Mercury-Redstone 2 (MR-2) was a rocket mission, launched at 16:55 UTC on January 31, 1961 from LC-5 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Mercury spacecraft # 5 carried Ham the Chimp as a passenger on a suborbital space flight launched on Redstone MRLV-2.
MR-2 was the first launch in the Mercury-Redstone program, part of Project Mercury, the United States' first successful manned spaceflight program.
The previous Mercury-Redstone mission, MR-1A, flew a tra...
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Mercury-Redstone 2 (MR-2) was a rocket mission, launched at 16:55 UTC on January 31, 1961 from LC-5 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Mercury spacecraft # 5 carried Ham the Chimp as a passenger on a suborbital space flight launched on Redstone MRLV-2.
MR-2 was the first launch in the Mercury-Redstone program, part of Project Mercury, the United States' first successful manned spaceflight program.
The previous Mercury-Redstone mission, MR-1A, flew a trajectory that was too steep with accelerations too high for a human passenger. MR-1A had climbed to its programmed apogee of about 130 miles (209 km) and landed 235 miles (378 km) downrange. Mercury-Redstone 2 would follow a more flattened trajectory. Its planned flight path was an apogee of 115 miles (185 km) and a range of 290 miles (467 km).
Spacecraft # 5 contained six new systems that had not been on previous flights: environmental control system, altitude stabilization control system, live retrorockets, voice communications system, ...
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