Mercury (Spacecraft)

The Mercury spacecraft was the one-person capsule that carried the first American astronauts into space during Project Mercury. NASA chose McDonnell Aircraft Corporation to build it, in a contest that came down to McDonnell and Grumman. The capsule had to be as small as possible to match the payload of the Atlas, America's first intercontinental missile, which lifted the orbital missions, while the smaller Redstone was used for the suborbital hops. The result was less than a third of the weight of the Soviet Vostok spacecraft. Encyclopedia Astronautica records a gross mass of 1,355 kilograms, a height of 4.03 metres and 18 launches between January 1960 and May 1963. Its final 24-hour mission was barely completed, and the lessons learned fed straight into the larger Gemini spacecraft, which McDonnell also built.