Half a century ago, on May 5th, 1961, the first of the so-called “Mercury Seven” astronauts strapped himself into a tiny capsule, and was blasted into space on a Redstone rocket. World War II veteran, Naval aviator and test pilot Alan Shepard was the first American to get into space (considered by the Air Force to be fifty miles altitude), though he didn’t get into orbit, because the Redstone couldn’t provide the seventeen-thousand-mile-per-hour speed necessary to keep him from falling back to the earth. His flight ended a few minutes after it began at Cape Canaveral, Florida, a few hundred miles downrange in the Atlantic. Always fast with a quip, when asked what he was thinking as he lay in the couch of the capsule on top of the rocket, he said that he was contemplating the fact that every part in it was built by the lowest bidder.
His flight had originally been scheduled for the previous October, and if it had kept that schedule, he would have been not just the first American to leave the atmosphere, but the first human, but Yuri Gagarin beat him by a little less than a month, on April 12th.
It was just one more of several “firsts” at which the Americans would be beaten by the Soviets in the space race, which had started three and a half years earlier, when they launched the first satellite, Sputnik. But at least, with Shepard’s launch, the Americans were in the game, after many previous setbacks and rocket failures. But Gagarin didn’t just beat Shepard to space — he beat the US to orbit as well, and it would be many months later, in February 1962, before the Americans would match that feat, with Marine aviator John Glenn’s three-orbit flight atop an Atlas rocket.
Shepard would go on to command the third mission to land on the moon — Apollo 14. By that time, the Americans had finally caught up with the Soviets, and had in fact won the space race a little over two years earlier, whcn Apollo 8 circled the moon, and the Soviets gave up and pretended they had never been racing. He died of leukemia in 1998.
We are in a new age of human spaceflight now, in which it will no longer be necessary to be a test pilot and hero to go into space — both Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace, among others, plan to offer trips for paying passengers within the next couple years, and the next decade will probably see more people go into space than the past five decades combined, with many of them going all the way to orbit. But for America, it all started fifty years ago today.
