50 YEARS OF US SPACEFLIGHT - JOHN GLENN FIRST AMERICAN TO ORBIT THE EARTH

SMN spacenote:

Mat irvine’s article on Dragon’s Mercury-Redstone reminded us that today is the 50th anniversary of John Glenn’s orbital spaceflight. Glenn became the fifth human in space, the third American in space, and the first US astronaut to orbit the Earth.

Orbital mission

John Glenn flew aboard the Mercury capsule Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962, on the Mercury-Atlas MA6 mission, during which he circled the Earth three times in a flight lasting 4 hours, 55 minutes, and 23 seconds. The pic above shows him climbing into the one-man spacecraft.

Salute from Down Under

Australians saluted Glenn during the flight, when the city of Perth became the ‘City of Light’, residents switching on all their house and street lights as the astronaut passed high overhead. It was a tribute that Perth repeated when Glenn flew in the Space Shuttle in 1998. On that mission he was aged 77, and still holds the record as oldest man in space. Good for you John Glenn, and NASA for making it possible.

Danger in space

During the flight (liftoff shown above) there was concern that the capsule’s heat shield had worked loose, with the danger of the whole spacecraft burning up during re-entry. So after the de-orbit burn, Glenn kept the retro-rocket pack in place to hold the shield tightly. In fact, re-entry was nominal and he splashed down safely; later analysis proved that the warning had been a false alarm. Even so...

Ticker tape parade

After the flight, John Glenn rightly became a national hero, receiving a ticker-tape parade through the streets of New York City. So, Dragon - we’re ready and waiting for a kit of the man and his ride...

Thanks to Cleveland.com for the infographic.

See the Dragon 1:72 scale model of the Mercury capsule Freedom 7 here and other Dragon Space models here.

PROJECT MERCURY GIANT CAPSULE KIT

Mat Irvine reports
19 December 1960 saw the very first launch of a Mercury capsule on a Redstone booster. This short flight (15 minutes 45 seconds) did not carry an astronaut though, for it was a ‘boiler-plate’ capsule (see previous posting on this subject), a test article built to check out systems, from basics like “does it fit on the top of the launch rocket?” to later technicalities, such as checking parachute deployment.

For many years the best Mercury capsule you could get as a model kit was a 1:48 scale version that arrived in a box along with its bigger two-man sibling, Gemini. This was by Revell, and the kit has been around for many years, also cropping up twice under the Monogram name.

But a few years ago, space modelling enthusiast Scott Alexander made the brave decision to design and finance a larger (and ‘larger’ here means ‘a lot larger’) model of this iconic capsule to 1:12 scale, making it four times the size of the Revell kit, so it packs a whole lot of detail.

Scott runs Atomic City Models, but he needed help with manufacture and distribution, so he involved the US company MRC, and the kit carries both names. It can be built as any one of the six capsules that carried astronauts, though the first MR-3 that launched Alan Shepard on his suborbital hop, was slightly different as far as windows and hatch are concerned, but the Atomic City plans include full details of the mods needed.

The kit is mainly in styrene plastic moulded in several colours, though it does have a few parts in metal, and the astronaut figure comes in vinyl. The kit features as one of the detailed builds in my book Scale Spacecraft Modelling in which you will also find a great deal more, such as simple conversions, how to deal with resin kits, designing and building dioramas, and a complete scratch-build of a Mars module.

Scale Spacecraft Modelling is published by The Crowood Press, and is available from Amazon, along with various other books I’ve written here.

SMN note:
Mat’s book is packed with fascinating material, so if you’re after a last-minute Christmas goody, we recommend it highly.

The pictures show, top to bottom:
1 Atomic City/MRC Mercury kit box.
2 The finished model.
3 The model in Friendship 7 markings.
4 Mat’s SSM book jacket.