60 Years Ago: Alan Shepard Becomes the First American in Space
HOSUTON (NASA PR) — In 1961, the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves in a race to put the first human being into space. The United States initiated Project Mercury in 1958 to put the first American into space and selected its first group of astronauts in 1959 to begin training for that mission. The Soviets kept their plans secret but began their own human spaceflight program and selected their own team of 20 cosmonauts in 1960.
The Soviets won the race in April 1961 when cosmonaut Yuri A. Gagarin completed a single orbit around the Earth aboard his Vostok capsule. On May 5, 1961, Alan B. Shepard became the first American in space during a suborbital flight aboard his Mercury capsule named Freedom 7. Three weeks later, based on the success of Shepard’s brief flight, President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to achieving a lunar landing before the end of the decade.
The Space Task Group (STG) at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, initiated Project Mercury in 1958 with three goals: orbiting a crewed spacecraft, investigating man’s ability to function in space, and safely recovering both spacecraft and crew member. NASA contracted the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation of St Louis to build the Mercury spacecraft.
Initial plans called for up to seven early suborbital flights launched on Redstone rockets to test the single-seat spacecraft, followed by Earth orbital missions using the more powerful Atlas booster. After some early launch failures, the first successful test flight of the Mercury spacecraft without an astronaut on board took place in December 1960, launched on a suborbital flight atop a Redstone rocket.
In parallel with Mercury spacecraft development, NASA selected its first group of astronauts on April 9, 1959. The group consisting of M. Scott Carpenter, L. Gordon Cooper, John H. Glenn, Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Walter M. Schirra, Alan B. Shepard, and Donald K. “Deke” Slayton called themselves the Mercury 7 astronauts. They began intensive training in the hope of becoming the first human in space.
On Jan. 19, 1961, STG leader Robert R. Gilruth informed the group that Shepard would fly the first suborbital mission, Grissom the second, with Glenn serving as a back up to both of them. To the public, NASA revealed only that one of the three men would make the first flight, with the actual individual made known only close to the launch. Before the first astronaut flight, NASA tested the Redstone rocket and the Mercury capsule by flying chimpanzee Ham on an identical suborbital mission on Jan. 31.
Although the flight was mostly successful and the U.S. Navy recovered Ham in excellent shape, a problem with an electrical relay in the Redstone rocket caused NASA to schedule another uncrewed test flight on March 24. That successful flight cleared the way for the flight of the first American astronaut. But on April 12, the Soviets stole the prize by launching cosmonaut Yuri A. Gagarin aboard his Vostok capsule, in which he completed a single orbit around the Earth.
After hundreds of hours of training in simulators, and three simulations inside the capsule itself, Shepard and his backups Grissom and Glenn prepared for the actual flight. Inclement weather scrubbed the first launch attempt on May 2, 1961, and NASA decided it was time to announce that Shepard would indeed be making the first flight.
On May 5, the weather proved more cooperative and Shepard climbed aboard Freedom 7 atop the Redstone rocket poised on Launch Pad 5 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, now the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, in Florida. Half a million people had gathered on nearby beaches to watch the launch in person.
An estimated 45 million Americans anxiously watched the liftoff on live television, including President Kennedy at the White House. After more than two hours of delays due to technical issues, the rocket engine ignited at 9:34 a.m. Eastern time, propelling Shepard skyward and into the history books.
During the mission, Shepard communicated with the Mercury Control Center (MCC) at Cape Canaveral. Flight Director Christopher C. Kraft designed the control center to monitor every aspect of the mission. Fellow astronaut Slayton served as the capsule communicator, or capcom, speaking directly with Shepard in Freedom 7.
The Redstone rocket’s engine shutoff as planned 2 minutes, 22 seconds after liftoff, with the launch escape tower jettisoning immediately thereafter. After another 10 seconds, the spacecraft separated from the booster, and Shepard began to experience weightlessness. At 3 minutes 10 seconds into the flight, Shepard took over manual control of the spacecraft’s attitude and found that he could control Freedom 7’s orientation with remarkable ease and precision. He conducted visual observations of the Earth below and took some photographs of the cloud-covered Atlantic Ocean. At 5 minutes, 11 seconds, Freedom 7 reached the highest point of its ballistic flight at 116 miles and began descending toward the Earth. Fifteen seconds later the retro-fire maneuver took place.
At an altitude of 230,000 feet, Freedom 7 encountered the top layers of the Earth’s atmosphere, ending Shepard’s time in weightlessness after five minutes. During the deceleration, he experienced g-loads of up to 11 times the force of Earth’s gravity, but only for a few seconds. A drogue parachute deployed at 22,000 feet to slow and stabilize the spacecraft, followed by the main parachute at 10,000 feet. A landing bag deployed at the bottom of the spacecraft to further cushion the impact, and after a flight of 15 minutes 22 seconds, Freedom 7 splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean north of the Bahama Islands and 300 miles southeast of Cape Canaveral, completing Shepard’s flight as the first American in space.
