Preparing for launch

On Tuesday, 21 February 1961, NASA finally released the names of John Glenn, Gus Grissom and Alan Shepard as having been selected as the prime candidates to enter the special training required for the final stages of preparedness for the first suborbital Mercury mission.

At the same time that the three names were announced, Gus Grissom was on duty at the NASA tracking station in southernmost Bermuda, where he was sitting at a control console during the unmanned Mercury-Atlas (MA-2) suborbital space shot, the main purpose of which was a particularly rugged reentry test of the capsule’s heat shield. The tracking station was on Cooper’s Island, a 77-acre rock-and-coral shelf in the Atlantic, some 600 miles from the United States.

The MA-2 flight was launched that day from Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral and flew a suborbital mission lasting 17 minutes and 56 seconds. Atlas rocket 67D carried Spacecraft No. 6 to an altitude of 114 statute miles at a speed of 13,227 miles an hour. All the test objectives of the flight were achieved, and the capsule was recovered 1,432 miles downrange.