Hidden Figures - Margot Lee Shetterly

Eisenhower’s watch. Additional testing
and fine-tuning—a cooling system bug
here, an oxygen delivery glitch there, the
need to implement improvements based
on previous unmanned and suborbital
flights—conspired to push the date into
the administration of incoming President
Kennedy. NASA set July 1961 as the new
date for the orbital flight, then
rescheduled it for October, then to
December. Finally the mission slipped
into 1962.
While NASA appeared to be dithering
on the ground, Russian cosmonaut
Gherman Titov followed Yuri Gagarin’s
April 1961 triumph with a successful
seventeen-orbit flight, nearly a full day
in space, on October 6, 1961. American
government officials, the press, and the
public expressed their disappointment