Project Mercury – Capsule #13

The first human spaceflight program for the United States was Project Mercury, running from 1958 through 1963.   Trying to keep up with the Soviets in the Space Race, the goal was to put a man into Earth orbit and return him safely.  John H. Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth in Mercury capsule #13 built for NASA by the McDonnell Aircraft Company and boosted into space by an Atlas rocket on February 20, 1962.  The NASA designation for this mission was MA-6.

I made the 1/12 scale model you see here starting with a plastic kit made by Atomic City.  I used the outer shell and most exterior parts from the kit but fabricated all of the support equipment, the astronaut, all the interior structures, and the wiring.  To get the detail level I wanted, I generated a 3D CAD model for each item such as the switches and lights on the control panel.  I made resin prints, painted each part separately and assembled it all.  This added up to several hundred parts and many months of work.  I also made the artwork for gauges, readouts, and equipment labels then printed them to decals or vinyl stickers at very high resolution.  I designed a microcomputer controlled lighting system with programmable color and brightness of 21 individual LEDs.

The model scene is a fanciful ground test of capsule #13 on the production floor at McDonnell Aircraft Company with John Glenn suited up ready for some simulation testing.   This never really happened this way but it does give you a chance to see more of the details inside and the scale of the capsule.  It was a very cramped space especially for a person in a spacesuit.  The astronauts often said that with this capsule, “you don’t get into it, you wear it.”  Although I used many of the excellent recommended NASA documents and pictures to make my model I must give a disclaimer.  Some of the mission specific interior information is hard to get to and very difficult to scale.  While much of this model is reasonably accurate, some of it is not.  I did what many other model makers have done, you go with what you know and you guess at the rest.

 I feel very fortunate to have been around to watch the real-life drama of these initial explorations of space.  I salute all the men and women that worked so hard to make it happen and thank them for their accomplishments.

The control panel

The capsule outside

The astronaut

The escape tower

The internal build