Project Mercury: Mercury Redstone 1 Launch 1960 NASA Educational Documentary WDTVLIVE4

Video from the channel Shawanna Broman about Mercury-Redstone 1, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 41:04. Language: English. Video type: Archive footage.

NASA educational film presenting Project Mercury before the first crewed flight. It shows the Mercury capsule and the Atlas launch vehicle and introduces the seven selected astronauts: Carpenter, Cooper, Glenn, Grissom, Schirra, Shepard and Slayton. Using animation, it explains the profile of an orbital mission: escape tower for aborts on the pad or during the atmospheric phase, capsule separation by three posigrade rockets, a 180-degree turn to place it in retrofire attitude, reentry with the heat shield glowing, drogue parachute and main parachute deployed at 10,000 feet, and splashdown with location aids for the recovery teams.

The footage covers work carried out in 1959 and 1960 at the McDonnell plant in St. Louis, at the Convair division of General Dynamics in San Diego, at the Marshall Space Flight Center, at Wallops Island and at Cape Canaveral. The narration runs up to the flights of late 1960.

The film reviews the test programme: more than a hundred wind-tunnel tests with 70 models, component and escape-rocket tests, and astronaut training in weightless flights, the centrifuge, simulators and sea survival, together with the network of 16 tracking stations coordinated from the control centre at Cape Canaveral. It recounts the flight of a prototype capsule on an Atlas on 9 September 1959, whose reentry was steeper than planned, and the Little Joe launches from Wallops Island on 4 October, 4 November and 4 December 1959; the last of these carried a rhesus monkey and the abort began at 96,000 feet. On 21 January 1960 there was another flight with a rhesus monkey. Also shown are the pad-abort test with a production capsule and the first Mercury-Atlas flight on 29 July 1960, which ended with the vehicle breaking up at 60 seconds. Of the first Mercury-Redstone, scheduled for November 1960, it reports that the launch vehicle's engine shut down prematurely: the capsule jettisoned the escape tower and deployed its parachutes as in a normal flight. A month later, that same capsule was launched successfully and recovered.