Mercury at the cape: Friendship 7, Aurora 7, Sigma 7

Project Mercury put six Americans in space between May 1961 and May 1963, and all six flights left from Cape Canaveral. The first two were suborbital hops on Redstone rockets from Launch Complex 5/6. The four orbital flights, beginning with John Glenn’s on February 20, 1962, went up on Atlas rockets from Launch Complex 14, which the 1984 National Historic Landmark nomination for the station calls “the most significant and important of the Atlas Complexes.”

Flight	Spacecraft	Astronaut	Date	Flight time
Mercury-Redstone 3	Freedom 7	Alan B. Shepard Jr.	May 5, 1961	15 min 28 s
Mercury-Redstone 4	Liberty Bell 7	Virgil I. Grissom	July 21, 1961	15 min 37 s
Mercury-Atlas 6	Friendship 7	John H. Glenn Jr.	February 20, 1962	4 h 55 min 23 s
Mercury-Atlas 7	Aurora 7	M. Scott Carpenter	May 24, 1962	4 h 56 min 5 s
Mercury-Atlas 8	Sigma 7	Walter M. Schirra	October 3, 1962	9 h 13 min 11 s
Mercury-Atlas 9	Faith 7	L. Gordon Cooper Jr.	May 15-16, 1963	34 h 19 min 49 s

The flight times are NASA’s. All six were controlled from the original Mercury Control Center at the cape, which, the landmark nomination says, handled every Mercury flight and the first three Gemini flights before control moved to Houston.

The pads

Complex 5/6 was a two-pad site with a shared blockhouse, built in 1955 for the Army’s Redstone missile tests. All of the Mercury-Redstone flights, crewed and uncrewed, were launched there, under a NASA team headed by Kurt H. Debus. Complex 14 was built in 1956 and 1957 for the Atlas missile and launched NASA’s Pioneer lunar probe in November 1959 before it was assigned to Mercury. Because Mercury used the Atlas D, the model the pad was designed for, the changes were small: a “white room” for the spacecraft at the top of the service tower, an egress tower for the crew, and room at the top of the gantry for the escape rocket tower.

Friendship 7

Glenn’s flight took a long time to get off the ground. NASA’s mission record says the countdown began on January 27, 1962, and was called off at T-13 minutes for bad weather; then a leak found in a bulkhead of the Atlas fuel tank took four to six days to repair. On February 20 the Atlas lifted off at 9:47:39 a.m. EST. Powered flight lasted 5 minutes and 1 second, and Glenn circled Earth three times.

Two problems came up. At the end of the first orbit a yaw control jet apparently clogged, and Glenn flew by hand using the fly-by-wire system. And a signal suggested that the clamp holding the heat shield had come loose, so the retropack was left on during reentry to hold the shield in place; the signal turned out to be false. Friendship 7 came down about 800 miles southeast of Bermuda, and the destroyer USS Noa had it aboard 21 minutes after landing, with Glenn still inside.

After Glenn

Carpenter repeated the flight on May 24, confirming the result. Schirra flew a six-orbit engineering test on October 3, and Cooper’s Faith 7, on May 15 and 16, 1963, made 22 orbits to see what a day in space would do. It was the last Mercury flight.

Complex 14 went on to launch the Agena target vehicles for Gemini. The $1.1 million rebuild for that work took down the egress tower Glenn, Carpenter, Schirra and Cooper had used. Near the pad stands the Project Mercury Monument, a 13-foot stainless-steel astronomical symbol for the planet Mercury dedicated in 1964, with a time capsule beneath it to be opened in 2464; at the entrance to the launch ramp is a monument to Glenn. The Gemini flights that followed are on our Gemini page.

Further Reading

• Live from Cape Canaveral by Jay Barbree