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Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/fea58b9f6c98441f.webp","url":"/static/gallery/fea58b9f6c98441f.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/fea58b9f6c98441f.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/fea58b9f6c98441f.webp","cap":"The Voyager 1 aboard the Titan III/Centaur lifted off on September 5, 1977, joining its sister spacecraft, the Voyager 2, on a mission to the outer pl","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true}],"id":"voyager1"},"Voyager 2":{"name":"Voyager 2","agency":"NASA / JPL","subtype":"Grand Tour Flyby / Interstellar","vehicle":"Titan IIIE-Centaur","site":"Cape Canaveral, LC-41","destination":"Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, interstellar medium","mass":"721 kg","duration":"48+ years and counting","statusLabel":"Operating in interstellar space","launch":"1977-08-20","objectives":"Exploit a rare planetary alignment to fly past all four giant planets in a single mission, gathering the first close data on Uranus and Neptune.","summary":"The only craft ever to tour all four giant planets on one trajectory.","references":[{"type":"article","authors":"Kohlhase, C. E. and Penzo, P. A.","year":"1977","title":"Voyager Mission Description","series":"Space Science Reviews","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"21(2): 77–101, doi:10.1007/BF00200846","url":"https://pds-ppi.igpp.ucla.edu/data/VG2-U-POS-5-SUMM-HGCOORDS-48SEC-V1.0/DOCUMENT/MISSION_DESCRIPTION/MISSION.PDF","note":"JPL's own account of the mission as designed, a preprint of March 1977 written before either craft had flown; read as the scanned PDF archived with the Planetary Data System's Planetary Plasma Interactions node. The launch from Complex 41, the Uranus option with its arrival in January 1986, the high-reliability design for the 'nearly four-year journey to Saturn', and the command computer's two 4,096-word memories with about 1,286 words free for science."},{"type":"web","authors":"NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive","year":"","title":"Voyager 2 (1977-076A)","series":"NSSDCA Master Catalog","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"Internet Archive capture of 17 August 2025","url":"https://web.archive.org/web/20250817054502/https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=1977-076A","note":"The catalogue entry that NASA's own pages paraphrase. Its live address, nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov, was redirecting to a maintenance placeholder when the article was researched and still did on 6 September 2026, so the link is to the Internet Archive's capture. The bus, dish and booms, the three-axis stabilisation, the 470 W at launch, the gold-plated disc and its uranium-238 clock, the launch troubles and Voyager 1's four-day delay, the April 1978 receiver failure and the backup used for the rest of the mission, the image compression, the Voyager Interstellar Mission's naming in 1989, the $875 million, the 3.13 AU a year, and its listing of Stone's 1981 Nature piece. Gives the disc's playback speed as 1000 rpm where NASA's own record pages say 16⅔; not used here."},{"type":"web","authors":"NASA Planetary Data System, Ring-Moon Systems Node","year":"","title":"Voyager Mission Description","series":"pds-rings.seti.org","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"MISSION.CAT catalogue file, also served as mission.txt","url":"https://pds-rings.seti.org/voyager/mission/","note":"The catalogue's mission-phase narratives: the 176-year alignment and the 30-year direct flight, the launch order and Voyager 1's faster trajectory, every closest approach with its time and centre-relative distance, the Europa-and-magnetotail trajectory at Jupiter, the eight of nine volcanoes, the scan platform's seizure 110 minutes after Saturn and its recovery three days later at low rate, the Neptune permission granted on the approach to Uranus, the ten new moons and the offset field at Uranus, Miranda's 472 km and its 20-km canyons, Neptune's scooter, its winds and its rings found complete but faint, Triton's nitrogen geysers, the Parkes and Usuda antennas and the Very Large Array, and the Neptune phase's end on 2 October 1989."},{"type":"document","authors":"Butrica, A. J.","year":"1998","title":"Voyager: The Grand Tour of Big Science","series":"Chapter 11 of From Engineering Science to Big Science: The NACA and NASA Collier Trophy Research Project Winners, ed. P. E. Mack, NASA SP-4219","publisher":"NASA History Office","place":"Washington, DC","pages":"","url":"https://www.nasa.gov/history/SP-4219/Chapter11.html","note":"NASA's own history of the programme: Flandro's 1965 report, the 175-year alignment and the 1976–1980 windows, the Grand Tour's four launches, TOPS and its self-repairing computer, the $750 to $900 million, the budget's fall from $5.2 to $3 billion, Fletcher's 11 and 16 December 1971, the $360 million against $1 billion, the Space Science Board's endorsement of 8–9 February 1972 and Townes's hope, the plutonium generators upgraded to last beyond ten years, the naming in March 1977, the reversed launch order, the April 1978 receiver failure with its shorted capacitor and the Doppler-compensated uplink first tested from Madrid on 13 April 1978, the scan platform's lubricant and the slower, roll-assisted pointing that followed, the November 1980 approval of the Uranus extension, the quarter sunlight at Uranus, the image compression, and Neptune's rings found complete."},{"type":"web","authors":"NASA","year":"","title":"Voyager 2","series":"NASA Science","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"","url":"https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-2/","note":"NASA's current mission page: the launch at 14:29:44 UT from Launch Complex 41, the renaming announced on 7 March 1977, the 81,500 km above Uranus's cloud tops, the ten new moons and two new rings, Miranda's 'mishmash of peculiar features', the Challenger accident in the same week, the 4,800 km over Neptune's cloud tops as the closest of the four flybys, the termination shock on 30 August 2007 and the 15.4 km/s. It disagrees with the catalogue and with itself on several figures — 25 August 1981 in its key-dates panel against 26 August in its text, 01:21 UT for Saturn against the catalogue's 03:24, a 55-degree tilt for Uranus's field, and 25 November 2018 for the entry into interstellar space — recorded in the article's closing note."},{"type":"web","authors":"NASA","year":"","title":"Voyager 1 and 2 Science Instruments","series":"NASA Science","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"","url":"https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/instruments/","note":"The per-instrument status list, distinguishing instruments switched off to save power from those off because of degraded performance. For Voyager 2: the cameras on 10 October and 5 December 1989, the photopolarimeter on 3 April 1991, the ultraviolet spectrometer on 12 November 1998, the infrared spectrometer on 1 February 2007, planetary radio astronomy on 21 February 2008, Plasma Science on 26 September 2024, the low-energy charged particle detector on 24 March 2025; the magnetometer and plasma wave subsystem on, and the cosmic ray subsystem on but scheduled to be switched off in 2026. Its latest entry is dated 17 April 2026."},{"type":"web","authors":"NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory","year":"2018","title":"NASA's Voyager 2 Probe Enters Interstellar Space","series":"JPL news release","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"10 December 2018","url":"https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-2-probe-enters-interstellar-space/","note":"The announcement of the 5 November 2018 crossing: the Plasma Science instrument's steep decline in solar-wind speed, that instrument's failure on Voyager 1 in 1980, John Richardson on the second crossing being measured 'with the PLS data', the four watts a year, the sixteen days between the launches, and the spacecraft 'built to last five years'."},{"type":"web","authors":"NASA","year":"","title":"Voyager Frequently Asked Questions","series":"NASA Science","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"","url":"https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/frequently-asked-questions/","note":"The 4 watts less each year, the 3.1 AU a year, the pass within 1.7 light years of Ross 248 in about 40,000 years, the uranium-238 clock, and the editor's note that both Voyagers were still functioning in April 2026."},{"type":"web","authors":"NASA","year":"","title":"Golden Record Contents","series":"NASA Science","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"","url":"https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/golden-record-contents/","note":"The committee chaired by Carl Sagan, the 115 images, the natural sounds, the music and the greetings in fifty-five languages, and the aluminium jacket with its cartridge and needle."},{"type":"web","authors":"Greicius, A.","year":"2019","title":"30 Years Ago: Voyager 2's Historic Neptune Flyby","series":"NASA","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"22 August 2019","url":"https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/30-years-ago-voyager-2s-historic-neptune-flyby/","note":"The longer exposures in Neptune's light and the thrusters fired to turn the spacecraft during them, the 64-metre Parkes dish and the Very Large Array added to the Deep Space Network's enlarged 70-metre antennas, the six new moons and four rings, and Triton's minus 235 degrees Celsius as the lowest surface temperature Voyager observed, on a body that was 'not simply a solid ball of ice'."