Little Joe (rocket)
Little Joe 1 launch vehicle with Mercury capsule, August 1959
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|
| Function | Unmanned capsule testing |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | North American Aviation |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Size | |
| Height | 55 ft |
| Stages | 2 |
| Capacity | |
| Payload to LEO | N/A |
| Payload to suborbital |
1,400 kg (3,000 lb) |
| Launch history | |
| Status | concluded |
| Launch sites | Wallops Island, Virginia |
| Total launches | 8 |
| Successes | 6 |
| Failures | 2 |
| Boosters - Booster | |
| No. boosters | 4 |
| Engines | Recruit rockets |
| Thrust | (167 kN) × 4 = (668 kN) |
| Burn time | 1.53 sec |
| Fuel | solid |
| First stage - Sustainer | |
| Engines | Castor |
| Thrust | (259 kN) × 4 = (1,036 kN) |
| Burn time | 37 sec |
| Fuel | Solid |
Little Joe was an unmanned United States solid-fueled booster rocket used for eight launches from 1959–1960 from Wallops Island, Virginia to test the launch escape system and heat shield for Project Mercury capsules, as well as the name given to the test program using the booster. The first rocket designed solely for manned spacecraft qualifications, Little Joe was also one of the pioneer operational launch vehicles using the rocket cluster principle.
The Little Joe name has been attributed to Maxime Faget at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. He based the name on four large fins which reminded him of a slang term for a roll of four in craps.
A successor, Little Joe II, was used for flight testing of the Apollo launch escape system from 1963–1966.
When NASA needed a booster for the Mercury manned space program, the agency found that the Atlas rockets would cost approximately $2.5 million each and that even the Redstone would cost about $1 million per launch. The managers of the Mercury program recognized that the numerous early test flights would have to be accomplished by a far less expensive booster system. As it turned out, the Little Joe rocket NASA designed cost about $200,000 each.
In January 1958, Max Faget and Paul Purser had worked out in considerable detail on paper how to cluster four of the solid-fuel Sergeant rockets, in standard use at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, to boost a manned nose cone above the stratosphere. Faget's short-lived "High Ride" proposal had suffered from comparisons with "Project Adam" at that time, but in August 1958 William Bland and Ronald Kolenkiewicz had returned to their preliminary designs for a cheap cluster of solid rockets to boost full-scale and full-weight model capsules above the atmosphere. As drop tests of boilerplate capsules provided new aerodynamic data on the dynamic stability of the configuration in free-fall, the need for comparable data on the powered phase quickly became apparent. So in October 1958, a NASA team prepared new engineering layouts and estimates for the mechanical design of the booster structure and a suitable launcher.
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