Like many firsts in spaceflight, Project Mercury began with a failure.
Unfortunately, Project Mercury was having trouble getting off the ground.
The program today is more than one year behind its original schedule and is expected to slip to two.
The Mercury Seven" astronauts pose with an Atlas model on July 12, 1962.
Photo: NASA
Project Mercury was a large and unproven part of NASA.
A variation of the Redstone rocket was used to put the first US satellite, Explorer, in orbit.
If there was a rocket that could place humans in space, NASA decided, it was the Redstone.
On November 21, 1960, the countdown began and progressed without any hiccups.
The Mercury-Redstone 1 rocket getting prepared for launch at Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex.
Photo: NASA
However, moments later the embarrassing failure came into view.
Immediately after, a strange sequence of events unfolded.
These fell limply to the side.
When everything fell silent, the incredulous engineers realized that they had a very big problem at hand.
Besides, the boosters self-destruct system was armed and there was no way to secure that system.
Nobody had any idea what to do.
All of us were thinking in aircraft, not rocket, termsand we were definitely behind the power curve.
We had no data to work with because we werent smart enough to know what we really needed.
Re-connecting the umbilical cord was proposed and rejected because of the risk involved.
Kraft would later establish the agency’s Mission Control concept and develop its organization, operational procedures and culture.
Kraft nodded, turned to his controllers and growled: That is the first rule of flight control.
If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything.
Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Photo: NASA
The cause of the failure was later tracked down to a faulty connection.
One of these cables relayed various control signals, and another provided power and grounding.
The control cable was supposed to separate first, followed by the power cable, a split-second later.
However, for this launch, someone used the wrong control cable which was a tad longer than expected.
Instead the power went out before the control cable was severed.
Mercury-Redstone 1 launching the escape rocket during its infamous Four Inch Flight.
Photo: NASA
Incredibly, the rocket suffered only minor damage from falling back on the pad.
