Mercury
Four flights in order, on their real dates. All four are in the game now.
- How long
- About ten minutes a mission.
- You need
- Nothing · A keyboard if you fly it
- Messy
- No.
Step 1. Tune in: find the beep
Find the signal in the static and hold it ten seconds. The beep comes back every 96 minutes because the ball is falling around the Earth and missing. That is what an orbit is.
Sputnik 1: 83.6 kg, a 58 cm polished sphere, launched October 4, 1957.
The first time you fly each mission, the board reads the news the calendar has reached, before you fly and that evening. The front page plays it again. Every bulletin is a re-creation we wrote from the record. AI voices read them: the American desk on an old radio sound, the Moscow desk on a shortwave sound we made. None is a real broadcast. NASA and the Smithsonian made none of it.
Source: NASA History, Siddiqi essay, October 4, 1957. The period is 96.17 minutes, printed as 96.
Step 2. Lift: off the pad and over
Thrust has to beat weight or nothing moves. The Mast makes 337 kN against 275 kN of weight, a ratio of 1.23 (game). A kilonewton is about 225 pounds of push.
The Saturn V's was 7.6 million pounds of thrust over 6.2 million pounds of weight.
On November 21, 1960, the first Mercury-Redstone rose a few inches and shut down on the pad. It flew clean four weeks later, December 19. So will you.
Sources: NASA Glenn, Thrust to Weight Ratio; NASA, What Was the Saturn V; NASA Marshall, Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle, November 21, 1960. The Mast's numbers are the game's. 225 pounds is 224.8 rounded (NIST SP 811).
Step 3. Up and down: Shepard
Up is not around. About 2,200 meters per second (game) is under a third of orbit speed, so the Acorn comes down a few hundred kilometers away. Your own arc's numbers are on the chart.
Alan Shepard flew this arc on May 5, 1961: 116.5 miles up, 302 miles down the range, 15 minutes 22 seconds, 11 g.
Source: NASA History, May 5, 1961: Alan Shepard Becomes the First American in Space; NASA SP-4001, Project Mercury: A Chronology, May 5, 1961.
Step 4. Around: three laps, then the way home
In the game now: a booster drop, three laps, a warning light to answer, three retros and the way home.
Orbit is not high, it is fast: 7,797 meters per second at 185 kilometers, one lap every 88 minutes. Check it: 2 pi x 6,556 km / 7.797 km/s = 5,283 seconds.
John Glenn flew three laps on February 20, 1962, in 4 hours 55 minutes.
Sources: arithmetic from the Earth's constants with the formulas of NASA Glenn, Flight to Orbit (October 17, 2026); NASA mission page Mercury-Atlas 6, February 20, 1962.
That is the end of this one
The word for what you just did is orbit.
Falling around the Earth and missing. Orbit is not high, it is fast: at 185 kilometers it takes 7,797 meters per second, and the lap comes back every 88 minutes.
Where to go now