A Mercury-Redstone launch vehicle awaits test-firing in the Redstone Test Stand at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama in this photo from the late 1950s.
A Mercury-Redstone launch vehicle awaits test-firing in the Redstone Test Stand at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, in this photo from the late 1950s. Between 1953 and 1960, the rocket team at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville performed hundreds of test firings on the Redstone rocket – over 200 on the Mercury-Redstone vehicle configuration alone.
Through Project Mercury, the United States’ first human-in-space program, Mercury-Redstone provided NASA with an opportunity to understand performance aspects of the Mercury spacecraft, the effect of a weightless environment on astronauts, and launch and recovery operations at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Image Credit: NASA