Mercury-Atlas 8
The mission Mercury - Atlas 8 (MA -8 ) was a manned space flight within the U.S. Mercury program.
Crew
On 27 June 1962 about a month after the flight of Mercury - Atlas 7, NASA announced that Walter Schirra would perform the next Mercury flight. With six orbits the flight time compared to Mercury - Atlas 6 and Mercury - Atlas 7 should be doubled. As a replacement pilot Gordon Cooper was divided.
Preparation
In the design of the Mercury spacecraft to fly for six orbits was not provided, so that some systems, such as the power supply and the oxygen tanks, had to be revised.
If one wanted the mission can cancel at any time with a forced landing, also had to be enlarged to rescue teams as the squad. 19 ships in the Atlantic and the Pacific nine were for communication and rescue ready. For a seventh mission in orbit, which was first considered an even greater effort would have been necessary, so that the flight was designed for six orbits. Five aircraft of the Air Force should revolve about the areas that were not covered by the ground stations.
After the flight of MA -7 astronaut Scott Carpenter had complained that he had received the flight plan too late, and that until the last changes were made. From this experience we had learned, so that the flight schedule for MA -8 was present two months before the start and no major changes were made.
The test on the Mercury spacecraft with the serial number 16, which was delivered on January 16, 1962 in Cape Canaveral, retreated to the length, and the hoped-for start date in August could not be maintained. The Atlas rocket, which was provided by the U.S. Air Force available, was delivered only on 8 August and needed further tests.
Schirra was the spaceship the name Sigma Sigma 7 is in mathematics as a symbol for the sum, and the spacecraft was the sum of all technical services. The number 7 stood for seven Mercury astronauts, such as any of the Mercury spacecraft after Shepard's Freedom 7
History of the flight
The Atlas rocket with Sigma 7 at the top started on 3 October 1962. Several seconds after liftoff, the rocket turned unexpectedly to the longitudinal axis and thus resulted in almost the rejected take-offs, but the situation stabilized again.
Sigma 7 reached after five minutes an orbit with an apogee of 283 km, higher than the previous Mercury flights. Only the first space flight ever, Vostok 1 had reached a greater height. With 7850 m / s Sigma 7 also introduced a new speed record.
Schirra introduced several control maneuvers with Sigma 7, both on the day and on the night side of the earth. A large part of the flight the spaceship was kept by the autopilot in the correct position or operating rudderless, to save fuel.
During this flight, the first television broadcast took place live from space, but that only lasted a few minutes. The television signals were those transferred from the TV satellite Telstar 1.
The splashdown was carried out with a much higher precision than in the previous Mercury flights. Sigma 7 landed only 9000 meters from the recovery ship, the aircraft carrier USS Kearsarge away. It was the first time that a manned landing capsule in the Pacific came down.
Importance for the Mercury Program
Schirra is to control the spaceship carefully and energy saving understand. In addition, there were no major mishaps, so that the flight of Sigma 7 became known as the " space flight from the textbook " in the history of NASA.
Even if the flight from Sigma 7 was technically successful and an improvement on Mercury - Atlas 7 meant it was obvious that the United States against the Soviet Union was still behind. With the launch of Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 had shown that they were able to launch two missiles within 24 hours. In addition, it was the flight time with just four days over the nine hours from Schirra far ahead. The next and final Mercury flight planned to go on a whole day to shorten this lead.