Project Mercury Advances | Trajectory: Milestones in Space Exploration | Series 1 Episode 3

Video from the channel The Full Series Channel about Project Mercury, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 23:14. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

Third episode of the documentary series "Trajectory," covering the final stage of Project Mercury, from the suborbital flights to the first American orbital flight. The second half is devoted to launch tracking cameras and the International Space Station.

After Alan Shepard's suborbital hop in Freedom 7 in May 1961, the United States still trailed the Soviet Union, which had already put Yuri Gagarin into orbit. Less than three weeks later, President Kennedy set the goal of landing a man on the Moon before the decade was out. On July 21, 1961, Gus Grissom flew Liberty Bell 7, debuting a new hatch with explosive bolts. After splashdown the hatch blew open and the capsule flooded. The helicopter had to release it and the craft sank in the Atlantic, while Grissom maintained the hatch had opened on its own. It was the last Mercury flight using the Redstone rocket. The unreliable Atlas needed several improvements. Meanwhile, Gherman Titov's Vostok 2 completed 17 orbits in a little over 25 hours. In November 1961, the chimpanzee Enos tested the Mercury-Atlas combination with two orbits, and on February 20, 1962, John Glenn orbited the Earth aboard Friendship 7.

Glenn's flight was limited to three orbits because a faulty sensor indicated the heat shield had come loose. Three days later, the president awarded him a medal. Three more orbital flights followed, and the remaining Mercury missions were cancelled in favor of the Gemini program. The documentary then describes the cameras that monitor every launch: a typical shuttle launch used 135 of them. Those cameras captured the 2003 foam strike that destroyed Columbia and its crew of seven. Finally it presents the ISS, continuously occupied since 2000 and with a mass of about 450,000 kg. It was assembled over 13 years from modules such as Zarya and Unity, and is resupplied by Japanese and European craft, Dragon, Soyuz, and Progress.