NASA MISSIONS PROJECT MERCURY Project Mercury

Video from the channel Nasa Library about Project Mercury, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 26:12. Language: English. Video type: Archive footage.

NASA film presenting Project Mercury: the capsule designed to keep a man in orbit and bring him back safely, the Atlas launch vehicle that was to put it into orbit, and the seven chosen astronauts, Malcolm S. Carpenter, Leroy G. Cooper, John H. Glenn, Virgil I. Grissom, Walter M. Schirra, Alan B. Shepard and Donald K. Slayton. An animation walks through a typical orbital mission: separation of the first-stage engines, jettisoning of the escape tower, separation of the capsule with three posigrade rockets, a 180-degree turn, three orbits at about 100 miles altitude and 18,000 miles per hour, firing of the retrorockets, reentry with the heat shield glowing, drogue parachute and main parachute at 10,000 feet, and splashdown with dye markers and radio beacons. It then shows more than a hundred wind-tunnel tests with 70 models, tests of the heat shield, the autopilot and the impact bag, and training: weightlessness flights, the centrifuge, manual-control simulators, sea and land survival, and the procedures trainer, an exact replica of the cabin.

It is period footage with contemporary narration: it describes the test flights through late 1960 and still speaks in the future tense about the crewed orbital flight. It features the McDonnell Aircraft plant in St. Louis, the Convair (General Dynamics) plant in San Diego, the Marshall Space Flight Center, Wallops Island (Virginia) and the control center at Cape Canaveral.

The film reviews the test campaign: on September 9, 1959, a prototype launched by an Atlas without an escape tower reentered at a steeper angle than planned and withstood greater heating than expected. The Little Joe, a solid-propellant rocket built to test escape and recovery, flew on October 4, November 4 and December 4, 1959; on the last of these, with a rhesus monkey aboard, the abort was triggered at 96,000 feet and five and a half times the speed of sound. On January 21, 1960, another Little Joe with a rhesus monkey tested the abort under maximum aerodynamic load. On July 29, 1960, the first Mercury-Atlas with a production capsule broke apart at 60 seconds, and in November 1960 the first Mercury-Redstone failed to lift off due to a premature engine shutdown; the same capsule flew successfully a month later. The tracking network had 16 stations.