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Project Mercury was the United States's first successful manned spaceflight program. It ran from 1959 through 1963 with the goal of putting a man in orbit around the Earth. Early planning and research was carried out by NACA, while the program was officially carried out by the newly created NASA. The name Mercury comes from the Roman god (it is also the name of the innermost planet of the solar system).

The Mercury program cost $1.5 billion in 1994 dollars. See NASA Budget.

1 Spacecraft

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Mercury spacecraft (also called a capsule or space capsule) were very small one-man vehicles; it was said that the Mercury spacecraft were not ridden, they were worn. Only 1.7 cubic meters of volume, the Mercury capsule was barely big enough to include its pilot. Inside were 120 controls, 55 electrical switches, 30 fuses and 35 mechanical levers. The spacecraft was designed by Max Faget and NASA's Space Task Group.

During the launch phase of the mission, the Mercury spacecraft and astronaut, were protected from launch vehicle failures by the Launch Escape System. The LES consisted of a solid fuel, 52,000 lbf (231 kN) thrust rocket mounted on a tower above the spacecraft. In the event of a launch abort, the LES fired for 1 second, pulling the Mercury spacecraft away from a defective launch vehicle. The spacecraft would then descend on its parachute recovery system. After booster engine cutoff (BECO), the LES was no longer needed and was separated from the spacecraft by a solid fuel, 800 lbf (3.6 kN) thrust jettison rocket, that fired for 1.5 seconds.

To separate the Mercury spacecraft from the launch vehicle, the spacecraft fired three small solid fuel, 400 lbf (1.8 kN) thrust rockets for 1 second. These rockets are called the Posigrade rockets.

The spacecraft had only attitude control thrusters. After orbit insertion and before retrofire they could not change their orbit. The spacecraft had three sets of control jets for each axis (yaw, pitch and roll), supplied from two separate fuel tanks. An automatic set of high and low powered jets and a set of manual jets, fueled from either the automatic tank or the manual tank. The pilot could use any one of the three thruster systems and fuel them from either of the two fuel tanks to provide spacecraft attitude control.

The Mercury spacecraft were designed to be totally controllable from the ground in the event that the space environment impaired the pilot's ability to function.

The spacecraft had three solid fuel, 1000 lbf (4.5 kN) thrust retrorockets that fired for 10 seconds each. One was sufficient to return the spacecraft to earth if the other two failed. The first retro was fired, five seconds later the second was fired (while the first was still firing). Five seconds after that, the third retro fires (while the second retro is still firing). This is called ripple firing.

There was a small metal flap at the nose of the spacecraft called the "spoiler". If the spacecraft started to reenter nose first (another stable reentry attitude for the capsule), airflow over the "spoiler" would flip the spacecraft around to the proper, heatshield first reentry attitude.

Suborbital Mercury capsules encountered lower reentry temperatures and used a beryllium heat-sink heat shields. Orbital missions encountered much higher atmospheric friction and temperatures during reentry and used ablative shields.

NASA ordered 20 production spacecraft, numbered 1 through 20, from McDonnell Aircraft Company, St. Louis, Missouri. Five of the twenty spacecraft were not flown. They were, Spacecraft #10, 12, 15, 17, and 19. Two unmanned spacecraft were destroyed during flights. They were Spacecraft #3 and #4. Spacecraft #11 sank and was recovered from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean after 38 years. Some spacecraft were modified after initial production (refurbished after launch abort, modified for longer missions, etc) and received a letter designation after their number, examples 2B, 15B.

A number of boilerplate spacecraft (mockup/prototype/replica spacecraft, made from non-flight materials or lacking production spacecraft systems and/or hardware) were also made by NASA and McDonnell Aircraft and used in numerous tests, including launches.

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Project ApolloFor other meanings, see Apollo (disambiguation). Project Apollo was a series of human spaceflight missions undertaken by the United States of America using the Apollo spacecraft, conducted during the years 1961- 1972. It was devoted to the goal of landing Project MercuryProject Mercury was the United States's first successful manned spaceflight program. It ran from 1959 through 1963 with the goal of putting a man in orbit around the Earth. Early planning and research was carried out by NACA, while the program was officia Project GutenbergProject Gutenberg PG was launched by Michael Hart in 1971 in order to provide a library, on what would later become the Internet, of free electronic versions (sometimes called e-texts) of physically existing books. The texts provided are mostly in the pub Project managementProject management is the ensemble of activities (such as tasks) concerned with successfully achieving a set of goals. This includes planning, scheduling and maintaining progress of the activities that comprise the project. Reduced to its simplest project Projective planeIn mathematics, a projective plane consists of a set of "lines" and a set of "points" with the following properties: #Given any two distinct points, there is exactly one line incident with both of them. Given any two distinct lines, there is exactly one p Project RunebergProject Runeberg is an initiative patterned after Project Gutenberg that publishes freely available electronic versions of books significant to the culture and history of the Nordic countries. The Project began archiving Nordic-language literature in Dece Project lifecycle Project Mogul Project Pluto Project planning Projectile point Projectile Project Galactic Guide Project Vanguard Project Xanadu