Talk:Mercury-Redstone 3

message: An anonymous user first moved this (Freedom 7) here from Mercury 3; I only re-moved it such that the edit history would be preserved. Where should it be at? -- Grunt 🇪🇺 21:29, 2004 Sep 24 (UTC)
:Should be at Mercury 3, with Freedom 7 as a redirect to Mercury 3.  Also, redirects should be made for all the call signs to point to their respective Mercury missions. CryptoDerk 21:31, Sep 24, 2004 (UTC)
:Mercury 3. The article encompasses the whole mission, not just the spacecraft. Deleted revision history shows that Freedom 7 was previously a redirect to Mercury 3. -- Cyrius|✎ 21:36, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: ARRGH. The anon's copy/paste moving the others as well! I'm reverting the other copy/paste moves until this is settled. -- Cyrius|✎ 21:38, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: I have proposed that all Mercury missions are re-named. This will affect this page. So they can be discussed together on one page, I've set up a subpage of my user talk page for discussion of the moves. --GW_Simulations|User Page | Talk | Contribs | E-mail 20:35, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed Move 

message: According to one NASA website, the flight lasted 15 minutes, 28 seconds: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mercury/missions/freedom7.html
But, according to several other NASA sources, it lasted 15 minutes, 22 seconds: 
*http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4201/ch11-1.htm
*http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=MERCR3
*http://www-lib.ksc.nasa.gov/lib/archives/Mercury/MR3.PDF
*http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19640052551_1964052551.pdf
There's a bit of discrepancy, then. But, those last two are primary documents written at the time, and on the whole I think the balance is for 15 min 22 seconds. I'm changing the duration (and hence landing time) to 15:22 for now.
Also, as for the touchdown location, the article gives 27°23′0″N, 75°88′00″W currently. However, four of the five sources cited above give 27°13.7'N, 75°53'W. Source #2 just doesn't say anything. So, I'll change that, too.
ADDENDUM: I think I know how the coordinates were entered wrong. 27°13.7' = 27.23°, and likewise for the longitude. Someone took the decimal notation and converted it non-mathematically into DMS.
Munion (talk) 04:06, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi, I agree and fixed accordingly --Golan's mom (talk) 10:50, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mission Duration and Landing Point 

message: There's a decent article in a contemporary journal here; aside from its usefulness in citing this article it makes the claim that Shepard introduced the phrase "A-OK" to the public during this flight. jhf (talk) 16:57, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't believe the part about Shepard saying "A-OK" is correct. FWIW, I recall hearing on a recorded documentary (TIME-LIFE records, Man on the Moon, 1969, unfortunately probably a collectible today) that Gen. "Shorty" Powers, "voice of Mercury Control", was responsible for "A-OK" and that Shepard himself never said it. JustinTime55 (talk) 15:53, 15 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another source 

message: The movie "The Right Stuff" depicts Shepard having to urinate in his spacesuit due to the launch being delayed - as do many other non-authoratitive sources.  This incident is not described in the official NASA report, so I can see why we don't mention it here at the moment.  However, in this video, Shepard himself describes it; is this a sufficiently Reliable Source for us to add it to the article? Tevildo (talk) 20:07, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not in This New Ocean, either; I believe it was something that was generally kept quiet about until later. It certainly happened, I believe - though I'm not sure how accurate Wolfe's claim of it messing up the telemetry was - but it might be best to see if one of the more recent history books mentions it, rather than the slightly hacky approach of citing a video. Shimgray | talk | 20:30, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: It's explicitly mentioned in DeGroot's Dark side of the moon, which seems a reliable enough source. I'll footnote it accordingly. Shimgray | talk | 19:20, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Urination? 

