Full coverage of the design, engineering, development and flight
operations of NASA's Mercury spacecraft, which in addition to several
unmanned tests supported two piloted ballistic sub-orbital flights in
1961 and four piloted orbital flights between 1962 and 1963.The Mercury
programme bridged the gap between the hypersonic X-15 and the two-man
Gemini spacecraft, which in turn led to the Apollo spacecraft. MERCURY -
AMERICA'S FIRST PILOTED SPACECRAFT 1958-1963 completes the Haynes
Workshop manual series of US and Russian piloted space vehicles and
serves as a precursor to a possible Hynes Workshop Manual on the NASA
Orion deep-space exploration vehicle scheduled to fly in 2018 on the
Space Launch System, the world's biggest rocket.The emphasis in the book
will on describing the design, engineering and technology of the Mercury
spacecraft rather than on the missions, which are comprehensively
covered in several previously published books. In this way the Workshop
Manual brand line is maintained as a reference to the way machines are
built and operated.