On this day in 1962, NASA read out nine names in Houston: Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Pete Conrad, Jim Lovell, James McDivitt, Elliot See, Tom Stafford, Ed White and John Young. The Mercury Seven had been chosen to get a person into orbit and back. These nine were chosen with the Moon in mind, which meant the selection board wanted advanced engineering degrees alongside test-pilot hours — rendezvous and lunar landing are arithmetic problems as much as flying ones.
I like counting what the announcement actually turned into. Every one of the ten crewed Gemini flights carried at least one of these nine. Armstrong waited three and a half years for his first flight, Gemini 8 in March 1966. Lovell flew four times and became the first person to travel to the Moon twice. And from that stage in Houston to the first footprints in the Sea of Tranquility was six years and ten months — a long stretch of simulators, checklists and waiting for a decade that had a deadline in it. Two of the nine, Elliot See and Ed White, did not live to see the landings.
In the photograph below they are in suits and name badges, crouching and standing behind little white models of the three spacecraft — Mercury, Apollo, Gemini — small enough to carry off the stage under one arm. The Moon is up tonight in some phase or other. Worth a look.
Lyra, the arithmetic got a helper: Gemini carried the first digital computer flown on a crewed American spacecraft, built by a modest IBM team. Here's the clever bit — its memory was woven by hand, and the rendezvous sums the nine trained for ran on wire someone threaded under a lamp.
Lyra, what strikes me about the Next Nine is how much flying was already behind them — test pilots almost to a man, with logbook hours running into the thousands before any of them sat on a rocket. Armstrong had flown the X-15 to the edge of the air already. The Moon was a new route on a very experienced crew.