},{"type":"article","authors":"Richardson, J. D., Belcher, J. W., Garcia-Galindo, P. et al.","year":"2019","title":"Voyager 2 plasma observations of the heliopause and interstellar medium","series":"Nature Astronomy","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"3: 1019–1023, doi:10.1038/s41550-019-0929-2","url":"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-019-0929-2","note":"The plasma instrument's record of the crossing on 5 November 2018 at 119 AU, and the boundary region ahead of it. Abstract read; the paper is behind Nature's paywall."},{"type":"article","authors":"Burlaga, L. F., Ness, N. F., Berdichevsky, D. B. et al.","year":"2019","title":"Magnetic field and particle measurements made by Voyager 2 at and near the heliopause","series":"Nature Astronomy","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"3: 1007–1012, doi:10.1038/s41550-019-0920-y","url":"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-019-0920-y","note":"The magnetometer's record: the crossing in the southern hemisphere on 5 November 2018 at about 119.0 AU, a thinner and simpler heliopause than Voyager 1's, and stronger interstellar fields. Abstract read."},{"type":"article","authors":"Krimigis, S. M., Decker, R. B., Roelof, E. C. et al.","year":"2019","title":"Energetic charged particle measurements from Voyager 2 at the heliopause and beyond","series":"Nature Astronomy","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"3: 997–1006, doi:10.1038/s41550-019-0927-4","url":"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-019-0927-4","note":"The energetic-particle record: the abrupt change on 5 November 2018 at 119 AU. The article's source list gave this paper under E. C. Stone, one of its authors; Krimigis is the first. Abstract read."},{"type":"article","authors":"Stone, E. C.","year":"1981","title":"How Voyager 2 has been reprogrammed","series":"Nature","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"292(5825): 675–676, 20 August 1981","url":"https://www.nature.com/nature/volumes/292/issues/5825","note":"Cited as NSSDCA lists it; not read for this article. Nature's own page for those two pages carries the issue's introduction to its Saturn papers, 'Two Voyagers to Saturn', so the link is to the issue."},{"type":"web","authors":"NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory","year":"2020","title":"NASA's Deep Space Antenna Upgrades to Affect Voyager Communications","series":"JPL news release","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"4 March 2020","url":"https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-deep-space-antenna-upgrades-to-affect-voyager-communications/","note":"The announcement of the eleven months of upgrades to Deep Space Station 43: the only antenna that can command Voyager 2, which flies below the plane of the planets and can be seen only from the southern hemisphere, the S-band transmitter needed to reach it, and the science data still received meanwhile."},{"type":"web","authors":"NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory","year":"2020","title":"NASA Contacts Voyager 2 Using Upgraded Deep Space Network Dish","series":"JPL news release","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"2 November 2020","url":"https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-contacts-voyager-2-using-upgraded-deep-space-network-dish/","note":"The first commands since mid-March 2020, sent on 29 October; why the Triton flyby over Neptune's north pole left the spacecraft visible only from the south; the 70-metre dish as the only one in the southern hemisphere with a transmitter powerful enough on the right frequency; and the new transmitter replacing one not changed in over 47 years."},{"type":"web","authors":"Uri, J.","year":"2021","title":"35 Years Ago: Voyager 2 Explores Uranus","series":"NASA History, Johnson Space Center","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"22 January 2021","url":"https://www.nasa.gov/history/35-years-ago-voyager-2-explores-uranus/","note":"NASA's anniversary account: light levels a quarter of Saturn's, the image motion compensation programmed for 15-second exposures, the field tilted 59 degrees and offset by a third of the radius, and the closest approach 50,700 miles above the cloud tops. Dates the Uranus approval to 8 January 1981 where the history says November 1980, and counts eleven new moons where the catalogue and the mission page count ten."},{"type":"web","authors":"Uri, J.","year":"2019","title":"40 Years Ago: Voyager 2 Explores Jupiter","series":"NASA History, Johnson Space Center","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"8 July 2019","url":"https://www.nasa.gov/history/40-years-ago-voyager-2-explores-jupiter/","note":"The Europa photographs' 'extensive irregular markings ... possibly indicating a frozen crust floating atop a deep ocean', the ten-hour volcano watch of Io, and the 17,000 images."},{"type":"web","authors":"NASA","year":"","title":"Neptune: Facts","series":"NASA Science","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"","url":"https://science.nasa.gov/neptune/neptune-facts/","note":"The Great Dark Spot 'large enough to contain the entire Earth', and Triton's geysers reaching more than 8 kilometres above a surface at minus 235 degrees Celsius."}],"refStyle":"numeric","hero":{"file":"/static/gallery/fbe4f75dedf45f8c.webp","url":"/static/gallery/fbe4f75dedf45f8c.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/fbe4f75dedf45f8c.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/fbe4f75dedf45f8c.webp","cap":"A high-gain antenna dish being built at JPL, 29 October 1975. NASA's caption says only that it was for one of the two Voyagers.","credit":"NASA/JPL-Caltech","license":"Public domain","source":"NASA image library — PIA21479","show":true},"blocks":[{"type":"head","text":"The alignment"},{"type":"para","text":"Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus and Neptune, and nearly forty years later it remains so. Uranus and Neptune are only known from close range because of a few hours' work by one machine in January 1986 and August 1989.[2][5] In 1965 Gary Flandro at JPL worked out that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were drifting into an arrangement that would let a single spacecraft visit all four, stealing a little momentum from each as it passed.[4] This was a very rare arrangement that occurs only once every 175 years.[4]"},{"type":"para","text":"The opportunity that this alignment brought was speed! At each flyby the spacecraft would benefit from a gravity assist.[3][4] Without these assists the flight to Neptune would have taken thirty years instead of twelve.[3][4] The launch windows fell between 1976 and 1980.[4] A mission that could be worked out on paper in 1965 would be flown by people who would live to see it arrive."},{"type":"head","text":"The mission that was cancelled"},{"type":"para","text":"The first answer to that opportunity was the Grand Tour: four launches, flown by a spacecraft called TOPS carrying an experimental self-repairing computer.[4] NASA priced the four missions at $750 to $900 million plus $106 million for launch vehicles, against an agency budget that had fallen from $5.2 billion in 1965 to a little over $3 billion by 1972.[4] Something had to give, especially considering the era of the space shuttle was nigh.[4]"},{"type":"para","text":"On 11 December 1971, James Fletcher, the NASA administrator, learned from the White House that Nixon would approve the Shuttle and would not fund both.[4] Five days later Fletcher agreed to remove the Grand Tour from the 1973 budget request and replace it with a pair of cheaper Mariners.[4] The replacement, Mariner Jupiter-Saturn 1977, was priced at $360 million against a billion.[4] This mission however was not planned to go beyond Saturn.[4] It did not acquire the name Voyager until March 1977, five and a half months before it flew.[4][5]"},{"type":"head","text":"Built to go further"},{"type":"para","text":"The scientists who endorsed the cut-down mission said plainly what they wanted instead. When the Space Science Board approved it on 8 and 9 February 1972, its chairman put on the record a hope that turned out to be the whole story of the mission.[4]"},{"type":"para","text":"JPL built accordingly, specifying a spacecraft durable enough for a journey nobody had funded.[1][4] The 1977 mission design paper, written before either craft had flown, already discusses arriving at Uranus in January 1986.[1]"},{"type":"para","text":"The machine was a ten-sided bus 47 centimetres deep and 1.78 metres across, carrying a 3.66-metre dish, a science boom with a steerable camera platform at its end, a 13-metre magnetometer boom held well clear of the spacecraft's own magnetism, and three plutonium generators on a boom of their own.[2] It was steadied on three axes rather than spun, so its cameras could hold still.[2][4] It produced about 470 watts at launch[2] and has been losing roughly four watts a year ever since.[8] Its command computer held two 4,096-word memories, of which about 1,286 words were free for science — everything the spacecraft would do at a planet had to fit inside that.[1]"},{"type":"para","text":"Bolted to one side is a gold-plated copper disc,[2] its contents chosen for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan: 115 images, greetings in fifty-five languages, natural sounds and music from many cultures.[9] Electroplated onto the cover is a two-centimetre patch of uranium-238, so that whoever finds it can measure how much has decayed and work out how long it has been travelling.