Everything you never knew you wanted to know about the Mercury Project
BJ-1
From RixWiki
Description of Mission
From SP-45 Mercury project summary
Spacecraft checkout for the launch of Big Joe 1 was accomplished at the Cape Canaveral launch site starting in June of 1959. The primary purpose of the flight was to investigate the performance of the ablation heat shield during reentry, as well as to investigate spacecraft reentry dynamics with an instrumented boilerplate spacecraft. Other items that were planned for investigation on this flight were afterbody heating for both the exit and reentry phases of flight, drogue and main parachute deployment, dynamics of the spacecraft system with an automatic control system in operation, flight loads, and water-landing loads. Recovery aids, such as SOFAR bombs, radio beacons, flashing light, and dye markers, had been incorporated. This spacecraft was not equipped with an escape system. The mission was accomplished on September 9, 1959. Because of the failure of the Atlas booster engines to separate, the planned trajectory was not followed exactly, but the conditions which were achieved provided a satisfactory fulfillment of the test objectives. The landing point of the spacecraft was about 1,300 nautical miles from the lift-off point, which was about 500 nautical miles short of the intended landing point. Even so, the recovery team retrieved the spacecraft about 7 hours after landing.
Data from instrumentation and results of inspection of the spacecraft showed that the heat protection method planned for the production spacecraft was satisfactory for a normal reentry from the planned orbit. On the basis of these results, the backup Big Joe mission was cancelled.
