Mercury-Atlas 5

Mercury-Atlas 5 was an American unmanned spaceflight of the Mercury program. It was launched on November 29, 1961 with Enos the Chimp, a chimpanzee, aboard. The craft orbited the Earth twice and splashed down about 200 miles south of Bermuda. By November 1961, the Soviets had launched Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov into orbit during the Vostok 1 and Vostok 2 manned orbital flights. At that time NASA was still debating placing a chimpanzee in orbit as part of the Mercury-Atlas subprogram, with NASA headquarters questioning the wisdom of the Manned Spacecraft Center launching another unmanned... Mercury mission. The NASA Public Affairs Office issued a press release stating "The men in charge of Project Mercury have insisted on orbiting the chimpanzee as a necessary preliminary checkout of the entire Mercury program before risking a human astronaut." prior to the flight. The flight used Mercury spacecraft # 9 and Atlas # 93-D. On February 24, 1961 spacecraft # 9 arrived at Cape Canaveral. It took forty weeks of preflight preparation. This was the longest preparation time in the Mercury program. The mission of spacecraft # 9 kept changing.
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