posted 08-23-2017 01:04 AM
There were a total of 20 Mercury spacecraft built and they were used on the Little Joe test flights as well as the Redstone and Atlas missions. The Mercury spacecraft were built sequentially and I suspect that NASA intended to assign the spacecraft to the various Mercury missions sequentially as well, but that is not what ultimately happened. Some of the spacecraft were taken off certain missions and assigned to others it appears.
So for example, Friendship 7 (MA-6) used Spacecraft 13 but MA-7 (Aurora 7) used Spacecraft 18. That is quite a gap between spacecraft.
Has anyone ever seen a document that showed how the Mercury spacecraft were initially assigned? Even the book "This New Ocean" doesn't cover these changes completely.