Friendship 7 Mercury Capsule 3D Model

Friendship 7, the Mercury capsule in which John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth on the MA-6 mission of 20 February 1962, circling the planet three times before splashing down in the Atlantic. The model shows the cone-shaped cabin with rows of rivet details, the cylindrical recovery section and ribbed antenna housing on top, and the retro-rocket pack under the heat shield at the base.

Technical details: about 165,000 polygons and 95,000 vertices, with 9 colour materials and no image textures. The mesh is fairly dense, so decimate it before mobile or VR use. It is scaled to 3 metres for AiZity's catalogue scale.

The download includes GLB for web viewers and three.js, FBX for Unity, Unreal Engine and Maya, OBJ as a widely supported mesh, and BLEND for Blender. AiZity cleaned up the original (centred, grounded and renamed the parts) and converted it to these formats.

Good for Project Mercury history lessons, John Glenn tributes, re-entry and splashdown animations, and museum-style displays.

License: Public domain, made by NASA/Michael D. Carbajal (a U.S. government work). Free for personal and commercial use; please credit NASA. NASA logos and insignia are not included, and use must not suggest NASA endorsement.