Operation Dirty Trick took things a step further. Remember, at this point the United States had barely put two men into space. Alan Shepard’s mission was just high enough to be considered a spaceflight, and Gus Grissom’s was similar—and then we lost Grissom’s capsule to the bottom of the ocean, and almost lost Grissom too. So we didn’t have a superb track record on sending people into space and recovering them safely back on Earth. There was a fairly decent chance that John Glenn’s mission would be a disaster (and it almost was—his flight was shortened due to a mechanical malfunction). If
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