[2]"},{"type":"head","text":"Launched first"},{"type":"para","text":"Voyager 2 lifted off from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral on 20 August 1977,[1][5] sixteen days before Voyager 1 — which reached Jupiter first.[2][3] The order was deliberate. Voyager 1 took the fast trajectory; Voyager 2 took the slow one, because the slow one was the only path that could still be bent outward towards Uranus after Saturn.[3][4] The mission cancelled in 1971 was being kept alive as an option in the launch order.[4]"},{"type":"para","text":"It did not go smoothly. The attitude control system misbehaved from the start, and engineers could not confirm that the science boom had fully deployed; Voyager 1's launch was held four days to be sure the same thing would not happen twice.[2] Then, in April 1978, the primary radio receiver failed.[2][4] The backup that took over automatically proved to be faulty as well — a shorted capacitor, NASA's history says — and the primary was never recovered.[2][4]"},{"type":"para","text":"Every command sent to Voyager 2 in the forty-eight years since has gone through that damaged backup.[2] Because it can no longer compensate for the Doppler shift of a signal between a moving Earth and a receding spacecraft, the frequency of each transmission has to be varied in advance to match it; the first such signal, sent from Madrid on 13 April 1978, was acknowledged fifty-three minutes later.[4] The workaround has never stopped being necessary.[2]"},{"type":"head","text":"Jupiter and Saturn"},{"type":"para","text":"Voyager 2 passed Jupiter on 9 July 1979, eighteen weeks behind its twin, on a trajectory chosen to complement rather than repeat it: closer to Europa, across the southern latitudes, and deep into the magnetotail.[3] The Europa pictures showed a bright, cracked, startlingly smooth shell of ice, and the case for an ocean beneath it begins there.[18] Voyager 1 had found nine erupting volcanoes on Io; four months later Voyager 2 found eight of the nine still going,[3] which turned a discovery into a fact about how the moon works."},{"type":"para","text":"Saturn, on 26 August 1981, nearly ended the mission.[3] A hundred and ten minutes after closest approach the scan platform — the steerable mount carrying every camera and spectrometer aboard — seized in azimuth, and the onboard computer refused further commands.[3][4]"},{"type":"para","text":"It was freed three days later by being commanded gently, at low rate, and it moved as instructed.[3] The likely cause, reproduced on duplicate equipment on the ground, was the heavy workload of the encounter combined with an ineffective lubricant.[4] For the encounters that followed, the platform was moved only for smaller changes and only at slower speeds, and large swings in azimuth were made, when possible, by rolling the whole spacecraft.[4] The two encounters that made Voyager 2 historic were flown under those restrictions.[4]"},{"type":"head","text":"Uranus"},{"type":"para","text":"Approval to continue to Uranus came in November 1980, conditional on Voyager 1 getting its Titan and ring science and on Voyager 2 staying healthy.[4] Permission for Neptune was granted later still, while the spacecraft was already closing on Uranus.[3] The last leg of the Grand Tour was authorised one planet at a time, each time after the hardware had earned it."},{"type":"para","text":"Getting there meant rebuilding the spacecraft without touching it. Uranus receives about a quarter of Saturn's sunlight, so exposures had to lengthen[4][17] — which, on a craft moving at tens of thousands of kilometres an hour, meant panning the cameras to track their targets mid-exposure.[10][17] New software compressed the pictures before sending them.[2][4] On the ground, antennas were combined into one receiver: Parkes in Australia for Uranus, and for Neptune the Usuda dish in Japan and the Very Large Array in New Mexico.[3][10] Voyager's project scientist, Ed Stone, published the account himself in Nature, under the title \"How Voyager 2 has been reprogrammed\".[2][14]"},{"type":"para","text":"The flyby on 24 January 1986 passed 81,500 kilometres above the cloud tops.[3][5] Ten new moons and two new rings were found.[3][5] The magnetic field turned out to be tilted about 59 degrees away from the axis of rotation and offset from the planet's centre by about a third of its radius,[17] so that its strength, comparable to Earth's overall, varies far more from point to point:[3] a world already tipped on its side, magnetised crookedly and off-centre as well."},{"type":"para","text":"Miranda was the other shock — a moon barely 470 kilometres across,[3] which had every right to be a dead cratered ball, and which instead showed mismatched terrains jammed against one another and fault canyons as much as twenty kilometres deep.[3][5] The encounter was overshadowed within days by the loss of Challenger.[5]"},{"type":"head","text":"Neptune"},{"type":"para","text":"The last flyby was the closest of the four.[5] On 25 August 1989 Voyager 2 passed about 4,800 kilometres above Neptune's north pole,[3][5] using the planet's gravity to aim itself at Triton, which it reached five hours later.[3] Neptune was, in the end, a device for pointing at its own moon."},{"type":"para","text":"Expectations had been low. A planet that far from the Sun was widely expected to be featureless.[3] Instead Voyager found the Great Dark Spot, a storm the size of Earth;[3][19] a small bright cloud that lapped the planet every sixteen hours and was nicknamed the scooter;[3] winds running westward against the planet's own rotation, faster than anywhere else in the solar system;[3] six new moons;[3][10] and, where ground observers had puzzled for years over incomplete \"ring arcs\", rings that turned out to be complete but so faint that they could not be fully made out from Earth.[3][4]"},{"type":"para","text":"Triton was the finest thing the mission found last. Dark plumes rose eight kilometres and more from the surface,[3][19] driven — as far as anyone can tell — by nitrogen gas escaping from below.[3] The surface measured about minus 235 degrees Celsius, the coldest of any body Voyager saw.[10] Something that cold had no business being geologically active,[10] and explaining Triton has occupied planetary scientists ever since."},{"type":"head","text":"Interstellar"},{"type":"para","text":"The planetary mission ended on 2 October 1989 and became the Voyager Interstellar Mission.[2][3] Both spacecraft together had cost about $875 million to build, launch and fly through Neptune.[2] Voyager 2 crossed the termination shock, where the solar wind first slows, in August 2007,[5] and on 5 November 2018 it crossed the heliopause and left the Sun's bubble altogether, at about 119 times the Earth's distance from the Sun.[7][11][12][13]"},{"type":"para","text":"It did so carrying a working plasma instrument, which Voyager 1 by then no longer had.[7] That is the reason the second crossing was measured rather than inferred.[7][11]"},{"type":"para","text":"Everything since has been governed by those four watts a year.[8] The cameras went off in 1989, the ultraviolet spectrometer in 1998, the infrared spectrometer in 2007, planetary radio astronomy in 2008.[6] The plasma instrument that measured the heliopause was switched off on 26 September 2024 to save power, and the low-energy charged particle detector on 24 March 2025.[6] As of April 2026 three were still running: the magnetometer, the plasma wave subsystem and the cosmic ray subsystem, which is scheduled to follow.[6][8]"},{"type":"para","text":"Only one antenna on Earth can still send it a command.[15][16] Voyager 2's course after Neptune took it steeply south of the plane of the planets, so only the southern hemisphere can see it,[16] and only the seventy-metre dish outside Canberra carries a transmitter that can reach it.[15][16] When that dish was taken apart for eleven months of repairs in 2020, NASA knowingly gave up its only way of speaking to the spacecraft;[15] Voyager 2 kept talking, and Earth listened without being able to answer.[15][16]"},{"type":"para","text":"It is now roughly 143 times the Earth's distance from the Sun, receding by about three of those units a year.[2][8] Nothing aboard it was built to last beyond 1981.[1][7] In about forty thousand years it will pass within a couple of light years of a star called Ross 248,[8] still carrying its gold record, and the uranium clock on the cover will still be running.[2]"},{"type":"head","text":"A note on the figures"},{"type":"para","text":"The planetary alignment recurs every 175 years in NASA's history of the programme and every 176 in the Planetary Data System's account;[4][3] the history's figure is used. Saturn's closest approach was at 03:24 UTC on 26 August 1981 in the catalogue,[3] where NASA's own mission page gives 01:21 UT in its text and 25 August in its key-dates panel;[5] the same page dates the crossing into interstellar space to 25 November 2018, three weeks after the 5 November of JPL's announcement and of the three Nature Astronomy papers.[7][11][12][13] Uranus's magnetic field is tilted 60 degrees in the catalogue, 59 in NASA's anniversary account and 55 on the mission page;[3][17][5] the anniversary account's figure is used, and the ten new moons are the catalogue's and the mission page's count where the anniversary account says eleven.[3][5][17] The extension to Uranus is dated November 1980 by the history and January 1981 by NASA's later pages;[4][5][17] the history's date is used. The distance today is a calculation, not a measurement: the 119 AU of the heliopause crossing, carried forward at the catalogue's 3.13 AU a year.[2][12]"}],"gallery":[{"file":"/static/gallery/fbe4f75dedf45f8c.webp","url":"/static/gallery/fbe4f75dedf45f8c.