Freedom 7 space flight (1961)

America had not seen such a star-spangled day in years. Washington DC was particularly festive and exuberant, with flags and banners fluttering gaily above the major boulevards, with parade stands filled to the brim along Pennsylvania Avenue all the way to Capitol Hill, with a half million tourists practically begging souvenir hawkers for their colourful trinkets and mementoes.

Across the entire country, buttons were popping off proud, patriotic chests. People were united in a common spirit of innocent celebration. Schools were let out. Businessmen stayed home from work.

One busy young executive by the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy cancelled all his appointments so he might welcome the man who had captured his nation’s fancy with a feat of gallantry, now emblazoned in our history books along with the most hallowed and immortal of prodigious moments.

The country’s new hero was US Naval Lieutenant Alan B. Shepard, Jr.

Less than one week earlier, on 5 May 1961, Shepard had dashed through the heavens to become America’s first Man in Space, thereby fulfilling a romantic fantasy as old as mankind.

Although he was actually the second man to ride a rocket toward the stars – Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had been the first just twenty-four days earlier – the slender thirty-seven-year-old became the greatest hero America had produced since the heyday of the Lone Eagle, Charles Lindbergh, in 1927.

Perhaps the most personable too. Quick with a brilliant smile and even more brilliant wit, Shepard’s press conference quips and spontaneous gestures tickled the entire population.

Even President Kennedy could not contain his reactions to the sparkling spaceman. At the White House award ceremonies for Shepard, JFK was so beset with laughter that he had a most difficult time pinning the medals on Shepard. The country loved it.

On 5 May, however, Alan B. Shepard was all business. Awakening before dawn in his special mobile quarters at Cape Canaveral, Shepard downed his customary breakfast of steak and eggs and then headed for the launch area.

Waiting for him there was the Mercury-Redstone B booster rocket, whose seventy-five thousand pounds of fiery thrust would hurl the one hundred sixty-pound Shepard toward his precarious fate. The fearless flyer donned his special space suit.

With the sun still below the horizon, Shepard emerged from the preparation chambers and headed for the gantry. Wearing shiny silver from helmet to boot, carrying a small portable air conditioner, the astronaut suddenly looked the part of a man from another world.

America held its breath as Shepard rode to the bell-shaped Mercury capsule perched high above. With the nickname “Freedom 7” painted on its side, the Mercury capsule would be Shepard’s cramped quarters for several hours of breathlessness, then weightlessness, then sheer waiting in the Atlantic swells for recovery.

The door was closed and locked securely. A droll voice belonging to one John “Shorty” Powers crackled across the launch area, informing all listeners that step by step the rocket and its payload had checked out.

The countdown marched downward. On nearby Cocoa Beach, nearly a million adventurous onlookers crossed their fingers bearing witness to the incredible scene a mile or two across the water.

Hardly a television set across the land sat inert or ignored.

Shorty Powers picked up the count. “T-minus one minute and counting,” he intoned. “T-minus thirty seconds. T-minus twenty seconds. T-minus ten-nine-eight-seven-six.”

A rumbling of engines was heard. “three-two-” