Mercury-Redstone 2

Mercury-Redstone 2 was an American space mission, launched at 16:55 UTC on January 31, 1961 from LC-5 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Mercury spacecraft No. 5 carried Ham the Chimp as a passenger on a suborbital space flight launched on MRLV-2. MR-2 was the first launch in the Mercury-Redstone program, part of Project Mercury, the United States' first manned spaceflight program. The previous Mercury-Redstone mission, MR-1A, flew a trajectory that was too steep with accelerations too high for a human passenger. MR-1A had climbed to its programmed apogee of about 130 miles and landed 235 miles ... downrange. Mercury-Redstone 2 would follow a more flattened trajectory. Its planned flight path was an apogee of 115 miles and a range of 290 miles . Spacecraft No. 5 contained six new systems that had not been on previous flights: environmental control system, attitude stabilization control system, live retrorockets, voice communications system, "closed loop" abort sensing system, and a pneumatic landing bag.
more