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Mercury-Atlas 9 was the final crewed space mission of the U.S. Mercury program, launched on May 15, 1963, from Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral, Florida.The spacecraft, named Faith 7, completed 22 Earth orbits before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, piloted by astronaut Gordon Cooper, then a United States Air Force major.
Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States, running from 1958 through 1963. An early highlight of the Space Race, its goal was to put a man into Earth orbit and return him safely, ideally before the Soviet Union.
Project Mercury still remained years behind the Soviet Union's space program, which had already flown a 64-orbit mission in Vostok 3. When Atlas 130-D, the booster designated for MA-9, first emerged from the factory in San Diego on January 30, 1963, it failed to pass inspection and was returned to the factory. [30]
All of the Mercury Seven eventually flew in space. They piloted the six spaceflights of the Mercury program that had an astronaut on board from May 1961 to May 1963, and members of the group flew on all of the NASA human spaceflight programs of the 20th century – Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle.
First flawless Mercury mission. 10 Gordon Cooper (1) 15 May 1963 Mercury-Atlas 9 : 16 May 1963 Mercury-Atlas 9 : First live TV from U.S. astronaut. 11 Valery Bykovsky (1) 14 June 1963 Vostok 5: 19 June 1963 Vostok 5: Longest solo spaceflight. 12 Valentina Tereshkova: 16 June 1963 Vostok 6: 19 June 1963 Vostok 6: First woman in space. 13 Joseph ...
Mercury capsule with escape tower. Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States. It ran from 1959 through 1963 with the goal of putting a human in orbit around the Earth. John Glenn's Mercury-Atlas 6 flight on 20 February 1962 was the first Mercury flight to achieve this goal.
Mercury-Atlas 10 (MA-10) was a cancelled early crewed space mission, which would have been the last flight in NASA's Mercury program.It was planned as a three-day extended mission, to launch in late 1963; the spacecraft, Freedom 7-II, would have been flown by Alan Shepard, a veteran of the suborbital Mercury-Redstone 3 mission in 1961.
Date/Time (UTC) Source object Event type Pieces tracked Remarks 9 May [1]: Westford-2: Communications experiment 46 [1]: As part of an experiment to facilitate international telecommunications, the US Military deployed an artificial space ring consisting of hundreds of millions of tiny copper needles [2] which would act as antennas reflecting radio signals at the target wavelength of 8 GHz.