September 9th - on this day in 1959, NASA launched Big Joe 1, an uncrewed, suborbital test flight of a boilerplate Mercury capsule, on an Atlas-D Mercury rocket from Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral. The flight was to test the spacecraft's ablative heat shield during a reentry test. However, the Atlas rocket's booster engines failed to jettison and the dead weight resulted in the flight not reaching the expected velocity and altitude. The Big Joe Mercury capsule splashed down intact, though,