OTD in 1960, the seven Mercury astronauts watched the first test flight of their Mercury spacecraft at Cape Canaveral. But 58 seconds into flight, MA-1 exploded 🚀 💥
Here are some of the remains recovered from the sea bottom — an exterior panel with the "S" from UNITED STATES and a large 31” chunk of the inner titanium structure and nickel-chrome alloy outer skin, twisted from the violence of its demise.
If successful, MA-1 would have given America a fighting chance of beating the cosmonauts to orbit. Excitement ran high as the countdown progressed. Rain lashed Launch Complex 14 as the Atlas rocket's three engines roared to life, and MA-1 disappeared into low-hanging clouds. All systems nominal when mission control suddenly lost radio contact with the Atlas rocket as it climbed past 30,000 feet. Contact with the Mercury capsule continued until it hit the Atlantic ocean seven miles downrange.
As thousands of fragments rained from the clouds, astronaut Alan Shepard calmly turned to the red-faced engineers and asked, "You're going to fix that, aren't you?"
The catastrophic MA-1 failure caused some to question NASA's decision to launch men on Atlas rockets. While some sought to place blame, engineers got to work analyzing the problem. The cloud cover meant that no one saw the Atlas fail. Engineers had to look for clues as to what went wrong in recorded telemetry and among MA-1 fragments like these recovered from a search of the ocean bottom.
After six months of sleuthing, they concluded that the Atlas ICBM weight trimming had gone too far. The failure had occurred near "Max Q" when maximum aerodynamic pressure rattled MA-1. The thin-skinned adapter ring linking capsule to rocket had crumpled under the strain. Engineers added a reinforcing eight-inch-wide "belly band" of steel to the adapter ring on Mercury-Atlas 2, and NASA breathed a big sigh of relief as MA-2 accomplished all its planned mission objectives. The fix was in.
Alan Shepard went on to become the first American to fly the Mercury spacecraft into space, 40 weeks after seeing MA-1 destroyed… and just 23 days after the Russians famously sent the first human into orbit.
