Mercury-Redstone 1

With Mercury - Redstone 1 (MR -1) to be held the first test flight as part of the Mercury program with a fully assembled Redstone rocket and Mercury spacecraft on 21 November 1960.

Start attempt

The rocket was fully assembled on the launch pad and the countdown proceeded normally until the start of the main engines. The engine lit, but it fell off immediately because a cable was not properly separated from the rocket. The rocket had about 10 cm raised here (4 inches) from the floor and fell back into the holding frame. It then launched the rescue tower, just because it was now the next step in the planned execution of the flight. Three seconds later, flew up out of the Mercury landing capsule of the first smaller release parachute and then the main parachute out, then hung on the rocket.

Analyzes

"Everything we did was to start the rescue tower. " later said a NASA Official highly disappointed.

Despite this miscarriage the rescue system proved to be successful and so were out of this glitch also provide valuable results are obtained.

The replacement mission, Mercury - Redstone 1A ( MR -1A ), on the other hand was on December 19, 1960 without any problems. The spacecraft reached an altitude of about 210 km (131 miles) and was rescued by a helicopter from the Atlantic Ocean 15 minutes later after landing.