Posts: 402
From: North Carolina
Registered: Mar 2002

posted 03-12-2012 03:28 PM               

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The aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CVN 65) is leaving on its final deployment today, leading to several news stories about her. A Google search turns up many examples of the story, and have this exact paragraph about her involvement with Mercury:

The ship's first mission was to track and measure the flight of Mercury 'Friendship 7'. Big E's efforts culminated May 5, 1962 when Cmdr. Alan B. Shepard, Jr., became the first American to break the barrier of the Earth's atmosphere and ascend 116.5 miles in the Mercury capsule.

Obviously this information is somewhat scrambled, with Friendship 7 and Shepard's Freedom 7 being confused, as well as the year being wrong. However, I've been unable to find any information on what Enterprise actually did during the Mercury program.

Can anyone help?

Posts: 481
From: Germantown, WI USA
Registered: Jan 2004

posted 03-12-2012 05:51 PM               

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It seems that the scrambled facts are not "Friendship 7" and "1962," but rather "May 5" and "Cmdr. Alan B. Shepard, Jr."

Haze Gray & Underway, a Naval history web site, has a page about the Enterprise. It says that Enterprise wasn't commissioned until 26 November 1961 and that it "played a role in the space age when Enterprise acted as a tracking and measuring station for the epochal flight of Friendship 7, the 'Project Mercury' space capsule in which Lieutenant Colonel John H. Glenn , Jr, USMC made the United States' first orbital space flight."