One of NASA’s earliest images, this iconic portrait was shot by Bill Taub, NASA’s first senior photographer. As NASA’s first senior photographer, Taub covered every major event from the beginning of the Mercury project through to the end of Apollo.

The Mercury Seven were first announced to the world on April 9, 1959, and were then expected to report to the Langley Space Task Group to begin their training program only a few short weeks later, on April 27. All seven were military test pilots, a requirement specified by President Eisenhower to simplify the selection process. Taub took the photograph on April 30, 1959 during the first training period of the Mercury Seven at the Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia. The Mercury astronauts (from left front row Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Scott Carpenter, Donald “Deke” Slayton, Gordon Cooper, (back row) Alan Shepard, Walter Schirra and John Glenn) show configuration of Atlas booster and Mercury capsule.

As project Mercury began in the late 1950s, NASA’s Langley Research Center was thrust full force into the national spotlight with the arrival in Hampton of the original seven astronauts. Under the tutelage of the Space Task Group, the Seven were trained at Langley to operate the space machines that would thrust them beyond the protective environment of Earth’s atmosphere. (https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/home/Road2Apollo-04.html)

Although the agency viewed Project Mercury’s purpose as an experiment to determine whether humans could survive space travel, the Original Seven astronauts immediately became national heroes and were compared by TIME magazine to “Columbus, Magellan, Daniel Boone, and the Wright brothers”.