Mercury-Little-Joe 5A

Little Joe 5A (LJ-5A) was an unmanned test flight as part of the Mercury program testing the rescue system. The mission deployed the Mercury capsule (Mercury spacecraft #14) on a Little Joe launch vehicle.

LJ-5A was conducted on March 18, 1961 from Wallops Island, Virginia. The LJ-5 failure sequence repeated itself when the rescue rocket fired again prematurely and the Mercury capsule failed to separate from the Little Joe rocket. However, on this flight, a ground commando was sent to separate the Mercury capsule from the Little Joe rocket and rescue rocket. This allowed the main and reserve parachutes to deploy and the Mercury capsule to be recovered with minor damage.

Since the mission was a failure, the flight had to be repeated as part of Mercury-Little-Joe 5B in order to achieve the mission objectives.