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.