I was born just before the final Apollo mission (17) in 1972. After that, nothing much happened (well, nothing except Skylab) until the first shuttle went up in 1981. I don't remember that particular launch, but I grew up with space shuttles and always thought of rockets as ancient history.

On the annual field trip to the Air & Space Museum I never paid much attention to anything except the IMAX films (To Fly!) and the freeze-dried ice cream in the gift shop, so it came as something of a surprise to me that the first US manned-flight space program was not Apollo, but Mercury. Little old Mercury, in which they strapped test flight pilots into a tiny capsule and shot them into space. It may not sound like much to someone of my generation, but Tom Wolfe gets across the tremendous cultural and historical significance of these mission in his distinctive prose.

The Space Program, A Timeline on the History Channel