After seeing the great movie “hidden figures” last night, I had lots of questions from my faded memory of the time (it was the same year I got my ham license and was 14 years old). This Wiki page has a lot… but the questions lingering in my mind were:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mercury
1) Was his mission planned at 3 orbits? (I thought it was more and then cut to three).
2) If #1, then they must have had to have recovery ships at a different spot for every potential orbit since he could not maneuver anything other than when to fire the retros. If it was 7 cut to three, then I guess they only needed two ship areas…
3) What frequency was CAPCOM? Was it the 108 MHz? I think the tracking stations all relayed the voice via HF?
4) Also related to #1, if something happened to the pilot, I assume ground control could fire the retros.