"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."
Edmund Burke. What happened on this Day in History?
Saturday, May 5, 2012
This Day in History: May 5, 1961: The first American in space
From Cape
Canaveral, Florida, Navy Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. is launched into
space aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule, becoming the first American
astronaut to travel into space. The suborbital flight, which lasted 15 minutes
and reached a height of 116 miles into the atmosphere, was a major triumph for
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
NASA was
established in 1958 to keep U.S. space efforts abreast of recent Soviet
achievements, such as the launching of the world's first artificial satellite--Sputnik
1--in 1957. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the two superpowers raced to
become the first country to put a man in space and return him to Earth. On
April 12, 1961, the Soviet space program won the race when cosmonaut Yuri
Gagarin was launched into space, put in orbit around the planet, and safely
returned to Earth. One month later, Shepard's suborbital flight restored faith
in the U.S. space program.
NASA
continued to trail the Soviets closely until the late 1960s and the successes
of the Apollo lunar program. In July 1969, the Americans took a giant leap
forward with Apollo 11, a three-stage spacecraft that took U.S.
astronauts to the surface of the moon and returned them to Earth. On February
5, 1971, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, became the fifth astronaut
to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 14 lunar landing mission.
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