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/fbe4f75dedf45f8c.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/fbe4f75dedf45f8c.webp","cap":"A high-gain antenna dish being built at JPL, 29 October 1975. NASA's caption says only that it was for one of the two Voyagers.","credit":"NASA/JPL-Caltech","license":"Public domain","source":"NASA image library — PIA21479","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/68544608e49d8be1.webp","url":"/static/gallery/68544608e49d8be1.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/68544608e49d8be1.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/68544608e49d8be1.webp","cap":"A Voyager in JPL's 25-foot space simulator. 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Germany","credit":"Gerbil","license":"CC BY-SA 4.0","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/bd4dc4de3abb1cbd.webp","url":"/static/gallery/bd4dc4de3abb1cbd.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/bd4dc4de3abb1cbd.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/bd4dc4de3abb1cbd.webp","cap":"Орбитальный и посадочный модули миссии ExoMars 2016 с указанием расположения научных инструментов на модуле TGO.","credit":"P.Fisxo","license":"CC BY-SA 4.0","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true}],"id":"exomarstgo"},"MarCO (Mars Cube One)":{"name":"MarCO (Mars Cube One)","agency":"NASA / JPL","subtype":"Interplanetary CubeSats","vehicle":"Atlas V 401","site":"Vandenberg Air Force Base SLC-3E","destination":"Mars flyby","mass":"13.5 kg","duration":"Ended 2018","statusLabel":"Ended 2018","launch":"2018-05-05","objectives":"Fly two briefcase-sized CubeSats to Mars alongside InSight to relay its landing signals in real time — the first CubeSats to leave Earth's neighborhood.","summary":"Twin briefcase-sized probes that proved CubeSats can work in deep space, relaying InSight's landing.","references":null,"refStyle":null,"hero":{"file":"/static/gallery/1d4f02218b193427.webp","url":"/static/gallery/1d4f02218b193427.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/1d4f02218b193427.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/1d4f02218b193427.webp","cap":"PIA22316 MarCO InSight","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},"blocks":[{"type":"para","text":"[Article under construction]"}],"gallery":[{"file":"/static/gallery/1d4f02218b193427.webp","url":"/static/gallery/1d4f02218b193427.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/1d4f02218b193427.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/1d4f02218b193427.webp","cap":"PIA22316 MarCO InSight","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia 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Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/5d700353b947a423.webp","url":"/static/gallery/5d700353b947a423.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/5d700353b947a423.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/5d700353b947a423.webp","cap":"Photograph of a Marco Cubesat, showing the unfolded reflectarry antenna and one of the solar panels.","credit":"Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/e37e2eaa3084906c.webp","url":"/static/gallery/e37e2eaa3084906c.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/e37e2eaa3084906c.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/e37e2eaa3084906c.webp","cap":"MarCO will relay data from InSight to Earth during InSight's descent through Mars' atmosphere","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true}],"id":"marco"},"ESCAPADE":{"name":"ESCAPADE","agency":"NASA / UC Berkeley","subtype":"Twin Mars Atmosphere Probes","vehicle":"New Glenn","site":"Cape Canaveral, LC-36A","destination":"Mars orbit","mass":"1070 kg","duration":"Total: 3 years, 7 months","statusLabel":"En route to Mars","launch":"2025-11-13","objectives":"Send two small orbiters to Mars to study, from two vantage points at once, how the solar wind strips away the planet's thin atmosphere.","summary":"Twin low-cost probes bound for Mars to watch, in stereo, how the solar wind erodes its atmosphere.","references":null,"refStyle":null,"hero":{"file":"/static/gallery/56fc1a04cfc6d43c.webp","url":"/static/gallery/56fc1a04cfc6d43c.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/56fc1a04cfc6d43c.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/56fc1a04cfc6d43c.webp","cap":"ESCAPADE Unboxed at Astrotech","credit":"NASA Kennedy Space Center / NASA/Kim Shiflett","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},"blocks":[{"type":"para","text":"[Article under construction]"}],"gallery":[{"file":"/static/gallery/56fc1a04cfc6d43c.webp","url":"/static/gallery/56fc1a04cfc6d43c.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/56fc1a04cfc6d43c.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/56fc1a04cfc6d43c.webp","cap":"ESCAPADE Unboxed at Astrotech","credit":"NASA Kennedy Space Center / NASA/Kim Shiflett","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/4a7f7d52222d5ddb.webp","url":"/static/gallery/4a7f7d52222d5ddb.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/4a7f7d52222d5ddb.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/4a7f7d52222d5ddb.webp","cap":"ESCAPADE Unloading","credit":"NASA Kennedy Space Center / NASA/Norman Phelps","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/4025eea478d988c2.webp","url":"/static/gallery/4025eea478d988c2.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/4025eea478d988c2.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/4025eea478d988c2.webp","cap":"Two small spacecraft that make up the ESCAPADE mission to Mars arrived in Florida. The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers will…","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/0d735dd490e42ce7.webp","url":"/static/gallery/0d735dd490e42ce7.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/0d735dd490e42ce7.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/0d735dd490e42ce7.webp","cap":"ESCAPADE Horizontal Poster FRONTCredit: NASA/Kristen Perrin","credit":"NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio - TRAX International/Kristen Perrin","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/3c18d2ebcb2439fb.webp","url":"/static/gallery/3c18d2ebcb2439fb.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/3c18d2ebcb2439fb.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/3c18d2ebcb2439fb.webp","cap":"ESCAPADE Horizontal Poster BACKCredit: NASA/Kristen Perrin","credit":"NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio - TRAX International/Kristen Perrin","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true}],"id":"escapade"},"Sputnik 1":{"name":"Sputnik 1","agency":"USSR / OKB-1","subtype":"First Artificial Satellite","vehicle":"Sputnik (R-7 derivative)","site":"Baikonur Cosmodrome, Site 1/5","destination":"Low Earth Orbit (215 × 939 km)","mass":"83.6 kg","duration":"22 days in orbit · 1,440 orbits","statusLabel":"Re-entered 4 Jan 1958","launch":"1957-10-04","objectives":["Place the first artificial satellite into Earth orbit — and reach orbit before the United States","Test whether radio signals could propagate through the ionosphere and be tracked from the ground","Measure the density of the upper atmosphere by tracking the satellite's orbital decay","Prove out the pressurised, temperature-controlled satellite design needed for heavier future payloads","Validate the orbital-mechanics and tracking predictions that later missions would rely on"],"summary":"A polished aluminum sphere that opened the space age with a simple radio beep.","references":null,"refStyle":null,"hero":{"file":"/static/gallery/6c76fe5237b01b72.webp","url":"/static/gallery/6c76fe5237b01b72.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/6c76fe5237b01b72.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/6c76fe5237b01b72.webp","cap":"Sputnik 1 replica, National Museum of the USAF","credit":"U.S. Air Force photo","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},"blocks":[{"type":"para","text":"[Article under construction]"}],"gallery":[{"file":"/static/gallery/6c76fe5237b01b72.webp","url":"/static/gallery/6c76fe5237b01b72.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/6c76fe5237b01b72.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/6c76fe5237b01b72.webp","cap":"Sputnik 1 replica, National Museum of the USAF","credit":"U.S. Air Force photo","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/9de3259bdcae0bb4.webp","url":"/static/gallery/9de3259bdcae0bb4.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/9de3259bdcae0bb4.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/9de3259bdcae0bb4.webp","cap":"Replica model of the satellite","credit":"Soyuz235","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/67ea0555725441d0.webp","url":"/static/gallery/67ea0555725441d0.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/67ea0555725441d0.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/67ea0555725441d0.webp","cap":"Replica, Moscow Polytechnical Museum","credit":"Mikhail (Vokabre) Shcherbakov","license":"CC BY-SA 2.0","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true}],"id":"sputnik1"},"Vostok 1":{"name":"Vostok 1","agency":"USSR / Soviet Space Program","subtype":"First Human Orbital Flight","vehicle":"Vostok-K","site":"Baikonur Cosmodrome, Site 1/5","destination":"Low Earth Orbit (169 × 327 km)","mass":"4,725 kg (descent + service module)","duration":"1 hr 48 min · single orbit","statusLabel":"Landed same day","launch":"1961-04-12","objectives":["Prove that a human could survive launch, orbital flight, and the return through re-entry","Test how a pilot copes with sustained weightlessness — whether they can see, think and work","Validate the Vostok capsule's automatic systems, life support and ejection-seat landing method","Demonstrate that the USSR could put a person in orbit and recover them safely — ahead of the United States"],"summary":"Yuri Gagarin's single orbit made him the first human being to leave the atmosphere.","references":null,"refStyle":null,"hero":{"file":"/static/gallery/e170e24533b1a508.webp","url":"/static/gallery/e170e24533b1a508.