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The Mercury-Redstone designers originally planned for the rocket to be recovered by parachute after its separation from the Mercury capsule. This was the first significant effort to develop a recoverable launch vehicle and the first to reach the testing phase.
Mercury-Redstone 1 (MR-1) was the first Mercury-Redstone uncrewed flight test in Project Mercury and the first attempt to launch a Mercury spacecraft with the Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle. Intended to be an uncrewed sub-orbital spaceflight , it was launched on November 21, 1960 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station , Florida .
Mercury-Redstone 3, or Freedom 7, was the first United States human spaceflight, on May 5, 1961, piloted by astronaut Alan Shepard. It was the first crewed flight of Project Mercury . The project had the ultimate objective of putting an astronaut into orbit around the Earth and returning him safely.
The first member of the Redstone family was the PGM-11 Redstone missile, from which all subsequent variations of the Redstone were derived. The Juno 1 version of the Redstone launched Explorer 1 , the first U.S. orbital satellite in 1958 and the Mercury-Redstone variation carried the first two U.S. astronauts into space in 1961.
The Mercury-Redstone 1 pad abort, Mercury-Redstone 1A, and the January, 1961, Mercury-Redstone 2 with a chimpanzee, Ham, aboard, also used LC-5. A total of 23 launches were conducted from LC-5: one Jupiter-A, six Jupiter IRBMs, one Jupiter-C, four Juno Is, four Juno IIs and seven Redstones. The first launch from the complex was a Jupiter-A on ...
Mercury-Redstone 4 was the second United States human spaceflight, on July 21, 1961. The suborbital Project Mercury flight was launched with a Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle , MRLV-8. The spacecraft, Mercury capsule #11, was nicknamed Liberty Bell 7 .
Mercury-Redstone 2 (MR-2) was the test flight of the Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle just prior to the first crewed American space mission in Project Mercury.Carrying a chimpanzee named Ham on a suborbital flight, Mercury spacecraft Number 5 was launched at 16:55 UTC on January 31, 1961, from LC-5 at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Mercury-Redstone 1A (MR-1A) was launched on December 19, 1960 from LC-5 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The mission objectives of this uncrewed suborbital flight were to qualify the spacecraft for space flight and qualify the system for an upcoming primate suborbital flight.