shuttlefan - 16/6/2006 1:07 PMWas there one more Mercury Mission tentatively scheduled for after Cooper's MA-9 flight and was it scheduled to be several days in duration? Seems to me I also heard that Shepard was to fly it....
Ben E - 23/6/2006 2:30 AMPurely out of curiosity, were any of the Mercury Seven considered 'stronger' candidates at the time of the first flights? I do recall reading, I think, in Shepard and Slayton's MOONSHOT, that the Shepard-Grissom-Glenn selection was made because they wanted representatives of all three military services in the corps at the time (Navy, Air Force and Marines).Maybe Gagarin beating Shepard was a good thing - would the race to the Moon have taken on the same urgency in Kennedy's eyes if America HAD been first to put a man in space?