In Mercury Rising, Shesol looks back at the last time a new president faced a national security challenge that extended into orbit. He recounts Kennedy’s boldness and his pledge to send Americans to the moon by drawing on new materials describing Kennedy’s uncertain path to that decision. Kennedy was reeling from a series of Soviet “firsts” in space and Soviet nuclear tests over Central Asia, and was facing relentless pressure from the US military (a classified Air Force report confirms) to take control of the “man-in-space” program. While American experts ruminated about the possibility of a Soviet nuclear base in orbit or on the moon, Pentagon planners attacked NASA—and the whole notion of a civilian space agency—as a dangerous indulgence.



Mercury Rising describes how John Glenn, a surprisingly fierce combat pilot and ardent Cold Warrior, became Kennedy’s—and America’s—best hope of resisting the all-out militarization of space while, at the same time, demonstrating the nation’s resolve and its strength in this new arena. Glenn spoke with genuine emotion about science and advancing the frontiers of human knowledge, but was prepared to “die on the firing line,” in the blunt words of James Webb, NASA’s Administrator.



Previously unpublished, handwritten notes—which Shesol unearthed in the Glenn Archives—show the astronaut coming to terms with the possibility that he would become a casualty of the Cold War, the first man to die in space. “If you hear this,” reads a script of a recording he sent to his children, “I’ve been killed.”



The story has a special resonance today, as President Biden decides how to engage in the new Cold War in space: not with Russia, this time, but with China. The new Secretary of Defense, Lloyd J. Austin III, has identified China not as a rival in space but a rising “threat” and has urged the U.S. to improve “our war-fighting capability” above the atmosphere.