John Glenn 13, "Friendship 7", and had the name hand-painted on the side like the one on his F-86 had been. Glenn and Carpenter completed their training for the mission in January 1962, but postponement of the launch allowed them to continue rehearsing. Glenn spent 25 hours and 25 minutes in the spacecraft performing hangar and altitude tests, and 59 hours and 45 minutes in the simulator. He flew 70 simulated missions and reacted to 189 simulated system failures. After a long series of delays, "Friendship 7" lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on February 20, 1962. There were eleven
Ulysses (spacecraft) to the Earth direction. This method of determining the relative orientation is called CONSCAN and was used by early radars for automated tracking of targets and also very common in early infra-red guided missiles. The spacecraft used S-band for uplinked commands and downlinked telemetry, through dual redundant 5-watt transceivers. The spacecraft used X-band for science return (downlink only), using dual 20 W TWTAs until the failure of the last remaining TWTA in January 2008. Both bands used the dish antenna with prime-focus feeds, unlike the Cassegrain feeds of most other spacecraft dishes. Dual tape recorders, each of approximately 45-megabit capacity,