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First American Launched Into Space, May 5, 1961

ANDREW GLASS | 5/5/09 4:31 AM EDT

On this day in 1961, the Soviet-American space race, in which the Kremlin had taken a lead, took a favorable turn for the United States when Navy Cmdr. Alan Shepard became the first American astronaut to travel in space.AP PhotoOn this day in 1961, the Soviet-American space race, in which the Kremlin had taken a lead, took a favorable turn for the United States when Navy Cmdr. Alan Shepard became the first American astronaut to travel in space. Shepard’s suborbital flight aboard Freedom 7 from Cape Canaveral, Fla., to a height of 116 miles was hailed by President John F. Kennedy as a major triumph for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

 

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In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower, prodded by a Democratic-controlled Congress, created NASA. The agency’s primary mission was to match and, hopefully in time, surpass Soviet achievements in space, which began with the launching of the world’s first artificial satellite — Sputnik 1 — in 1957. In the ensuing years, the rival superpowers strived to become the first nation to put a man in space.

 

On April 12, 1961, the Soviets won that race with the launch of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1. A month later, Shepard’s suborbital flight, although it lasted only 15 minutes, succeeded in restoring public faith in the lagging and, until that point, failure-prone U.S. space program.

 

 

NASA continued to trail the Soviets’ space efforts until the late 1960s. That changed with the successes of the Apollo lunar program. In July 1969, the Americans took a leap forward with Apollo 11, a three-stage spacecraft that took U.S. astronauts to the surface of the moon and returned them safely to Earth.

 

On Feb. 5, 1971, Shepard became the fifth astronaut to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 14 lunar landing mission. Although he wore thick gloves, which forced him to swing a golf club with one hand, he struck two balls with a six iron, driving the second one, as he jokingly put it, “miles and miles and miles.”

 

 

Source: “The Right Stuff,” by Tom Wolfe (1979)

 

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