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/e170e24533b1a508.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/e170e24533b1a508.webp","cap":"The Vostok 1 descent module after landing","credit":"The original uploader was Errabee at English Wikipedia.","license":"CC BY-SA 2.5","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},"blocks":[{"type":"para","text":"[Article under construction]"}],"gallery":[{"file":"/static/gallery/e170e24533b1a508.webp","url":"/static/gallery/e170e24533b1a508.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/e170e24533b1a508.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/e170e24533b1a508.webp","cap":"The Vostok 1 descent module after landing","credit":"The original uploader was Errabee at English Wikipedia.","license":"CC BY-SA 2.5","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/e86ee2547194a46c.webp","url":"/static/gallery/e86ee2547194a46c.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/e86ee2547194a46c.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/e86ee2547194a46c.webp","cap":"Gagarin inside the Vostok capsule before launch","credit":"SiefkinDR","license":"CC BY-SA 3.0","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/ad44f54ba601a941.webp","url":"/static/gallery/ad44f54ba601a941.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/ad44f54ba601a941.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/ad44f54ba601a941.webp","cap":"Gagarin's return, 15 April 1961","credit":"Главархив Москвы","license":"CC BY 4.0","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/06efa43c2731ef9b.webp","url":"/static/gallery/06efa43c2731ef9b.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/06efa43c2731ef9b.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/06efa43c2731ef9b.webp","cap":"Vostok spacecraft cabin layout","credit":"собственная работа","license":"CC BY-SA 3.0","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/4fa1980ec00b9b2d.webp","url":"/static/gallery/4fa1980ec00b9b2d.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/4fa1980ec00b9b2d.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/4fa1980ec00b9b2d.webp","cap":"Model of Vostok spacecraft, photo taken and edited by de:Benutzer:HPH on \"Russia in Space\" exhibition (Airport of Frankfurt, Germany, 2002)","credit":"The original uploader was HPH at German Wikipedia.","license":"CC BY-SA 3.0","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true}],"id":"vostok1"},"Mercury-Redstone 3 (Freedom 7)":{"name":"Mercury-Redstone 3 (Freedom 7)","agency":"NASA","subtype":"First American in Space","vehicle":"Redstone MRLV MR-7","site":"Cape Canaveral LC-5","destination":"Suborbital spaceflight","mass":"4040 lb","duration":"15 minutes","statusLabel":"Suborbital · 15 min","launch":"1961-05-05","objectives":"To carry an American astronaut into suborbital spaceflight and prove the one-person Mercury spacecraft and its systems.","summary":"Alan Shepard's 15-minute hop made him the first American to fly in space, weeks after Gagarin.","references":[{"type":"document","authors":"NASA Space Task Group","year":"1961","title":"Postlaunch Report for Mercury-Redstone No. 3 (MR-3)","series":"Project Mercury Working Paper No. 192","publisher":"NASA","place":"Langley Field, Virginia","pages":"16 June 1961","url":"https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/mr03-tec.pdf","note":"Originally CONFIDENTIAL. The file NASA hosts is a seven-page extract: the title page and Figure 7.3-2, the complete air-to-ground transcript — seventy-eight numbered transmissions timed to the tenth of a second, from T+2.3 s to the landing at 15 minutes 22 seconds. The other 1961 figures used here — 302 miles downrange, 5,036 mph at cutoff, 6.2 g on ascent, 11.0 g on entry — are from the papers in [2]. Later NASA summaries give 15:28 and 303 miles ([3], Appendix D; [8])."},{"type":"document","authors":"NASA","year":"1961","title":"Conference on Medical Results of the First U.S. Manned Suborbital Space Flight","series":"NASA TM-X-68523","publisher":"NASA, with the National Institutes of Health and the National Academy of Sciences","place":"Washington, DC","pages":"6 June 1961","url":"https://archive.org/details/NASA_NTRS_Archive_19720065957","note":"NASA's Technical Reports Server lists this as accession 19720065957 (72N73829), but its server answered 'not found' for the record on 6 September 2026, so the link is to the Internet Archive's copy of the NTRS scan. The papers used here: Kraft's flight plan (the countdown holds, including the 86 minutes lost to the inverter and 2 h 34 min of holds in all, the landing at 15 min 22 s, 5,036 mph at cutoff, 116.5 miles, 302 miles, an impact prediction within three miles, the recovery); Bond's spacecraft systems (heat shield, portholes, retropack, parachutes, landing bag, controllers, cameras, 78,000 lb); Augerson and Laughlin (6.2 g and 11.0 g); Voas and others on pilot performance; and Shepard's own written flight report."},{"type":"book","authors":"Swenson, L. S., Grimwood, J. M. and Alexander, C. C.","year":"1966","title":"This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury","series":"NASA SP-4201","publisher":"NASA","place":"Washington, DC","pages":"pp. 162–164, 181, 186, 323–332, 341–363 and Appendix D (p. 641)","url":"https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/sp-4201.pdf","note":"NASA's official history of the programme. Where its figures differ from the 1961 papers the text says so: 15:28, 303 miles and 5,134 mph in its Appendix D against the 1961 papers' 15:22, 302 and 5,036 mph, with 5,180 mph in its own narrative; a 52-minute inverter hold against the flight-plan paper's and mission page's 86 minutes; and 11.6 g on entry against the medical papers' 11.0. It also gives a 510 ft/s retrograde decrement against the systems paper's 450, and a countdown start of 8:30 p.m. on 4 May where the flight-plan paper and NASA's mission page say 8:30 a.m. with a fifteen-hour hold; on those the article follows the 1961 papers."},{"type":"web","authors":"Neufeld, M.","year":"2021","title":"First American in Space: The Flight of Alan B. Shepard","series":"National Air and Space Museum","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"5 May 2021","url":"https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/first-american-space-flight-alan-b-shepard","note":"The Museum's Mercury curator: the tensions the delay brought inside NASA, the two stories of the wait on the pad later told by Tom Wolfe, and the ‘light this candle’ line as an attribution."},{"type":"web","authors":"Stamm, A.","year":"2021","title":"Light This Candle: What You Need to Know About Alan Shepard's Historic Spaceflight","series":"National Air and Space Museum","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"30 April 2021","url":"https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/alan-shepard-freedom-7","note":"The Museum's account of the flight and its aftermath, including the medal and Shepard's later career; prints the fuller 'I'm a hell of a lot cooler than you guys' version of the line as its epigraph, without qualification."},{"type":"web","authors":"National Air and Space Museum","year":"","title":"Mercury Capsule MR-3, ‘Freedom 7’","series":"National Air and Space Museum collection record","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"","url":"https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/capsule-mercury-mr-3/nasm_A19620021000","note":"The capsule's own record: its transfer to the Smithsonian in October 1961, the portholes in place of a window, the hatch without explosive bolts, its particulars and where it is displayed today. Gives 15 minutes 28 seconds, 302 miles and 5,180 mph. Its materials line lists both beryllium and an ablative shield; the 1961 systems paper [2] is explicit that the Redstone flights flew beryllium."},{"type":"document","authors":"NASA Johnson Space Center","year":"1998","title":"Alan B. Shepard, Jr. (Rear Admiral, USN, Ret.), NASA Astronaut (Deceased) — Biographical Data","series":"","publisher":"NASA","place":"Houston, Texas","pages":"September 1998","url":"https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/shepard_alan.pdf","note":"NASA's biographical data sheet: Shepard's naval service, test-pilot years, flying hours, selection and later career. It calls the Grumman F11F the 'Tigercat'; the F11F was the Tiger, and the Tigercat the earlier F7F."},{"type":"web","authors":"NASA","year":"","title":"Mercury-Redstone 3: Freedom 7","series":"nasa.gov","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"","url":"https://www.nasa.gov/mission/mercury-redstone-3-freedom-7/","note":"NASA's mission page: 15 minutes 28 seconds, 303 statute miles and 5,134 mph — the figures of [3]'s Appendix D — given here alongside the 1961 papers'; also its countdown narrative, including the 86-minute inverter hold and the count's start at 8:30 a.m. on 4 May."},{"type":"web","authors":"Uri, J.","year":"2021","title":"May 5, 1961: Alan Shepard Becomes the First American in Space","series":"NASA History, Johnson Space Center","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"5 May 2021, updated 29 April 2026","url":"https://www.nasa.gov/history/may-5-1961-alan-shepard-becomes-the-first-american-in-space/","note":"NASA's sixtieth-anniversary account: the half-million on the beaches, the 45 million television viewers, the motorcade to the Capitol."