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| Enos relaxing in the couch he occupied during his flight |
In November of 1961, the same year Gagarin orbited the earth, the United States put Enos, a 42 pound chimpanzee, into orbit completing two orbits of the Earth. The animal's successful flight proved the readiness of the Mercury spacecraft for manned orbi tal missions. Less than three months later, in the next Mercury flight, John H. Glenn, Jr. became the first American to orbit the Earth. John Glenn orbited 4 hours and 55 minutes in Friendship 7 , a capsule put in orbit by an Atlas 6 rocket on February 20 , 1962.
He orbited the Earth three times on an elliptic orbit with an apogee of 161.75 miles and became the first American to see a sunrise and sunset from space. He also became the first space photographer, using a Minolta camera he bought in a Cocoa Beach drugs tore to take some holiday snaps through the window.
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| Enos relaxing in the couch he occupied during his flight |
There were some exciting times on this flight, particularly when a malfunctioning sensor indicated that the heat shield had come loose. During reentry, Glenn ran out of fuel trying to compensate for the capsule's bucking motions, but he nevertheless came to a safe landing about 40 miles from the target, a miss attributed to having overlooked the loss of consumable items when computing the spacecraft's weight.
Prior to Glenn, astronauts Alan B. Shepperd and Virgil I "Guss" Grissom had completed two suborbital flights on the first two Mercury projects, each lasting about 15 minutes.
Project Mercury began on October 7, 1958, one year and three days after the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union heralded the beginning of the Space Age. The challenges were seemingly insurmountable; to devise a vehicle light enough to be launched into Earth's orbit, yet sturdy enough to withstand the forces of liftoff and splashdown, while protecting the pilot from the vacuum of space and the intense heat of re-entry into the atmosphere.
To meet these goals, they designed the spacecraft as a wingless capsule, complete with an ablative heat shield that would literally be burned off during re-entry. This capsule was to sit atop a liquid-fueled ballistic missile. The first, for suborbital flights, was the Redstone , designed by Wernher von Braun's Huntsville team. The second vehicle, designed to actually rocket the capsule into orbit, was the Atlas-D , with steel skin so thin that it would collapse like a plastic bag if it were not ke pt under constant pressure from within.
Three weeks after Alan Shepard's first U.S. human suborbital flight, on May 5, 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced the goal of landing a man on the moon within the decade. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became that man when he stepped off Apoll o 11's LEM onto the Moon's surface, taking the last "small step" on that Giant Leap begun a decade earlier by the Mercury astronauts. The six Mercury flights totaled only two days, six hours in space.
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| View of astronaut Glenn insertion to the Mercury spacecraft |
For more details on Project Mercury visit www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/history/mercury/mercury.htm