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Mercury astronauts at Ham MR-2 launch

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Topic: Mercury astronauts at Ham MR-2 launch

ColinBurgess
Member

Posts: 2046
From: Sydney, Australia
Registered: Sep 2003

posted 04-26-2020 05:39 PM

I've been asked a question by another author which I can only partially answer and I'm hoping someone out there might know. When the chimp Ham was launched on the MR-2 mission in January 1961, contemporary newspapers reported that six of the seven Mercury astronauts were observing the launch from the Cape blockhouse. The seventh astronaut was elsewhere on official duties.

Two weeks earlier, Alan Shepard had been secretly named as the first astronaut to fly into space, so perhaps he may have been involved in related training. Does anyone know for sure who this seventh absent astronaut was?

ColinBurgess
Member

Posts: 2046
From: Sydney, Australia
Registered: Sep 2003

posted 04-27-2020 07:27 PM

Many thanks to Rob South who pointed me to a film clip showing and naming Alan Shepard at the Cape that day watching Ham being loaded into his spacecraft for the MR-2 mission. This now means that Shepard, Cooper, Slayton and Schirra were in the blockhouse that day, so was it Grissom, Glenn or Carpenter the absent astronaut mentioned in the press?

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