Freedom 7 splashed down just four miles from the prime recovery ship – an aircraft carrier called the U.S.S. Lake Champlain (CVS-39). Recovery forces deployed from the Lake Champlain and retrieved Shepard and his capsule within 20 minutes of splashdown and delivered them onto the flight deck. Shepard went below decks for a brief medical exam and a congratulatory phone call from President Kennedy.
At a press conference afterward, the President hinted that he would soon be seeking more funding for a greatly expanded space program. Less than two and a half hours after arriving aboard the Lake Champlain, Shepard boarded a plane that took him the Grand Bahama Island for more in-depth medical examinations. Meanwhile, a helicopter retrieved Freedom 7 from the Lake Champlain and delivered it to Cape Canaveral. After initial inspections, the capsule traveled to Paris to go on exhibit May 25 at the International Aeronautical Show.
On May 8, 1961, Shepard arrived at the White House where in a ceremony in the Rose Garden President Kennedy presented him with NASA’s highest award, the Distinguished Service Medal. From there, Shepard with his wife Louise riding in Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson’s limousine took part in a motorcade that took them to the Capitol for a reception with lawmakers.
On May 25, President Kennedy returned to the Capitol to address a joint session of Congress. During the speech, he stated that the United States should “commit itself to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” That risky commitment, based on a single 15-minute suborbital spaceflight, culminated with the landing on the Moon of Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969.
The Freedom 7 capsule is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. A recreation of the MCC is on display inside the Kurt Debus Center at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center’s Visitor Complex.
29 responses to “60 Years Ago: Alan Shepard Becomes the First American in Space”
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I remember watching it with my dad. The start of American human spaceflight!
Even though the US started at a huge throw-weight deficit, Project Mercury and then Gemini were powerhouse programs for testing the techniques of human spaceflight. I would have loved to have been a teenager in that era. The aerospace culture back when was just dripping. I think within 7 years we’re going to see a reboot of human spaceflight and it’s going to regain a lot of that old swagger.
I agree!
I’d say that the Apollo 1 tragedy knocked a lot of the swagger out of spaceflight.
yes but the swagger was going out the door in Gemini…the American people just stopped watching or caring
Yup. But this time around it will be the American people…and many others…doing the flying. That oughta help keep our pathetic attention spans focused.
Actually the public’s attention is not important, it’s the investors. Once business models close it will move forward regardless just like communication and weather satellites.
It’s ironic that Elon tweeted this just about an hour ago.
…Public support for life on Mars is critical to making it happen…
The problem with public support is that it’s fickle and subject to manipulation. NASA survived Apollo because LBJ, as Senator/Vice-President/President, designed it to be a pork machine to ensure it’s survival when public support shifted, which ultimately created the problems like SLS we see today.
JSC, Marshall, Goddard, and Stennis really served no purpose other than generating political support for its budget. One could even argue that NASA would have benefited from locating it prime launch facilities at an expanded Wallops Island close to Langley and left the Cape to the USAF.
Your Wallops notion is just daft. The whole island is just six square miles in area. Even if one could have displaced the residents and shut down the wildlife refuge the Apollo facilities would never have fitted onto this postage stamp-sized bit of real estate. Merritt Island is 219 square miles in area.
Massive public support is not critical, just an absence of massive opposition.
Musk has opined that a trip to Mars would cost the equivalent of the profits from the average sale of a median priced house in the US…about $250,000.00. But I believe that he has come to realize that the crowd that wants to go settle Mars is not the same crowd that has been building equity in their homes for half of their lifetimes. Therefore I believe that he has come to realize that there will need to be some sort of wealth transfer scheme to make his goal of a million person city on Mars a reality. That is why he tweeted that massive public support will be critical.
This is just me reading the tea leaves.
I don’t think “public support” is a code phrase for “taxpayer money” in this case.
It’s been several years since Musk has said anything about the notional costs of a ticket to Mars. In the interim, SpaceX has ginned up Starlink as a funding source.
I think Musk now realizes that that Del Webb retirement community on Mars idea is going to take awhile to make practical.
The first Martian “settlers” will be hardhats that Musk will be paying to make the trip and start building that city on Mars he wants. There will probably be at least some modest opportunity to charge fares to people who want to go to Mars to supply personal goods and services to said hardhats – bar owners, gamblers and prostitutes as well as storekeepers, doctors and other more “respectable” types.
Good thoughts. But why do I have visions of GUNSMOKE ON MARS running through my head?
