Mercury missions

• 1961Freedom 7 (Mercury-Redstone 3)Alan Shepard’s 15-minute suborbital flight — the first American in space, three weeks after Gagarin.
• 1961Liberty Bell 7 (Mercury-Redstone 4)The second American suborbital flight — marred when the hatch blew on splashdown and Liberty Bell 7 sank to the ocean floor (recovered in 1999).
• 1962Friendship 7 (Mercury-Atlas 6)John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the Earth — three orbits in just under five hours aboard Friendship 7.
• 1962Aurora 7 (Mercury-Atlas 7)Scott Carpenter repeats Glenn’s three-orbit flight and runs the first science experiments in orbit — then overshoots his splashdown point by 400 km.
• 1962Sigma 7 (Mercury-Atlas 8)A disciplined six-orbit engineering flight by Wally Schirra, conserving fuel and proving the spacecraft for longer missions.
• 1963Faith 7 (Mercury-Atlas 9)The final Mercury mission: Gordon Cooper’s 22-orbit, day-and-a-half flight, ending with a hand-flown reentry after electrical failures.