{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/video-young-honors-hoosier-astronaut-gus-grissom-on-senate-floor/", "VIDEO: Young Honors Hoosier Astronaut Gus Grissom on Senate Floor", "2023-07-19", "2023", "2023-07", "Republican", "Senate", "IN", "Todd Young", "Y000064", "www.young.senate.gov", "toddyoung", "https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/", "scraper", "**Click here or above to watch Senator Young\u2019s floor speech.**\n\nWASHINGTON \u2013 Ahead of the anniversary of the Mercury-Redstone 4, U.S. Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.) paid tribute on the Senate floor to Hoosier astronaut Virgil I. \u201cGus\u201d Grissom.\n\nA native of Mitchell, Indiana, Grissom was one of the seven Mercury astronauts and America\u2019s second man in space.\n\n\u201cSix decades later, we are still proud of him. And we should all still follow his example, and always press on towards the next frontier, wherever it may be,\u201d said Senator Young.\n\nTo watch Senator Young\u2019s full floor speech, click here.\n\nSenator Young\u2019s full remarks, as prepared for delivery:\n\nIndiana was settled by men and women who left the safety of their homes, headed westward, and crossed the Appalachian Mountains into the wilderness and the unknown.\n\nThey were willing to endure hardship, to risk danger in search of a better tomorrow, to clear a path for others to follow.\n\nThey were pioneers.\n\nBut long after our state was settled, and Indiana\u2019s population drifted up from the banks of the Ohio River towards Lake Michigan, Hoosiers never stopped looking towards the frontier.\n\nOnly they cast their gaze away from the west and towards the sky\u2026\n\nIn the fall of 1959, 15,000 people gathered in the southern Indiana town of Mitchell \u2013 population 3,500 at the time.\n\nSome lined the streets. Others sat on roof tops or watched through windows.\n\nThey hadn\u2019t come to Mitchell\u2019s annual Persimmon Festival for the beauty pageant, the pudding contest, or the classic car run.\n\nThey were there to see the convertible at the head of the festival\u2019s parade as it drove down Mitchell\u2019s Main Street.\n\nSeated inside was one of their own, a local boy.\n\nThey knew him from the house on Baker Street, or from Mitchell High, or First Baptist Church.\n\nHistory knows him as the second American to travel to space and the first man to go there twice.\n\nHis name was Lt. Colonel Virgil Ivan \u201cGus\u201d Grissom.\n\nStudy his portrait \u2013 the flattop haircut, the serious expression.\n\nLook at old photos of White House press events \u2013 he\u2019s the odd astronaut out, the one who looks like he would rather not be there.\n\nThe images do not lie: He was taciturn, tough minded and hard driving.\n\nNASA\u2019s head physician described him as \u201cconfident but not conceited, a stern competitor but a good teammate, a frank but carefree speaker.\u201d\n\nHe had little use for publicity or the press. He only went to White House events there because his wife Betty and their boys wanted to.\n\nHe wasn\u2019t a celebrity. He was a pilot and an engineer.\n\nHe was more comfortable racing fellow Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard in his souped up Corvette around Cape Kennedy.\n\nBut the race he truly cared about was the one to the stars. He was determined to beat Russia there.\n\n\u201cI think we ought to declare an out and out race with the Russians to put the first man in space,\u201d Grissom once stated.\n\nThis Hoosier didn\u2019t mince words.\n\nHe saw the space race as an important global competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, between freedom and communism.\n\nThe prize was more than just a flag planted on the moon. It meant prestige and pride, yes, but also technological superiority, and the national security and economic benefits that went with it.\n\nAmerica won that race in part because of Gus Grissom, \u2013and our nation reaped incredible benefits because of his sacrifice.\n\nOn July 21, 1961, almost two years after he was at the center of the Persimmon Festival in Mitchell, Grissom splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, 260 nautical miles south of Cape Canaveral.\n\nHe had just rode Mercury-Redstone 4 above the earth and back down.\n\nAppropriately, Grissom nicknamed the ship Liberty Bell 7, a tribute to the bell that rang after the reading of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.\n\nRegardless of what you\u2019ve read in novels or seen in movies, Grissom\u2019s flight was flawless.\n\nThe vessel sank after its hatch blew \u2013 the result of poor design and electrostatic discharge, not astronaut error.\n\nFour years later, on March 23, 1965, friends and former classmates gathered at the First Baptist church back in Mitchell, nearly every business installed a television so their customers and employees could watch Grissom return to space.\n\nThis was a different journey though.\n\nThe Mercury ships boosted astronauts into space and retro-rocketed them back to earth.\n\nThis new craft, the Gemini, gave them a degree of control and added maneuverability, technological leaps that anticipated manned flights to the moon.\n\nGrissom, along with pilot John Young, did not only skillfully guide Gemini 3 as it orbited the earth three times, he virtually designed the ship.\n\nStung by the \u201chatch crap\u201d on Liberty Bell 7, as he called it, Grissom securitized and directed the assembly of the new spacecraft.\n\nTheir construction so closely followed his vision that other astronauts nicknamed the Gemini \u201cGusmobile.\u201d The cockpit and seat were even configured to his 5\u20197 frame.\n\nGrissom was next given command of the Apollo program\u2019s first mission, with its goal of realizing President Kennedy\u2019s charge of landing a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s.\n\nWhen the Apollo Lunar Module landed at Tranquility Base on the lunar surface in 1969, Grissom was not aboard.\n\nHe had perished two years prior in a launch pad fire aboard Apollo 1 during testing.\n\nThe tragedy, though, inspired NASA to improve the construction and ultimately the safety of the Apollo crafts, leading to the moon landing.\n\nGrissom said, \u201cthe conquest of space is worth the risk of human life.\u201d The race to the stars ended in America\u2019s favor because he gave his.\n\nHe may not have been aboard Apollo 11 when it reached the moon, but it never would have gotten there without him.\n\nAt the onset of that journey, and the most daunting journeys Americans have embarked on, there has been skepticism, questions of purpose and value.\n\nIt never stopped the pioneers, the doers and dreamers, and Americans like Gus Grissom, from making the voyage and making our country better.\n\nBack in the fall of 1959, during the Persimmon Festival, Mayor Roy Ira handed Grissom a plaque and gave him a simple tribute:\n\n\u201cMitchell is proud of Grissom. I urge our youth to take note of Virgil\u2019s example.\u201d\n\nSix decades later, we are still proud of him. And we should all still follow his example, and always press on towards the next frontier, wherever it may be.", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T18:25:20Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/video-young-honors-hoosier-astronaut-gus-grissom-on-senate-floor/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.9203227236866951, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}