Heading: (1958-1968, Mercury-Apollo medical)
Author: Berry, Major Charles A.
Title: Crew Selection and Training for Space Flight
Place Published: [Randolph Air Force Base, Texas?]
Publisher:U.S. Air Force
Date Published: ca. 1958
Description:

10 + 1 mimeographed pages, stapled. Lacking two drawings mentioned in text.

An early statement on medical considerations of future manned space flight. Berry became known as “The Astronauts’ Doctor” because every NASA space crew from 1962-1971 required his medical approval.

Also includes:

• 2 original news service photographs of Dr. Berry, 1 at Houston Space Center, November 1965, giving a press briefing on Gemini 7; the other of Berry, as NASA Chief Physician at Cape Kennedy, Florida, December 1968, briefing newsmen on his physical examination of Astronauts Borman, Lovell and Anders for the Apollo 8 flight. 

Refutes the argument that humans were too “frail” for space flight – and that the ideal “space crewman” (the word Astronaut does not appear) should be “a small, compact female, a gymnast, a schizoid personality, a eunuch…”, Dr. Berry considers the aptitude, skills and physical requirements and training to deal with acceleration, altitude, heat, isolation and drug reactions. 

The monograph is undated but all the references in Berry’s bibliography are dated from March to November 1958, the year after NASA was created. He was then Chief of the Department of Flight Medicine of the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine in Texas an  soon after writing this monograph, he joined the Mercury Astronaut Selection Committee, the start of his 15 year association with the Space Program, eventually becoming Director of Life Sciences at NASA Headquarters.
 

Slight edgewear; photographs with pencil notations and labels on verso; otherwise very good.