The first astronaut team were the Project Mercury astronauts, whose selection was announced on April 9, 1959, only six months after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was formally established on October 1, 1958, included: Front row, left to right, Walter M. Schirra, Jr., Donald K. Slayton, John H. Glenn, Jr., and Mr Scott Carpenter; back row, Alan B. Shepard, Jr., Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom and L. Gordon Cooper.
This very famous photograph of the astronauts wearing their new Mercury spacesuits was made by long-time Life photographer Ralph Morse, a man who spent so much time with the Mercury Seven (and with the Gemini and Apollo crews as well) that John Glenn himself fondly dubbed him “the eighth astronaut” (Ben Cosgrove, TIME magazine, http://time.com/3879356/mercury-seven-photos-of-nasa-astronauts-in-training/).

Although the agency viewed Project Mercury’s purpose as an experiment to determine whether humans could survive space travel, the Original Seven astronauts immediately became national heroes and were compared by TIME magazine to “Columbus, Magellan, Daniel Boone, and the Wright brothers”.