The Secret Flight of Friendship Eleven: The Space Race’s Best Kept Secret

In the early days of the space race, rockets were not the only unknown. Scientists, politicians, and military planners also wondered what would happen to the human mind once it left Earth behind.

Project Friendship Eleven was designed to answer that question.

Hundreds of applicants were screened through an unusual training program that had little to do with engineering or flight skill. The candidates were tested on imagination, sensitivity, and their ability to describe what they felt. By launch day only two men remained: Samson Mahong, a quiet and intense writer from Indiana, and Basil Fitchell, an older druggist from New York whose cheerful confidence masked a stubborn streak.

Only minutes before launch the final decision is made.

What follows is one of the strangest missions ever attempted in space. As the capsule climbs above Earth, the scientists on the ground begin probing the astronaut’s thoughts, hoping to capture the poetry of humanity’s first true encounter with the cosmos. Instead they receive answers that slowly turn the mission into something far more unsettling.

Because space can change a man.

And sometimes the wrong man is the one who gets there first.

Alfred Connable’s “The Secret Flight Of Friendship Eleven” appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a publication famous for blending sharp satire with imaginative speculative storytelling. The story captures the early-1960s space race atmosphere while quietly questioning what humanity actually expects to find in space—and what we expect from the people we send there.

Connable’s tale remains a clever and unsettling snapshot of the era when rockets were new, the world was watching the sky, and no one quite knew what the first astronauts might become once Earth was far below them.