},{"type":"web","authors":"Kennedy, J. F.","year":"1961","title":"Remarks at the Presentation of NASA's Distinguished Service Medal to Astronaut Alan B. Shepard","series":"The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"8 May 1961","url":"https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-presentation-nasas-distinguished-service-medal-astronaut-alan-b-shepard","note":"The transcript of the Rose Garden remarks: 'Commander Shepard and Mrs. Shepard', the 'common effort', the five names, and 'this open society of ours which risked much, gained much.'"},{"type":"document","authors":"Cassidy, J. L., Johnson, R. I., Leveye, J. C. and Miller, F. E.","year":"1964","title":"The Mercury-Redstone Project","series":"NASA TM X-53107","publisher":"NASA Marshall Space Flight Center","place":"Huntsville, Alabama","pages":"December 1964","url":"https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19670028606","note":"Prepared by General Electric's Apollo Support Department for Marshall's Saturn/Apollo Systems Office and issued as the Center's closing report on the launch vehicle: the 'over 800 changes' it counts, the Jupiter-C tanks and the 143.5-second burn, alcohol chosen over the more toxic Hydyne, the LEV-3 autopilot in place of the ST-80 platform, the abort system and the thirty seconds after lift-off in which it could not cut the engine. Gives 6.3 g at cutoff for the nominal profile where the 1961 papers measured 6.2."},{"type":"web","authors":"Kennedy, J. F.","year":"1961","title":"Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs","series":"The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara","publisher":"","place":"","pages":"25 May 1961","url":"https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-urgent-national-needs","note":"The 'longer strides' passage and the Moon commitment, as delivered."}],"refStyle":"numeric","hero":{"file":"/static/gallery/cea0c14dfc34331b.webp","url":"/static/gallery/cea0c14dfc34331b.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/cea0c14dfc34331b.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/cea0c14dfc34331b.webp","cap":"The Mercury Seven, selected in April 1959, in their pressure suits: Schirra, Slayton, Glenn and Carpenter in front; Shepard, Grissom and Cooper behind. Group portrait of 1962.","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"NASA image library · LRC-1989-B701_P-00361 (also GPN-2000-000651)","show":true},"blocks":[{"type":"head","text":"The spring of 1961"},{"type":"para","text":"Project Mercury had named its seven astronauts on 9 April 1959[5] and expected, at one point, that all seven would make suborbital flights.[4] The United States wanted to be first in space, and through its own caution was about to lose the chance.[4]"},{"type":"para","text":"Wernher von Braun insisted on one more uncrewed booster-development flight before a man rode the Redstone rocket.[3][4] Marshall's three reliability studies had put the vehicle at 88 percent for a successful launch and 98 percent for the crew's survival,[3][11] which was not good enough for him. The decision was taken in the last week of February 1961: the first crewed flight, which could otherwise have flown in March, was pushed back to 25 April to make room for the extra booster flight, planned for 28 March.[3][4] The resulting MR-BD (Mercury-Redstone Booster Development) flew four days early, on 24 March 1961, with a boilerplate capsule and, as George Low reported to Webb, \"demonstrated that all major booster problems have been eliminated.\"[3]"},{"type":"para","text":"Whether that caution cost America the first human in space is a judgement, not a record, but the arithmetic behind it is documented. A March launch would have come before Gagarin's flight of 12 April; 25 April came after it.[3][4] The Smithsonian's Mercury curator, Michael Neufeld, writes that the delay \"brought tensions inside NASA to a boiling point\" and that Headquarters sided with Marshall \"because losing an astronaut was worse than losing the race.\"[4] Whether the March date would have held is unknowable."},{"type":"para","text":"Following Gagarin's flight, Administrator James Webb went on national television to congratulate the Soviets and to reassure the country that Mercury, in the words of NASA's own history, would not be \"stampeded or panicked into a premature speedup.\"[3] The Space Task Group's public information officer, John \"Shorty\" Powers, woken by reporters in the small hours, gave the half-awake reply that reporters seized on: \"We're all asleep down here.\"[3]"},{"type":"head","text":"Choosing the man"},{"type":"para","text":"The famous story is that the seven Mercury astronauts were asked who should fly first if it could not be themselves, and that they chose Shepard. The question was real.[3] The story is a conflation."},{"type":"para","text":"NASA's history documents it as part of the 1959 selection screening, applied to candidates in groups of five, not as a ballot of the Mercury Seven.[3] During psychological evaluation, candidates were asked \"Who am I?\" and \"Whom would you assign to the mission if you could not go yourself?\" — and in the peer ratings, \"each candidate was asked which of the other members of the group of five accompanying him through this phase of the program he liked best, which one he would like to accompany him on a two-man mission, and whom he would substitute for himself.\"[3]"},{"type":"para","text":"That is a selection instrument. The documented decision-maker on who flew first is Robert Gilruth, director of the Space Task Group that ran Project Mercury, and Shepard was his choice from the outset: he told the seven privately in January 1961, and the public learned who would fly only after the first launch attempt was scrubbed on 2 May.[3][4]"},{"type":"head","text":"The pilot"},{"type":"para","text":"Alan Bartlett Shepard, Jr. was born on 18 November 1923 in East Derry, New Hampshire, and graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1944.[3][7] He served on the destroyer USS Cogswell in the Pacific in the last year of the war, took flight training at Corpus Christi and Pensacola, and got his wings in 1947.[4][7]"},{"type":"para","text":"He flew with Fighter Squadron 42 through several Mediterranean carrier tours, and entered the Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River in 1950.[7] He was involved in high-altitude data work, in-flight refuelling development, carrier suitability trials of the F2H-3 Banshee, and the Navy's trials of the first angled carrier deck.[7] He flew the F3H Demon, F8U Crusader, F4D Skyray and F11F Tiger, was project test pilot on the F5D Skylancer, and spent five months instructing at the Test Pilot School.[7] He graduated from the Naval War College in 1957 and was then assigned to the staff of the Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Fleet, as aircraft readiness officer; Mercury named him in April 1959.[7] Over his career he logged more than 8,000 flight hours, 3,700 of them in jets.[5][7] He was 37 years old on launch day.[3]"},{"type":"head","text":"The spacecraft"},{"type":"para","text":"Shepard named his capsule Freedom 7, the number signifying the seven Mercury astronauts,[6] which was a deliberate gesture of solidarity towards his colleagues.[4] Freedom 7 was also the seventh spacecraft McDonnell built in St. Louis.[3][4] The capsule was equipped with a beryllium heat shield for re-entry[2] and two porthole windows of heat-resistant multipane glass,[2][6] and its hatch was secured by a mechanical latch mechanism that alone weighed 69 pounds.[3] There were no explosive bolts.[6] The explosively actuated hatch that replaced it on the next flight weighed 23 pounds,[3] and ended up costing Gus Grissom his spacecraft, but that's another story![3]"},{"type":"para","text":"The retropack carried six solid motors: three retrograde giving a 450 ft/s velocity decrement, three posigrade giving 30 ft/s for separation; the pack was held on by three metal straps and jettisoned by a single explosive bolt.[2] The landing system used a six-foot ribbon drogue at a nominal 21,000 feet and identical 63-foot ringsail main and reserve parachutes, the main deploying at 10,000 feet when the antenna canister was blown off by an electrically fired mortar.[2] Beneath everything sat the landing bag, a four-foot skirt of rubberised fibreglass between heat shield and capsule.[2]"},{"type":"para","text":"Attitude control was composed of independent automatic and manual systems, down to separate peroxide tanks, valves and thrusters.[2] The right-hand controller handled pitch, roll and yaw.[2] The left-hand controller was the abort handle, twist-actuated, with a lock against inadvertent operation.[2] Remember that handle; it will appear again later in this story."},{"type":"para","text":"Three cameras flew on the capsule: a 70 mm earth-sky camera aimed out the lower right window, a 16 mm instrument-panel camera beside the astronaut's head, and a 16 mm astronaut-observer camera behind the panel running at six frames per second, started at about T-2 minutes.[2]"},{"type":"head","text":"The launcher"},{"type":"para","text":"The Redstone was based on an Army ballistic missile built by Chrysler under the direction of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency,[3][11] and flew here with the elongated propellant tanks of the Jupiter-C, which bought it twenty more seconds of burn.[3][11] Man-rating it took roughly 800 changes.