NASA Mercury - 1956 to 1963 (all models): An insight into the design and engineering of Project Mercury - America's first manned space programme

Haynes Owners' Workshop Manual

by Boojkdl ajdp

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.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction

208 pages, Hardcover

Published June 15, 2017

Reviews

[Mark Merritt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the format of these books. Lots of detail and pictures plus drawings of the men and systems that the book is about.

This book, while detailed, and had many pictures and engineering drawings, left me kind of cold. The extreme detail of every subsystem in the spacecraft seemed like pubs I read when I was in the Navy. They are very detailed, but that’s because back in the day, I had to work and fix that stuff.

But it’s a great reference book and is certainly one of the few that cover Mercury anywhere.

Reading it from cover to cover isn’t something I need to do…

[Tim62 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard going at times, it is very technical. If you want to be able to re-wire a Mercury capsule in your sleep this is for you. David Baker has written better manuals in this series. But there are nuggets to be gained from it, hence the three stars.

[Denis Viau · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the best of the series in this genre. A lot of the writing in the drawings is unreadable because the font is too small. Also, not enough story and too technical.