Five Mercury 7 Spacemen Help Open Hall of Fame

Five of the Mercury 7 astronauts, America’s first and perhaps most beloved space explorers, returned to their history-making roots Friday to help dedicate the Astronaut Hall of Fame.

“We don’t sit around getting nostalgic,” said Donald (Deke) Slayton, now 66. “We’re trying to make things happen for the future.”

The United States Astronaut Hall of Fame, 13 miles from where the men rocketed into history three decades ago, is a tribute to their exploits.

There is an “umbilical” plug from the Freedom 7 spacecraft that carried Alan Shepard on a 15-minute suborbital flight in 1961, making him the first American in space. There is a chunk of the Atlas rocket that propelled John Glenn into space in 1962, America’s first manned orbital mission.

There is Walter Schirra’s Mercury spacecraft, the late Virgil (Gus) Grissom’s spacesuit, L. Gordon Cooper’s spacecraft heat shield, Malcolm Scott Carpenter’s camera with which he photographed Earth, and Slayton’s food tubes from the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission.