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Mercury-Atlas 10 (MA-10) was a cancelled early manned space mission, which would have been the last flight in NASA's Mercury program. It was planned as a three-day extended mission, to launch in late 1963; the spacecraft, ''Freedom 7-II'', would have been flown by Alan Shepard, a veteran of the suborbital Mercury-Redstone 3 mission in 1961. However, it was cancelled after the success of the one-day Mercury-Atlas 9 mission in May 1963, to allow NASA to focus its efforts on the more advanced two-man Gemini program. ==Planning== Scheduling for the MA-10 mission began as early as mid-1961, before a single orbital flight had been flown. It was planned as a one-day orbital mission, using Spacecraft #15.〔Grimwood, p. 146〕 The - by now heavily modified - spacecraft #15A was delivered to Cape Canaveral on 16 November 1962,〔Grimwood, p. 177〕 renumbered #15B in January 1963, and prepared for use as a backup spacecraft for MA-9;〔Grimwood, p. 180〕 by this stage, NASA was noncomittal about whether or not a fifth orbital flight would be flown.〔Grimwood, p. 181〕 Shortly after the Mercury-Atlas 8 flight in October 1962, some commentators speculated on the possibility of MA-10 being flown as a "dual mission". In this approach, MA-10 and a new MA-11 flight, the latter using the MA-10 backup capsule, would be launched in close proximity, and fly a loosely co-ordinated mission, similar to the Soviet Vostok 3 and Vostok 4. While in late 1962 the MA-10 mission had still been planned as a nominal one-day flight,〔''Mercury spacecraft no. 15A configuration specification'', p. 1〕 as of early 1963, the tentative plan for the MA-10 mission anticipated it being around three days long.〔''This new ocean'', p. 492〕 The mission was to be flown by Alan Shepard, the backup pilot for MA-9, then in preparation, and previously the pilot of the Mercury-Redstone 3 suborbital mission in 1961. In a nod to his earlier spacecraft, Shepard named #15B "Freedom 7-II". The mission would have carried a re-entry communications experiment, which involved injecting water into the plasma sheath surrounding the spacecraft on reentry, in the hope that it would disrupt the sheath enough to allow radio communications; this was later flown on Gemini 3.〔''On the shoulders of titans'', p. 231〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Mercury-Atlas 10」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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