The "Original Seven"

The "Original Seven"

NASA's first group of Mercury astronauts (the "Original Seven") pictured here at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), now Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Texas (June 1963) included Naval aviators, Air Force pilots and a Marine Corps aviator.
Conceivably any one of them could have been first man on the moon some five years later, but each were integral parts of the team that spectacularly achieved that effort. They’re all gone now* but what a fantastic legacy they left in their wake.


* (left to right):

Cooper 2004 (77) [heart failure]
Schirra 2007 (84) [heart attack]
Shepard 1998 (75) [leukemia]
Grissom 1967 (41) [testing accident]
Glenn 2016 (95)
Slayton 1993 (69) [malignant brain tumor]
Carpenter 2013 (88) [stroke]

The man who filled his own life and all our existence with bright light.

‭“‬If there is life hereafter,‭ ‬or if there is none,‭ ‬it does not matter.‭”

“Everything on earth depends on will. I never had an idea in my life. I’ve got no imagination. I never dream. My so-called inventions already existed in the environment—I took them out. I’ve created nothing. Nobody does. There’s no such thing as an idea being brain-born; everything comes from the outside. The industrious one coaxes it from the environment; the drone lets it lie there while he goes off to the baseball game. The ‘genius’ hangs around his laboratory day and night. If anything happens he’s there to catch it; if he wasn’t, it might happen just the same, only it would never be his.”

… Thomas Edison (1847-1931),  American inventor and businessman