[VIDEO] Astronauts and Corvettes

If you’re into Corvettes, you’ve no doubt by now heard about their connection with astronauts dating back to the early days of the Mercury 7.

Today, Lyle at C&S Corvettes – a Sarasota, Florida business that specializes in unavailable, discontinued, and other parts you just can’t find for America’s Sports Car – shares some stories and vintage photos of the astronauts and their Corvettes, inspired by a recent trip to the Kennedy Space Center with his girlfriend and her son. Even if you know the storyline, we think his 10-minute video posted to his YouTube channel is well worth your time.

Alan Shepard, one of the Mercury 7 and the first American to orbit the Earth, gets a lot of the credit for initially instilling a love of Corvettes among astronauts when he showed up in his used 1957 Corvette at the space center. Believe it or not, that wasn’t even his first Corvette as he had previously bought a used ’53 model.

The Mercury 7 were the rock stars of their age, Lyle says, noting that when they needed to blow off steam, they would drag race or road race their Corvettes on the empty roads on the Cape.

“It was very, very competitive,” Lyle points out. “Obviously, these guys were all Type A alpha males, and they all wanted to be the fastest and the best so the other astronauts started getting involved with Corvettes as well.”

After Shepard’s historic flight in 1961, General Motors presented him with a new white 1962 Corvette, but the government and NASA soon got involved and said it wasn’t cool for an astronaut to promote any specific brand of product.

As astronauts are prone to do, however, they soon came up with a workaround to that problem, with former Indy 500 racer Jim Rathmann offering to lease the astronauts any GM vehicle for only $1 a year through his Chevrolet dealership in Cocoa Beach. Six of the original Mercury 7 astronauts wound up leasing Corvettes through the program, with only “more mature and a bit more uptight” John Glenn opting for a station wagon to haul his family around, Lyle says.

Other astronauts soon followed suit with the Corvette leasing program in the coming years, and astronauts are still into Corvettes to this day, including Scott Kelly who had a blue C7.

At Shepard’s memorial service in 1998, Gordon Cooper, one of the other astronaut drag racers, admitted to Al posthumously that he had changed the gear ratio in the differential in Shepard’s car without him knowing so he could continue to beat him in drag races. “He kind of tongue-in-cheek apologized to him posthumously,” Lyle says, “which I think is just awesome and very fitting for this group of guys.”

By the way, Lyle highly recommends a trip to the Kennedy Space Center to see all the memorabilia on display, and you might even get lucky enough to witness a SpaceX launch the way he did during his visit.

Source:
C&S Corvettes / YouTube

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