Its aim was to accomplish Project Mercury, the first U.S. The group was founded on 5 November 1958, a little more than a month after NASA opened for business. The STG that heard McDonnell's presentation shared some traits with the proposed One-Man Space Station: it was small and meant to be temporary. It was meant to be used for 14 days by the single astronaut launched with it in the Mercury spacecraft, then permanently abandoned after the astronaut separated from it in the Mercury and returned to Earth. One might be excused for calling the station a Mission Module for expanding Mercury spacecraft capabilities rather than a bona fide space station. The Agena B would have completed orbit insertion and retained enough propellants to maneuver itself, the station, and the attached Mercury in orbit. The Mercury/station/Agena B combination would have lifted off from Earth atop an Atlas D rocket similar to that tapped to launch standard Mercury orbital missions. The station, a pressurized 10-foot-long, six-foot-wide cylinder with dome ends, was meant to be launched with a Mercury and an Agena B restartable upper stage into a 150-nautical-mile-high Earth orbit inclined 30° relative to the equator. Probably the record for the smallest space station design ever proposed belongs to the One-Man Space Station that McDonnell Aircraft, makers of the Mercury spacecraft, presented on 24 August 1960 to the Space Task Group (STG) at NASA's Langley Research Center (LaRC) in Hampton, Virginia. Please feel free to suggest possible posts I can't guarantee that I'll write them immediately, but at least they'll shape my thinking about the direction this blog takes. Please note: This post is based on a reader comment on my last post.
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