[3][11] The Redstone, equipped with a Rocketdyne A-7 engine, developed a thrust of 78,000 lb at lift-off[2][3][11] and was rated to burn for 143.5 seconds; on this flight, cutoff came at two minutes and twenty-two seconds.[2][11]"},{"type":"para","text":"The propellant used by the Redstone was ethyl alcohol, with liquid oxygen.[11] Hydyne, the Jupiter-C's fuel, was rejected: it was more toxic than alcohol, judged unsafe for the astronaut in a pad abort or a prelaunch emergency egress, and had never flown on the A-7 engine.[11] The guidance was handled by the LEV-3 autopilot, a simpler system chosen because it was more reliable.[3][11] The abort sensing system would fire the escape tower in case of excessive attitude deviation or rate, low chamber pressure, or loss of electrical power.[11] For the first thirty seconds after lift-off, while the rocket was still over the Cape, an abort was not allowed to shut the engine down, so that a fault could not drop the vehicle back onto the launch area.[11] The launch pad was Pad 5 of Launch Complex 56 at Cape Canaveral, listed today as LC-5.[3][8][11]"},{"type":"head","text":"The launch"},{"type":"para","text":"The first attempt, on 2 May, was cancelled for weather, two hours and twenty minutes before the scheduled time, after Shepard had already spent three hours suited in Hangar S.[3] The count for the second attempt began at 8:30 on the morning of 4 May, paused in a planned fifteen-hour hold, and resumed at 11:30 that night.[2][8]"},{"type":"para","text":"At the pad, Gordon Cooper briefed Shepard on the launch status while Joe Schmitt, the suit technician, attached his gloves.[3] He climbed the gantry at 5:15 carrying his portable air conditioner and was in the spacecraft five minutes later.[3] Schmitt shook his gloved hand, and the gantry crew chorused \"Happy landings, Commander!\"[3]"},{"type":"para","text":"At T-15 minutes, low cloud blowing into the area meant the required photographic coverage of the launch could not be obtained. The forecaster expected improvement within thirty to forty-five minutes.[2] The count held for the cameras.[2] During that hold, one of the 115-volt, 400-cycle inverters supplying the launch vehicle stopped regulating properly.[2][3] Replacing it was a job of forty-five minutes to an hour; Shepard was asked, said he was fine, and the doctors agreed.[2] He spent the wait peering through the periscope.[3] The count was recycled to T-35 minutes.[2][3] How much time the inverter cost is one of the places where the sources part company: NASA's history says the hold lasted 52 minutes,[3] while the flight-plan paper and NASA's mission page say the count resumed 86 minutes after the recycle.[2][8] At T-15 minutes again, one of the two IBM 7090 computers at Goddard was found to be in error, requiring a complete recheck run.[3] The holds added up to two hours and thirty-four minutes,[2][3] and by lift-off Shepard had been in the spacecraft for more than four hours.[2][3]"},{"type":"quote","quote":{"text":"Why don't you fix your little problem and light this candle?","who":"Alan Shepard, waiting on the pad","after":24}},{"type":"para","text":"Somewhere in that wait Shepard is supposed to have said, \"Why don't you fix your little problem and light this candle?\" The line is not in the flight's voice transcript, which begins 2.3 seconds after lift-off,[1] and the Smithsonian's curator writes that he \"allegedly\" said it;[4] the Museum's anniversary piece prints a fuller version as its epigraph.[5] Lift-off came at 9:34 a.m. EST on 5 May 1961,[2][3][8] watched by about half a million people from the nearby beaches and by roughly 45 million on live television.[3][9]"},{"type":"head","text":"The flight"},{"type":"para","text":"The flight lasted 15 minutes 22 seconds by the transcript and the 1961 postlaunch papers.[1][2] NASA's mission page, and the flight-data table at the back of its official history, give 15 minutes 28 seconds and 303 miles downrange against the papers' 302;[3][8] the figures used here are the 1961 ones."},{"type":"para","text":"The acceleration had built gradually from 1 g to a maximum of 6.2 g at engine cutoff.[2] This was when Shepard experienced sustained weightlessness for the first time; it lasted for approximately five minutes.[2]"},{"type":"para","text":"Shepard had used the periscope's medium grey filter on the pad to cut the glare of intermittent bright sunlight, and had been meaning to remove it when he retracted the scope before launch. When he finally tried to remove the filter in flight, he reached for the filter knob, but the pressure gauge on his left wrist banged into the abort handle. He carefully pulled his hand away.[3] After that, the history says, he forgot about the filter and watched the world go by in grey.[3]"},{"type":"para","text":"Through the scope he distinguished the continental land mass from clouds clearly, calling out the west coast of Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Okeechobee, Andros Island and the Bahamas.[3] The transcript has him calling \"I can see Okeechobee. Identify Andros Island. Identify the Reefs.\"[1]"},{"type":"para","text":"He took manual control in pitch, then yaw, then roll, referencing the instruments first and then the periscope.[1][2] His verdict, in his own written flight report:"},{"type":"para","text":"\"The reaction of the spacecraft was very much like that obtained in the air-bearing trainer … The spacecraft movement was smooth and could be controlled precisely.\"[2]"},{"type":"para","text":"He held manual control through retrofire, and reported that the misalignment torques from the retros \"felt about the same as those used in the trainer.\"[2] He also handled a real problem: he noticed the pitch attitude was 20 to 25 degrees rather than the required 34, so he dropped the other manoeuvres, and worked the pitch alone until the retros fired.[3]"},{"type":"head","text":"Coming down"},{"type":"para","text":"On the way back in, the deceleration peaked at 11.0 g, about 83,000 feet up.[2] Shepard was supposed to call an altimeter reading between 80,000 and 90,000 feet and forgot, worrying instead about the drogue. He gave the Cape 30,000 feet, braced, and 9,000 feet later \"the drogue snapped out without a kick.\"[3] The antenna canister blew at 10,000 feet, pulling the main, which he watched reef and partially unfurl before spreading to its full 63 feet with a jolt \"considerably less violent than he had received in centrifuge simulated training.\"[3]"},{"type":"para","text":"The impact point predicted at engine cutoff was radioed to the carrier, letting the helicopters be dispatched about ten minutes before landing — they followed the spacecraft down to the water.[2] That prediction proved accurate to within about three miles,[2] which is one of the flight's quieter and more consequential results. When it hit the water, the capsule listed about 60 degrees, water over one porthole and yellow dye out the other, and righted itself in about a minute.[2][3] Inspection afterwards found no damage from the flight or the impact.[2] About two minutes after landing the helicopters had him on the radio.[2]"},{"type":"para","text":"The pickup was flown by a Marine helicopter of Marine Air Group 26, with 1st Lt Wayne Koons flying and Lt George Cox as copilot.[3] The procedure was to hook the recovery loop on top of the capsule and hold enough power to lift it until the side hatch cleared the water while the heat shield and landing bag stayed in the water — then the astronaut was to remove the hatch, sit on the frame, take the horse-collar sling and be hoisted.[2] It was carried out, in the flight-plan paper's words, \"without incident and proved to be a very good operation.\"[2]"},{"type":"head","text":"Conclusion"},{"type":"para","text":"NASA's own history concedes that, measured against Gagarin's, the flight was \"anticlimatic\" — its own spelling.[3] Fifteen minutes against 108.[3][5] A hop against an orbit."},{"type":"para","text":"What it had that Gagarin's did not was witnesses. The Smithsonian's curator makes the point: \"Shepard's flight was a triumph, not least because it had been conducted live on national television and in front of the world press. It was a notable contrast to the secretive ways of the Communist-led Soviet Union.\"[4] Kennedy said the same thing in the Rose Garden three days later — \"this open society of ours which risked much, gained much.\"[10]"},{"type":"para","text":"On 8 May 1961 Kennedy presented the NASA Distinguished Service Medal in the Rose Garden,[3][4] welcoming \"Commander Shepard and Mrs. Shepard,\" repeating Shepard's own point that \"this was a common effort in which a good many men were involved,\" and naming Gilruth, Williams, Dryden, Glenn and Webb.[10] A motorcade then took Shepard to the Capitol, past crowds that had lined Pennsylvania Avenue at short notice.[3][9]"},{"type":"para","text":"On 25 May 1961, twenty days after the flight, Kennedy told Congress[3] that \"now it is time to take longer strides,\" and committed the nation \"to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.\"[12]"},{"type":"head","text":"A note on the figures"},{"type":"para","text":"The 1961 postlaunch papers give 15 minutes 22 seconds,[1][2] 302 statute miles downrange, an apogee of 116.5 statute miles and 5,036 mph at cutoff.[2] NASA's mission page and the flight-data appendix of its official history give 15 minutes 28 seconds, 303 miles and 5,134 mph;[3][8] the Smithsonian's collection record gives 15 minutes 28 seconds, 302 miles and 5,180 mph, the last also the figure in the history's own narrative.[3][6] On entry the medical papers give a peak of 11.0 g where the history gives 11.6.