During the early 1960s, NASA’s Mercury program sent Americans into space.
Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States, running from 1958 through 1963 which goal was to place a man into Earth orbit and return him safely, ideally before the Soviet Union. Taken over from the US Air Force by the newly created civilian space agency NASA, it conducted twenty developmental flights (some using animals), and six successful flights by astronauts.