Souvenir typescript, an excerpt from the chapter titled “A Standing Start” from the collaborative book We Seven, 8 pages, 8.5 x 11, signed at the conclusion in ballpoint, “D. K. Slayton.” Slayton recounts his astronaut training. In part: “Since there were no ground rules for training astronauts when we started to work, we just plunged in…. We learned about celestial mechanics: how celestial bodies like stars and planets—or our spacecraft—move through space…. This was a brand-new kind of vehicle, and it was not so easy to keep up with it…. You had to train for the extreme situations in which two or three troubles could pile up on you at once…. When we were about ready to start flying real missions, we worked out some of the details of our actual flight plans on the trainers…. We accentuated the training on each [simulator] and then hoped that when we put them all together for the first time in space the total experience of all of the simulations we had had would add up to equal the stresses we would meet in actual space flight….” Staple holes, light horizontal folds, and mild handling wear, otherwise fine condition. COA Scott Cornish and R&R COA.
