Project Mercury: The American space program begins

That announcement was made May fifth, nineteen sixty-one. It was the first manned flight of project Mercury. Today, Tony Riggs and Larry West tell about the beginning of the United States space program that carried humans into space.

TONY RIGGS: The United States entered the Space Age in nineteen forty-five, at the end of World War Two. German rocket scientists, with the support of the German government, had spent fifteen years developing rockets as weapons. Near the end of the war, Germany began firing huge rocket bombs at Britain.

Called V-2 rockets, the German weapons carried a ton of explosives three hundred twenty kilometers. They flew as high as eighty kilometers.

When the war ended, American forces found the...

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