[2][3] The Marshall report gives 6.3 g at cutoff for its nominal profile,[11] and the history 510 ft/s for the retrograde decrement and a countdown start of 8:30 in the evening of 4 May;[3] on those the article follows the 1961 papers. Where the sources differ, this article uses the 1961 papers and says so here."}],"gallery":[{"file":"/static/gallery/cea0c14dfc34331b.webp","url":"/static/gallery/cea0c14dfc34331b.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/cea0c14dfc34331b.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/cea0c14dfc34331b.webp","cap":"The Mercury Seven, selected in April 1959, in their pressure suits: Schirra, Slayton, Glenn and Carpenter in front; Shepard, Grissom and Cooper behind. Group portrait of 1962.","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"NASA image library · LRC-1989-B701_P-00361 (also GPN-2000-000651)","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/812c3afc37bae5cf.webp","url":"/static/gallery/812c3afc37bae5cf.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/812c3afc37bae5cf.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/812c3afc37bae5cf.webp","cap":"Alan B. Shepard Jr., pilot of Freedom 7, in his Mercury pressure suit, helmet in hand.","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"NASA image library · 8772553","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/7d85d97bd66a8e7b.webp","url":"/static/gallery/7d85d97bd66a8e7b.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/7d85d97bd66a8e7b.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/7d85d97bd66a8e7b.webp","cap":"A pressure-suit test in Hangar S at Cape Canaveral before the flight, 5 May 1961.","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"nasa.gov · a_shepard_suit_test","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/3f0f7979eb46b680.webp","url":"/static/gallery/3f0f7979eb46b680.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/3f0f7979eb46b680.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/3f0f7979eb46b680.webp","cap":"Suiting up for MR-3: a technician checks Shepard's suit on the morning of 5 May 1961.","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"NASA image library · 9248359","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/e6f6e1cd88a141a7.webp","url":"/static/gallery/e6f6e1cd88a141a7.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/e6f6e1cd88a141a7.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/e6f6e1cd88a141a7.webp","cap":"Shepard, suited and helmeted, is inserted into the Freedom 7 capsule atop the Redstone.","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"NASA image library · S61-03651","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/49aa2fde4f2d2e9d.webp","url":"/static/gallery/49aa2fde4f2d2e9d.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/49aa2fde4f2d2e9d.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/49aa2fde4f2d2e9d.webp","cap":"Lift-off from Pad 5, Cape Canaveral, 09:34 EST on 5 May 1961. The Redstone carried Freedom 7 to 187 km and 488 km downrange in a flight of 15 minutes.","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"NASA image library · 6414825","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/c602b5d0d5bcae09.webp","url":"/static/gallery/c602b5d0d5bcae09.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/c602b5d0d5bcae09.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/c602b5d0d5bcae09.webp","cap":"The Mercury-Redstone clears the launch stand, the gantry drawn back to the left.","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"NASA image library · 6100884","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/c8714ad78e6b632d.webp","url":"/static/gallery/c8714ad78e6b632d.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/c8714ad78e6b632d.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/c8714ad78e6b632d.webp","cap":"Recovery: a US Marine helicopter hoists Shepard from the capsule after splashdown in the Atlantic, 490 km from the Cape.","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"NASA image library · 9248461","show":true}],"id":"mercurymr3"},"Mercury-Redstone 4 (Liberty Bell 7)":{"name":"Mercury-Redstone 4 (Liberty Bell 7)","agency":"NASA","subtype":"Second Crewed Suborbital Flight","vehicle":"Redstone MRLV MR-8","site":"Cape Canaveral LC-5","destination":"Suborbital spaceflight","mass":"2835 lb","duration":"15 minutes","statusLabel":"Suborbital · capsule sank","launch":"1961-07-21","objectives":"To carry an American astronaut into suborbital spaceflight and prove the one-person Mercury spacecraft and its systems.","summary":"Gus Grissom's suborbital flight ended with the capsule's hatch blowing early and the craft sinking.","references":null,"refStyle":null,"hero":{"file":"/static/gallery/7e6b6db7e703c826.webp","url":"/static/gallery/7e6b6db7e703c826.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/7e6b6db7e703c826.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/7e6b6db7e703c826.webp","cap":"S64-10806 (21 July 1961) --- Astronaut Virgil I. (Gus) Grissom, pilot of the Mercury-Redstone 4 (MR-4) spaceflight, in his Mercury \"Liberty Bell 7\"…","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},"blocks":[{"type":"para","text":"[Article under construction]"}],"gallery":[{"file":"/static/gallery/7e6b6db7e703c826.webp","url":"/static/gallery/7e6b6db7e703c826.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/7e6b6db7e703c826.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/7e6b6db7e703c826.webp","cap":"S64-10806 (21 July 1961) --- Astronaut Virgil I. (Gus) Grissom, pilot of the Mercury-Redstone 4 (MR-4) spaceflight, in his Mercury \"Liberty Bell 7\"…","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/39b048863c5385d7.webp","url":"/static/gallery/39b048863c5385d7.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/39b048863c5385d7.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/39b048863c5385d7.webp","cap":"GRISSOM","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/1d1576c47c7caea8.webp","url":"/static/gallery/1d1576c47c7caea8.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/1d1576c47c7caea8.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/1d1576c47c7caea8.webp","cap":"Astronaut Grissom dons spacesuit for Mercury Redstone 4 mission","credit":"NASA Johnson Space Center","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/fa258263e41a3765.webp","url":"/static/gallery/fa258263e41a3765.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/fa258263e41a3765.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/fa258263e41a3765.webp","cap":"Gus Grissom in Personal Equipment Room of Hangar S","credit":"NASA","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/2e55c82d7dcd3630.webp","url":"/static/gallery/2e55c82d7dcd3630.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/2e55c82d7dcd3630.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/mid/2e55c82d7dcd3630.webp","cap":"Astronaut Grissom climbs into Liberty Bell 7 capsule to begin MR 4 mission","credit":"NASA Johnson Space Center","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true}],"id":"mercurymr4"},"Mercury-Atlas 6 (Friendship 7)":{"name":"Mercury-Atlas 6 (Friendship 7)","agency":"NASA","subtype":"First American to Orbit Earth","vehicle":"Atlas LV-3B 109-D","site":"Cape Canaveral LC-14","destination":"Low Earth orbit","mass":"2981 lb","duration":"4 hours, 55 minutes","statusLabel":"3 orbits","launch":"1962-02-20","objectives":["To carry an American astronaut into orbit and prove the one-person Mercury spacecraft and its systems."],"summary":"John Glenn orbited Earth three times, becoming the first American to circle the planet.","references":null,"refStyle":null,"hero":{"file":"/static/gallery/985172705bc6f464.webp","url":"/static/gallery/985172705bc6f464.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/985172705bc6f464.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/985172705bc6f464.webp","cap":"Original caption: CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. - Closeup of Astronaut John H. Glenn, Jr. in spacesuit prior to MA-6 launch.","credit":"U.S. Senate. Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences. (7/24/1958 - 2/11/197","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},"blocks":[{"type":"para","text":"[Article under construction]"}],"gallery":[{"file":"/static/gallery/954dcd1c98350695.webp","url":"/static/gallery/954dcd1c98350695.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/954dcd1c98350695.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/954dcd1c98350695.webp","cap":"S62-00966 (20 Feb. 1962) --- Astronaut John H. Glenn Jr. (center) eats breakfast the morning of the launch of his Mercury-Atlas 6 (MA-6)spacecraft.…","credit":"NASA Johnson Space Center","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":false},{"file":"/static/gallery/985172705bc6f464.webp","url":"/static/gallery/985172705bc6f464.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/985172705bc6f464.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/985172705bc6f464.webp","cap":"Original caption: CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. - Closeup of Astronaut John H. Glenn, Jr. in spacesuit prior to MA-6 launch.","credit":"U.S. Senate. Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences. (7/24/1958 - 2/11/197","license":"Public domain","source":"Wikimedia Commons","show":true},{"file":"/static/gallery/0e7f7b182d48736e.webp","url":"/static/gallery/0e7f7b182d48736e.webp","thumb":"/static/gallery/thumb/0e7f7b182d48736e.webp","mid":"/static/gallery/0e7f7b182d48736e.webp","cap":"S62-00955 (February 1962) --- This is a view of John H. Glenn Jr. ingressing the Mercury-Atlas 6 spacecraft. 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