Mercury Seven Monument: America's First Astronauts

This thirteen-foot monument marks the launch site where the space age began for American human spaceflight. The astronomical symbol for the planet Mercury rises above a cross representing valor, and the numeral at its center honors the seven men NASA chose in nineteen fifty-nine to pioneer American crewed spaceflight: Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper, and Deke Slayton. All seven trained at Cape Canaveral.

All seven were military test pilots. And all seven launched from this ground or planned to. Beneath the monument sits a time capsule set to be opened in twenty-four sixty-four, five hundred years after the Mercury program.

Whatever is inside, the people who placed it there imagined that five centuries from now, someone would still want to know how humanity left the ground for the first time.