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The principle always applies: the larger a mass that is to be moved, the more energy has to be expended.
When the available power is established, the equation is: the more payload you want to move, the shorter the range will be.
Middle school level physics.
Nasa, the civil US space agency founded in 1958, also had to submit to it.
At the end of the 1950s, their rockets were all primarily military developments - designed to bring more or less large nuclear weapons more or less far to their target.
It was no different than in the Soviet Union.
The Redstone (here on May 5, 1961) was a modified launch vehicle for nuclear weapons
Source: Getty Images
The first reasonably operational rocket in the USA, the Redstone, had, together with three additional, small stages, enough power to shoot an object into orbit - but only with a maximum mass of 25 kilograms.
This configuration, called "Juno I", brought the first US satellite into space on February 1, 1958: "Explorer 1".
Four months after the Soviet Union had successfully launched the “Sputnik 1”, which weighed more than three times as much.
A respectable success, nothing more.
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However, because three years later, in early 1961, NASA still did not have a sufficiently tested rocket available, the Redstone had to suffice for the first manned space mission of the USA after the first (near) orbit of the Earth with the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.
But its performance set tight limits to its goals: The Redstone could bring a load of a good three tons to a height of 90 kilometers, which, with a ballistic trajectory as is usual for nuclear weapons, led to a range of almost 300 kilometers.
A Mercury capsule under construction.
You can see the three brake rockets and the heat shield
Source: Nasa / Public Domain
A capsule called "Mercury" was developed for the first manned flight into space by an American.
A cone ending in a cylinder with a diameter of 1.89 meters and a length of 3.30 meters.
The pure capsule weighed just under 1,400 kilograms when fully equipped, including the 4.61-long rescue rocket on the cylinder 1950 kilograms.
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A Redstone in series configuration could bring a payload of two tons to an altitude of around 135 kilometers.
But the launch vehicle had been modified for the premiere, with a 1.80 meter longer tank that contained more fuel for a longer burn time, and the most modern variant of the Rocketdyne engine.
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In spite of this, the construction now called “Redstone-Mercury” remained basically a medium-range nuclear missile - and that is exactly what it was used for on May 5, 1961, but instead of a nuclear weapon with a human payload.
There had been four unmanned launches before.
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But the first one failed on November 21, 1960: The engine fired, but the rocket rose just ten centimeters from the launch platform in the US space center Cape Canaveral in Florida.
Then the thrust failed and the Redstone sagged.
After all, there was something good about this failure: the rescue rocket on the capsule recognized the failure, detonated and shot the unmanned Mercury spacecraft to safety.
It landed on a parachute undamaged and could be reused.
This half-failed, half-successful test went down in the annals of NASA as a “four-inch flight”.
Three weeks later, the same capsule was launched at the tip of another redstone as planned, and this time everything went smoothly: after 15 minutes and 45 seconds of flight at an altitude of 210 kilometers and over a distance of 375 kilometers, the capsule watered in the Atlantic, about 32 Kilometers beyond the planned location.
Helicopters of the aircraft carrier USS "Valley Forge" recovered them about 20 minutes later.
Shepard's predecessor on board Mercury was "Ham", a chimpanzee (here after his flight)
Source: Marka / Universal Images Group via
The next test flight took place on January 31, 1961, and this time there was a living passenger in the Mercury capsule: the four-year-old chimpanzee "Ham" flew 16 minutes and 39 seconds, reached an altitude of 150 miles and a range of 679 kilometers.
Instead of the planned five minutes, he was weightless for more than six and a half minutes, but apparently had fun.
What was less funny was that the internal pressure of the cabin dropped rapidly during the flight - had "Ham" not been wearing a tight spacesuit, he would have died.
In addition, the exposure of the male monkey was significantly higher than expected.
Would a person stand it?
Alan Shepard making final preparations for his flight
Source: picture alliance / © Bruce Cole
Another test was put in using a modified redstone on March 24, 1961. But before that, Alan Shepard, a 37-year-old Navy test pilot, had already learned that he would be the first American in space. Planned start: May 2, 1961. But the Soviet Union was faster: On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin took off into space as the first person, completed an almost complete orbit around the earth to the east and landed a safe 1200 kilometers west of his launch site.
This success put the USA under pressure to act.
All the more so as the start had to be postponed from 2nd to 4th and then to 5th May 1961 due to bad weather.
Unlike Gagarin's flight, which had been kept secret until after the successful start, millions of people fevered with Shepard.
But there were delays, and the test pilot was strapped in his capsule on the Redstone for more than four hours.
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Since the mission itself was only supposed to last a maximum of 20 minutes and the preparation time was actually 125 minutes, Shepard did not have a urine bag in his spacesuit.
Since it was impossible to get out of the car without interrupting the countdown, he wiped his pants before the start.
The start of the Redstone with Alan Shepard on board
Source: AFP via Getty Images
The more than 45 million Americans who watched the live images from Cape Canaveral that Friday morning did not find out, of course.
At 9:34 a.m. local time, the engine finally started and the first American flight into space began.
It was accelerated up to 8,300 kilometers per hour and had to endure a load of up to 6.3 g - not too much of a challenge for him as a test pilot.
Two minutes and 22 seconds after take-off, the Redstone burned out, the Mercury capsule (which Shepard had given the name "Freedom 7") was automatically separated from the rocket, which fell back to Earth.
Now the pilot Shepard took over the steering himself, more precisely: the correction of the automatic steering.
He tried out how the capsule responded to his commands given via an electrical control.
In contrast to his Soviet predecessor Yuri Gagarin, Alan Shepard was not just human cargo in a space capsule, but was able to direct it himself to a limited extent.
However, the trajectory that the NASA control center had given him corresponded to a ballistic curve - in other words: the trajectory of a missile-based nuclear weapon.
That is why his mission was nearing its end.
When she re-entered the earth's atmosphere, Shepard was exposed to extreme loads of up to 11.6 g - for anyone other than a highly trained test pilot that would have been fatal.
It was only at this point that he gave the manual (corrective) control back to the autopilot.
Alan Shepard a few minutes after landing near the Bahamas
Source: picture alliance / Everett Colle
The auxiliary parachute opened at an altitude of 6,400 meters and the main parachute at 3,000 meters.
Shepard described hitting the water as similar to landing on an aircraft carrier - he'd done hundreds of them.
Within two minutes of the splashdown, a helicopter from the aircraft carrier USS "Lake Champlain" was over the capsule, and another nine minutes later Shepard had the usual deck of a US warship under her feet.
His flight had taken him to a maximum altitude of 187.5 kilometers and a distance of 486 kilometers - but it had not been a circumnavigation of the earth as Gagarin had done three weeks earlier.
The Redstone's performance was simply not enough for that.
Incidentally, Shepard only reported to the public about the mishap shortly before the start decades later.
But since May 5, 1961, every astronaut has always used a urine bag at take-off.
As far as is known, Shepard's problem with the wet pants has therefore not been repeated.
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