Mercury Project

Sixty years ago this week, America sent its second man into space. The mission had gone flawlessly, but nearly ended in tragedy when the Liberty Bell 7 Mercury space capsule sank into the sea, almost taking astronaut Virgil Grissom with it.

On May 5, 1961, about 45 million US television viewers watched as a single-stage Redstone rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral. Mercury Redstone 3 carried Alan Shepard on a 15-minute flight to become America's first man in space.

​Space pioneer and former US senator John Glenn has died at the age of 95, after a brief stay in hospital. One of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, Glenn was America's first man to orbit the Earth on February 20, 1962.

Nate D Sanders Auctions is offering another vintage bit of Space Race memorabilia – NASA astronaut John Glenn's timeline of flight instructions that flew on his historic 1962 Mercury-Atlas 6 mission

The first Hasselblad camera body and Zeiss lens sent into space during the Mercury-Atlas 8 mission in 1962 and the Mercury-Atlas 9 mission the following year are up for auction. The historic camera set, originally purchased over the counter, goes on the auction block on November 13.