were permitted unrestricted access to source materials and participants. Furthermore, they have with humility and some courage attempted to document what emerges as a complex accounting of the purposes of science, technology, and public funding in a challenging new area of human endeavor.
Some classical historians may deplore the short lapse of time between the actual events and the historical narration of them. Others may boggle at the mass of full documentary sources with which the Project Mercury historians have had to cope. There are offsetting advantages, however. The very freshness of the events and accessibility of their participants have made possible the writing of a most useful treatise of lasting historical value. Future historians may rewrite this history of Project Mercury for their own age, but they will indeed be thankful to their predecessors of the NASA historical program for providing them with the basic data as well as the view of what this pioneering venture in the Space Age meant to its participants and to contemporary historians.
Melvin Kranzberg
Case Institute of Technology
Chairman, NASA Historical
Advisory Committee
Members:
- Lloyd V. Berkner, Graduate Research Center of the Southwest
- James L. Cate, University of Chicago
- A. Hunter Dupree, University of California at Berkeley
- Wood Gray, George Washington University
- Lawrence Kavanau, North American Aviation, Inc.
- Marvin W. McFarland, Library of Congress
- Paul P. Van Riper, Cornell University
- Alan T. Waterman, National Academy of Sciences