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
I disagree. Putting a comsat in orbit is nothing like the excitement in store for 100’s of years that will come from human exploration and development of the Moon and Mars, and the other things. I think what we will see is the kind of public excitement garnered by the American Moon program will be transferred to a corporation, or a corporate man. Much as we see FaceBooks ‘supreme court’ pretending to act like a real court of law and the society is already treating it as such. The problem with the libertarian/GOP outlook of free enterprise is, corporations start acting like nations, and we already see this. And as I’ve been saying for years now, SpaceX is going to found new nations, and the US needs to decide what it’s going to do about that.
No different than was the case with the railroads or airlines in their day. And don’t forget all the colonies which would eventually become the United States started as corporations. The key is finding a good revenue stream and it won’t be the ones, commodities and energy, many space advocate believe but instead it will be a product whose value is generated by locational advantages. This bottle of Space Wine being sold is a good better of what future space products will be generating revenue for space settlements.
https://www.npr.org/2021/05…
A Fancy Bottle Of Wine That Went To Space Can Be Yours For Perhaps A Million Dollars
May 5, 20215:06 PM ET
Becky Sullivan
Souvenirs and novelties will never be more than the same small slice of the lunar, Mars and other space economies than they are here on Earth. The original Spanish colonies in South America all had export-led economies. That’s why they never prospered to the degree that North American colonies did. The latters’ economies quickly came to be much more dominated by production of all kinds for local consumption, not export. The same will happen in space. Energy and commodities will figure importantly in that.
Corporations behaving as quasi-states is only possible to the extent some genuine state entity exists which said corporation can bribe to allow that. The Ford Motor Company once had what amounted to an internal secret police organization to keep tabs on its workforce. That didn’t last because no state political support was acquired for it.
New nations in space seem completely inevitable. It is far from clear to me that the U.S. should have anything to say about that.
there is a modest chance of that. but it will only matter if the reboot is one not just for A man but for all mankind.
we dont have that now
With the Soviet Union gone, the US lost its way on pushing it’s universalist vision of humanity. Considering that politics is about change, and overcoming the establishment, we see that China and the other ascendant nations are pushing a nationalist even racist world view. Nobody pushes a race neutral outlook anymore even in the West the ascendant political outlook is all about judging a person by the color of their skin and not the content of their character. Again I think this is natural as political ascendancy is all about overthrowing the establishment. However if the Soviet Union were still around I think the play off of the US, EU, and USSR would have kept the universalist humanity outlook front and center as the three blocks competed to serve the idea better than the other.
Yes, tens of thousands of years of cultural history creates a huge resistance to change especially given that views on race and gender in a few western nations have only really shifted in the last few decades. It is not surprising that those attitudes are returning to their long term position, a trend that needs to be actively resisted. Many Americans don’t realize just how unique the ideas of individual rights, political freedom, the immorality of slavery, the immorality of racism, freedom of women, transgenderism, internationalism, and intellectual property are in the long stream of history from the Neolithic Revolution to today, nor how easy it would be to slip backward to the old state of affairs.
I have a very hard time communicating to my Trump’tard family members that while I’m offended by transgender people and think their sub-culture is just plain stupid, they have every right to live their lives that way and should not face barriers in moving thru society and conducting their lives. It’s the same difficulty I have with my lefty friends convincing them that most of what they want to do in the name of undoing what the right has done is exactly the same thing the right has done. Human nature is indeed hard to undo which is why I think more and more the US needs good enemies to act as mirrors for ourselves. I don’t think we’re doing too well as top dog without a real enemy that hates us so much they won’t do business with us.
Sounds like we are on the same page especially when it comes to the extremism on both sides.
Yes, when there is no competition stagnation sets in unless you go into competition with yourself towards a difficult goal. I often felt the reason the Egyptians built the pyramids was to hold their society together because they had no enemies worth fighting at that point in their history.
I’ve thought much the same. What better thing than to wake up in the morning and see your kraftwork rise from the desert floor year after year.
Thomas and Andrew. Good thoughtful discussion, thanks.
“…thoughtful discussion, thanks”
They could really use Gary to round it out
I think that would violate the good, the thoughtful, and the discussion part of my comment. The author of the Gary comments seems to have zero interest in those qualities. I blame him for deliberate trolling, and myself for responding to it. I’m know you were joking, but I am annoyed by the (his) distraction.
I and, I suspect, your “Trump’tard” relatives aren’t so much annoyed that transgender people exist or even that they have a stupid sub-culture, but that the leftists among them keep inventing new prospective oppressions to inflict on the non-transgendered – like mandating use of an ever-growing list of made-up pronouns and the insinuation of genetic males into women’s athletics. Some animals are more equal than others.
Leftist politics is “about change and overcoming the establishment.” At least until a leftist establishment takes over. After that, it’s all about gulags and the Lubyanka.
The neo-racism and identity politics of the modern American left are not “ascendant” anywhere but here. And it remains to be seen just how durable that ascendancy proves to be. The American Left thought it was ascendant in the 1930s and 1960s too. Those ascendancies proved quite brief.