impacted the world now that I have read this book.

The Space Race has taken on a mythical quality in my view because we know how it ended up with the Americans landing a man on the moon. But in the 1950s and 1960s this was far from the expected or likely outcome.

Jeff Shesol in Mercury Rising takes readers into a perhaps less familiar America where the Soviet Union is racking up victory after victory in outer space and they are not shy about rubbing it in our face. As the book opens, Eisenhower seems ambivalent at best about trying to compete with the Soviets in terms of manned space flight. These Soviet victories seen within the context of the Cold War had the effect of given the American public the perception that we were losing in outer space and it wasn’t a massive leap to believe that if we lost space, we lost everything in the Cold War. Shesol does a really good job bringing this point home to the reader.

Just because space becomes a priority eventually in the Kennedy years, doesn’t mean that it was warp speed ahead. Progress was agonizingly slow as Shesol illustrates through numerous delays, launches, and failures which are hard to take as a country when the Soviet Union is acting as some outer space juggernaut. But America had the Mercury 7 and in particular John Glenn.

It would be easy to mythicize John Glenn given all his accomplishments, but Shesol avoids it. We see a man who is ultimately competitive wanting to be number one in everything who seemed to understand his role in the historical moment, much to the concern of some of his fellow astronauts. But at the end of the day, he remains a man with faults and pride and behavior that can strike one as prudish at times. But does America get to space without him?

Shesol gives the reader a first class seat as to what it was like to be the president, and an astronaut, and even the men and women who built and worked on the space program in these days of the Cold War where everything felt like do or die.