Mercury-Redstone 1 - Aftermath

Aftermath

The Redstone had suffered some minor damage from falling back on the pad, but it could still be used after refurbishment, so it was returned to Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and was held in reserve. A new mission was scheduled, Mercury-Redstone 1A (MR-1A), which would use a new Mercury-Redstone rocket, numbered MR-3. MR-1's Mercury spacecraft, #2, was undamaged, so it was reused for MR-1A, together with the escape rocket from spacecraft #8 and the antenna fairing from spacecraft #10.

To prevent a failure like MR-1 from happening again, subsequent Mercury-Redstones added a grounding strap about 12 inches (30 cm) long to electrically connect the rocket to the launch pad. This strap was designed to separate from the rocket well after all other electrical connections to the ground had been severed.

Mercury engineers were also concerned that MR-1's failure had allowed a "normal cutoff" signal to reach the capsule and trigger the premature jettisoning of the escape rocket, since in an actual emergency this would remove the only escape mechanism for the astronaut. Had MR-1 been a manned mission the normal contingency would have been a pad abort, lifting the Mercury capsule off the booster and to safety via the escape rocket. Since the escape rocket had instead jettisoned itself from the capsule the astronaut would have been left in a very precarious situation, stuck inside the Mercury capsule atop a fully fueled, fully independently powered, yet completely untethered and partially damaged Redstone booster. To prevent a situation like this, the Mercury-Redstone was altered so that it could not send a "normal cutoff" signal to the capsule until 129.5 seconds after liftoff, about 10 seconds before the expected time of the Redstone's actual engine cutoff.

MR-1 was never used for another mission after its return to Huntsville. It was eventually put on display at the Space Orientation Center of Marshall Space Flight Center.