Aurora 7 NASA Documentary about the US Space Program & Project Mercury WDTVLIVE42
Video from the channel Rocky Edgens about Mercury-Atlas 7, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 29:07. Language: English. Video type: Archive footage.
What it shows
Period film about the MA-7 flight, in which astronaut Scott Carpenter orbited the Earth three times aboard the Mercury capsule he named Aurora 7. The narrator opens with a parallel between the first flights at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903, and humanity's arrival in space. It reviews the suborbital flights of Alan Shepard (Freedom 7, May 5, 1961) and Virgil Grissom, and John Glenn's orbital flight (Friendship 7, February 20, 1962), and presents Carpenter's flight as the step from proving that man could fly in space to putting him to work there. The footage alternates the launch, mission control and the rescue with recordings of the communications between the astronaut and the tracking stations.
When and where it was filmed
The launch was filmed on May 24, 1962 at Complex 14, Cape Canaveral, with a weather hold at T-11 minutes before the count resumed. The Atlas rocket, with 360,000 pounds of thrust (about 1,600 kN), placed the capsule at an altitude of 99 miles (about 160 km) and over 17,000 miles per hour. The tracking stations at Kano (Nigeria), Muchea (Australia), Canton Island and Guaymas (Mexico) appear, along with the Goddard center and the recovery force: 20 ships, 110 aircraft and 13,000 personnel.
Context
The mission carried a scientific program: a photometer to measure star brightness, observations of zodiacal light and the solar corona, horizon photographs for MIT and the Naval Research Laboratory, cloud photographs for the Weather Bureau, and an experiment on the behavior of liquids in weightlessness. Carpenter photographed the Atlas stage that was trailing him, identified in the third orbit the luminous particles as frost shed from the capsule, and released a four-color balloon, of which only the orange and silver were clearly visible. By the end of the flight fuel was running low and the retrorocket firing had to be completed by hand. The capsule splashed down about 250 miles (about 400 km) beyond the planned point; a P2V aircraft located it by its radio beacon, a rescue team parachuted in, and helicopters from the carrier Intrepid picked up the astronaut. The destroyer Pierce recovered the capsule, and Carpenter spent two days of technical debriefing on Grand Turk Island.