Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Launch Complex 5
Launch Complex 5 (LC-5) was a launch site at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida used for various Redstone and Jupiter launches.
It is most well known as the launch site for NASA's 1961 suborbital Mercury-Redstone 3 flight, which made Alan Shepard the first American in space. It was also the launch site of Gus Grissom’s Mercury-Redstone 4 flight. The Mercury-Redstone 1 pad abort, Mercury-Redstone 1A, and Mercury-Redstone 2, with chimpanzee Ham aboard, also used LC-5.
A total of 23 launches were conducted from LC-5: one Jupiter-A, six Jupiter IRBMs, one Jupiter-C, four Juno Is, four Juno IIs and seven Redstones. The first launch from the complex was a Jupiter-A on July 19, 1956 and the final launch was Gus Grissom's Liberty Bell 7 capsule on July 21, 1961.
LC-5 is located next to the Air Force Space & Missile Museum. The original consoles used to launch the Mercury-Redstone rockets are on display in the blockhouse. As of 2011 a tour of the blockhouse (and the museum) can be arranged through the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex's "Cape Canaveral: Then and Now" tour. One tour is offered daily, so the number of visitors is limited by the size of the tour.
Read more about Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Launch Complex 5: Launch Chronology, Gallery
Famous quotes containing the words cape, air, force, station, launch and/or complex:
“Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain’s rim:
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me.”
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)
“I remember when I was first assigned to jets. I said to the colonel, “Colonel, I joined this man’s air force to fly an airplane. But nobody’s gonna hitch me to no Roman candle.””
—Kurt Neumann (1906–1958)
“May the Force be with you!”
—George Lucas (b. 1944)
“I introduced her to Elena, and in that life-quickening atmosphere of a big railway station where everything is something trembling on the brink of something else, thus to be clutched and cherished, the exchange of a few words was enough to enable two totally dissimilar women to start calling each other by their pet names the very next time they met.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies
and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
with its store of food and little cooking pans
and change of clothes,”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“It would be naive to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems.... However, with faith and perseverance,... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace. They can be resolved in the future, provided, of course, that we can think of five new ways to measure the height of a tall building by using a barometer.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)