GiGi checked the manifest twice — the payload bay is still empty.
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Fueling up…
The machine behind the mission
A compact Navy attack jet flown off carrier decks from Vietnam to Desert Storm. Pilots nicknamed it the “SLUF,” and it was one of the first jets to put a modern heads-up display in front of the pilot.
Rocketry's first customers were armies. Missiles built for deterrence — Redstone, Atlas, Titan — carried megaton stakes before they ever carried science. The road to orbit runs straight through the arsenal.
The Space Age wasn't born confident — it was born stubborn…
One missile, three jobs: the Army Redstone, stretched into Jupiter-C, then topped with a man.
Redstone family
The first American satellite was a stovepipe: 80 inches long, six and a quarter across.
Explorer 1 cutaway
Fifteen minutes, start to splash: 116 miles up, 302 miles downrange, 5,134 mph.
MR-3 flight plan
Before the Cape was NASA's, it was the Air Force's missile range: a sandy point where the Army, Navy and Air Force fired everything they had out over the Atlantic. This is the log of that decade, pad by pad.
One missile, three jobs. The Army Redstone was built at Huntsville to throw a warhead 200 miles. Stretched and topped with spinning solid stages it became the Jupiter-C that put Explorer 1 up from the Cape in January 1958. Stretched again, with a capsule and escape tower, it put Alan Shepard into space from Pad 5 in May 1961.
Source: The Mercury-Redstone Project, NASA TM X-53107, MSFC, December 1964 (and MR-3 flight plan, Figure 19).
The first living things sent to space rode a V-2 in 1947 — fruit flies, parachuted home alive before any monkey or man.
Early launch crews watched from concrete blockhouses just yards from the pad — with domed roofs up to eight feet thick.
By 1960 Cape Canaveral's shoreline was so crowded with launch pads that the strip earned a nickname: "Missile Row".
The first American satellite was a stovepipe: 80 inches long, six and a quarter across, 30 pounds with its burned-out fourth-stage motor still attached. Van Allen's Geiger counter rode in the nose, and it kept going quiet at the top of the orbit. Explorer III, with a tape recorder, showed why: the counter was saturating in a belt of radiation nobody knew was there.
Source: The Explorer Rocket Research Program, JPL Publication No. 145, 1958.
Fourteen entries from the first decade, with the pad each one left from.
| Vehicle | Date | Pad | Result | Event |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bumper 8 | 24 Jul 1950 | LC-3 | Partial | The first launch from Cape Canaveral - a V-2 with a WAC Corporal on top |
| Redstone RS-1 | 20 Aug 1953 | LC-4 | Partial | First flight of the Army's Redstone - the missile that would carry Mercury |
| Jupiter-C RTV | 20 Sep 1956 | LC-5 | Success | 682 miles up, 3,335 miles downrange - a satellite in all but name |
| Thor 101 | 25 Jan 1957 | LC-17B | Failure | First Thor; it rose a few inches and fell back onto the pad |
| Atlas 4A | 11 Jun 1957 | LC-14 | Failure | First Atlas flight - lost thrust at 26 seconds and was destroyed by range safety at 50 |
| Vanguard TV-3 | 6 Dec 1957 | LC-18A | Failure | The first U.S. satellite attempt, on live TV; it rose four feet and exploded |
| Juno I - Explorer 1 | 31 Jan 1958 | LC-26A | Success | America's first satellite; discovered the Van Allen belts |
| Thor-Able - Pioneer 1 | 11 Oct 1958 | LC-17A | Partial | The first launch under NASA, eleven days old; it reached 70,700 miles |
| Titan I | 6 Feb 1959 | LC-15 | Success | First Titan, first flight on the first try |
| Jupiter AM-18 | 28 May 1959 | LC-26B | Success | Able and Baker ride a nose cone 300 miles up and come home alive |
| Mercury-Redstone 2 | 31 Jan 1961 | LC-5 | Success | Ham the chimpanzee; the last test before a man |
| Minuteman I | 1 Feb 1961 | LC-31 | Success | First all-up solid-fuel ICBM, perfect on the first try |
| Mercury-Redstone 3 | 5 May 1961 | LC-5 | Success | Alan Shepard, Freedom 7 - the first American in space |
| Atlas 109-D - MA-6 | 20 Feb 1962 | LC-14 | Success | John Glenn, three orbits - the Cape becomes the Space Coast |
LC-5, LC-6 and LC-26 are preserved by the Air Force Space and Missile Museum at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The blockhouse at LC-26 still has its periscopes.
Every dimension in inches, the way the drawing office wrote it. From the fin tips to the top of the escape tower, 996 inches: 83 feet. The booster is a little under 60 feet of it; the spacecraft and tower the rest. The 70-inch diameter was the Redstone's, so the capsule had an adapter to sit on.
Source: The Mercury-Redstone Project, NASA TM X-53107, MSFC, December 1964 (and MR-3 flight plan, Figure 19).
Fifteen minutes, start to splash. Engine cutoff at 2 minutes 22 seconds, tower off, capsule off, turnaround, then five minutes of weightlessness over the top at about 100 nautical miles. Retrofire at 5 minutes 14 seconds was not needed on a ballistic hop; Shepard fired the retros anyway, for practice. Eleven g on the way down.
Source: The Mercury-Redstone Project, NASA TM X-53107, MSFC, December 1964 (and MR-3 flight plan, Figure 19).
Juno I, January 31, 1958 - the first American satellite
Tick through the night from the blockhouse at Launch Complex 26A.
Tap a box to check it off
The whole flight fit on one chart of the Bahamas. A carrier sat at the predicted landing point, destroyers and helicopters were strung along the track in case it came down short, and the Cape was in the top left corner. For MR-3 the carrier was the USS Lake Champlain, and the helicopter had Shepard on deck eleven minutes after splash.
Source: The Mercury-Redstone Project, NASA TM X-53107, MSFC, December 1964 (and MR-3 flight plan, Figure 19).
Negative. Not in the range log.
