[amsat-bb] Friendship 7 details?

[Robert Bruninga]

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.