Today is the 50th anniversary of Alan Shepard's 15 minute suborbital Mercury flight, which initiated the U.S. manned space program. According to the NASA press kit for the MR-3 launch, the combined height of the launch vehicle and spacecraft was 83 feet, with a liftoff weight of about 66,000 pounds.
Compare this to the lift-off of the space shuttle Atlantis on the nearly 12 day
STS-132 mission. The
NASA press kit for STS-132 lists combined weight of the shuttle system at launch as 4,519,769 pounds, with a height of 184 feet.
Mercury Redstone 3 and Atlantis are perhaps the bookends for the NASA manned spaced program;
the last flight of Atlantis (STS-135) may well be the last time U.S. astronauts fly aboard spacecraft designed and built by NASA.
