Tilt tables, ice water on the feet, three doses of castor oil and five enemas: that was the price of admission for America's first astronauts. This deep dive tells the collective story of the Mercury Seven, from the shock of Sputnik in 1957 and the Air Force's failed Man in Space Soonest project to Eisenhower's creation of NASA and the rigid selection criteria, including a height cap of 5 feet 11 inches dictated by the size of the capsule itself.

The episode follows the winnowing of more than 500 records down to seven men, the April 1959 press conference where reporters asked about wives and faith rather than thrust ratios, and the cracks behind the God, country and family image. It covers the pilots' refusal to be spam in a can, the fight for a window and manual controls, the $500,000 Life magazine deal, the one-dollar-a-year Corvettes, an ...