Missiles and Rockets, January 2 1961

Weekly missile/space trade magazine; the cover shows a Marine helicopter delivering the just-recovered MR-1 Mercury capsule to the carrier USS Valley Forge, alongside cover lines on Kennedy’s incoming space policy review and the issue’s “M/R Astrolog” status report.

The lead feature, Jay Holmes’s “Chimp to Go in Next Flight Test of Mercury,” reports that a chimpanzee — not yet a man — would fly the next Mercury-Redstone ballistic shot (MR-2), with a manned flight (MR-3) still projected for as early as March but more realistically expected by mid-April 1961; it recaps the successful December 19, 1960 MR-1 flight (135-mile altitude, 235-mile range) and quotes NASA operations chief Walter C. Williams on the program’s early troubles, the four production capsules then at the Cape, and lingering doubts about Atlas reliability following the July 1960 MA-1 failure.

In the event, the chimpanzee flight became Ham’s MR-2 mission of January 31, 1961.

The issue’s “M/R Astrolog” supplement, a running status report on U.S. missile and space programs, opens with a Satellites and Spacecraft table covering Advent, Anna, Aeros, Apollo, Arents, Asp, Bambi, Courier, Csar, Discoverer, Dyna-Soar I, and Echo — including Apollo’s earliest published capsule description, a three-man spacecraft “probably winged for lunar flights” then still in six-month contractor studies.