message: A hasty reworking for the fiftieth anniversary...
Things to do:
* Add a background section briefly outlining the troubled and delayed history of Project Mercury, why suborbital and not orbital, and the political effects of Gagarin's flight
* Incorporate some of Shepard's comments (from the flight transcript or from interviews) into the main description
* Add a post-flight analysis - technical aspects, medical results, political aspects (including the 25 May moon speech), and notes about how this led on to subsequent missions
There's currently a large table showing the exact timeline of the mission - I'm not sure we need this, but I'm in two minds about it - it may as well stay for the time being, at least. Shimgray | talk | 01:06, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  To do list 

message: Here's a large chunk of text from near the end of the article. commented-out for months if not years.  I assume it is awaiting references...72.244.204.108 (talk) 08:29, 15 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chunk of unreferenced text  

message: This article is in many ways, a mess. The biggest issue is the fact that it relies on one source primarily, the NASA publication This New Ocean : A History of Project Mercury. Really, folks haven't bothered to look at contemporary newspapers like the The New York Times, The Montreal Gazette, or other newspaper that can be accessed online? I can think of at least twenty books that would be authoritative and could describe these events. I would deal with this, but I'm too involved in other articles to deal with this. But come on, this is one of the most reported and written about American space missions in the 1960s, there's lots of source to make this a well written article. I'm demoting it to start due to its reliance on essentially one source.--Abebenjoe (talk) 03:17, 6 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I originally thought that relying on the "official" NASA history This New Ocean, as opposed to newspapers whose reporting of technical matters can be of questionable accuracy, would be a good thing, but now having read it all the way through, I've had to sadly abandon that belief. This New Ocean is presumably fine when it comes to describing the organizational and social matters around Project Mercury, it does go into some neglected technical aspects, and it generally gets the basic story of each mission correct, but I've found too many examples where it has screwed up details. Mercury-Redstone 3 is one of those—there are specific details of this mission cited in This New Ocean which are simply incorrect. It needs to be verified against other, more reliable sources, like the papers in the official "results" conference and the "postlaunch report", and ignored when it comes in conflict with those. --Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 23:20, 31 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  One Source, needs more sources 

message: I've not edited a Wikipedia page before, so I wanted to bring this up on the talk page before doing anything else.  I recently purchased the Right Stuff on Blu Ray and the bonus disc includes interviews with Mercury astronauts.  I'll have to go back to it for specifics, but I believe it was Wally Schirra who said that the 7 in the name Freedom 7 came from the fact that it was the seventh Mercury spacecraft built and had nothing to do with the seven Mercury astronauts.  How reliable a source are we going to consider Wally Schirra on this subject and what's the best way to go about adding this information (how to cite, etc)?  Hmmcnally (talk) 04:23, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spacecraft name 

message: http://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/browse/2014/something-simple-and-striking/
©Geni (talk) 17:33, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Source for part of its life as a museum exhibit

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The infobox says, 
 Launch mass	4,040 pounds (1,830 kg)
 Landing mass	2,316 pounds (1,051 kg)
But, that doesn't jive with what we say at Space capsule#Mercury: .  In any case, what accounts for the 1700 lbs lost between launch and spashdown?  You ditch the escape tower, the retro pack, and the descent parachutes.  You use up a little bit of propellent for attitude control.  It doesn't seem plausible that adds up to 43% of the original mass.  -- RoySmith (talk) 00:21, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Comment Unfortunately, it looks like someone damaged the Space capsule page by removing the source documents, therefore we can't verify where the 3,000 pounds number came from. Also, bear in mind also that there were two different versions of the capsule (suborbital and orbital). Also, Mercury-Atlas 9, the 3,000-pound capsule, carried a day's worth of added "equipment" and consumables. JustinTime55 (talk) 14:40, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

text: Though the infobox doesn't say so (it definitely should), that launch mass does include the escape tower. The tower with its rocket was quite heavy, since it had to be strong enough to bear the escape rocket's full pull of 58,500 pounds of force. The Postlaunch Report for MR-3 confirms the launch mass was 4040 pounds and the landing mass was 2316 pounds. That report says the "orbit" mass (mass after separation from the booster) was 2855 pounds, giving 1185 pounds for the escape tower, and that re-entry mass was 2579 pounds, giving 276 pounds for the retro pack and 263 pounds for the antenna fairing, its attached hardware (like the horizon scanners), and perhaps the parachutes. This all seems reasonable to me. --Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 22:18, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spacecraft mass?