Big Joe 1 |Big Joe 1| |Mission name||Big Joe 1| |Spacecraft
mass||1,159 kg| |Launch pad||Cape Canaveral LC-14| |Launch
date||2:19 a.m. EST September 9, 1959| |Landing||September 9,
1959| |Mission duration||13 min| |Number of orbits||suborbital|
|Apogee||95 mi (153 km)| |Distance traveled||1,424 mi (2,292
km)| Big Joe 1 (Atlas 10-D) launched an unmanned boilerplate
Mercury capsule from Cape Canaveral, Florida on September 9,
1959. The objective of the Big Joe program was to test the
Mercury spacecraft ablating heat shield. It was also the first
Project Mercury flight using an Atlas booster. The flight was
both a success and failure—the heat shield survived reentry and
was in remarkably good condition when retrieved from the
Atlantic Ocean. The Atlas-D booster, however, failed to stage
and separated too late from the Mercury capsule. Due to the
added weight of the unseparated booster engines, the sustainer
engine depleted its fuel supply 14 seconds early. The
boilerplate capsule was not equipped with a launch e