posted 10-18-2015 10:45 AM               

Mercury Atlas 4 rockets into space and Earth orbit, September 13, 1961, Cape Canaveral, Florida, scan NASA-JSC.

A stunning Space Craft cover is shown for the successful launch of Project Mercury's Mercury Atlas 4 mission, September 13, 1961, from launch site LC-14, Cape Canaveral, Florida. The unmanned MA-4 mission is the first orbital flight for NASA's Project Mercury. The mission will place a Project Mercury spacecraft into a geocentric orbit one hundred miles above the Earth to precede a spaceflight with an astronaut aboard a space capsule. On this early flight, however, was what was termed by NASA as a "pilot simulator." This esoteric information is quickly picked-up by the press corps and area news cast staff that a "robot astronaut" was making this first Project Mercury orbital spaceflight.

Cachet maker George Goldey was one of only a few space cover servicers who foresaw the importance of NASA's first orbital spaceflight with a robot astronaut on this significant early orbital mission cover for Project Mercury. Only one Earth orbit in duration, the spaceflight is the first successful orbital flight of NASA's Project Mercury program and is confirmed as achieving all of the mission's objectives during its one hour and 50 minute orbital flight. This test if successful then would speed progress towards NASA's decision to make an orbital manned spaceflight as early as December 1961.

Space Cover #339: Robot Astronaut!

With the USSR's spectacular success of Yuri Gagarin's one orbit flight, April 12, 1961, followed by the failure of NASA's MA-3 flight, NASA Director Robert Gilruth and Walter Williams are adamant to rework the planned suborbital flight of MA-4 as an orbital flight. Spacecraft 8-A, the jettisoned space capsule of MA-3, is refurbished and made ready for this mission, in spite of its landing bag not being installed, a crew port used instead of the new window configuration for a manned spaceflight mission, and absence of the new explosive egress hatch added from astronaut Gus Grissom's problematic emergency egress from his sinking spacecraft during splashdown July 21, 1961,in which he almost drowned.

More significantly, though, the Mercury Atlas rocket and Project Mercury spacecraft combination had had only one successful launch out of four attempts. The present situation was far from encouraging in view of incredible recent Soviet space successes. Scott Simpkinson, Langley Space Task Group point of contact at Convair, the facility where the rocket and spacecraft were being manufactured, matter of factly stated, "MA-4 just had to work!" But, if it did not work, what would happen then?

As the press later discovered, the Mercury Atlas-4 mission carried a black box, a so called "pilot simulator" or "robot astronaut," to qualify Project Mercury tracking stations and the Project Mercury communications network with real communication transmissions during this first Project Mercury orbital flight. But, it would also do far more than just broadcast communication traffic to tracking stations.

The robot astronaut payload consisted of the pilot simulator black box, two voice tapes to broadcast communication traffic to NASA's tracking station network, a life support environmental system, three cameras to take photos from space, and instrumentation to monitor levels of noise, vibration, and radiation during the MA-4 mission.

Engineers had suspected that transient voltage had caused a malfunction of MA-3's programmer, and that a similar problem had been responsible for Big Joe's failure to stage properly on its Atlas 10-D flight.

This time, things were different. After successful launch, the MA-4 mission powered the first Project Mercury spacecraft into Earth orbit, achieving an orbital apogee of 123 nautical miles and a perigee of 86 nautical miles in its orbit. After one Earth orbit, the spacecraft's orbital timing device triggered its retrograde rockets, and the spacecraft returned back to Earth, splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean 161 miles east of Bermuda. It was a successful test of what also could be done during a manned spaceflight.

USS Plymouth Rock had been assigned as the primary recovery ship for the orbital flight, but upon splashdown, USS Decatur sped to the space capsule's splashdown position and successfully recovered MA-4. The following day, USS Decatur offloaded the space capsule ashore in Bermuda completing its role as primary recovery ship for the robot astronaut mission.

The successful one orbit flight of the Mercury Atlas-4 mission had smoothed the way for a manned Project Mercury orbital spaceflight to be made as early as December 1961. NASA Director, Robert Gilruth, upon completion of MA-4's mission noted the successful performance of its robot astronaut in commenting, "...all flight objectives were successfully achieved!" And, it was a major achievement for NASA's early Project Mercury space program.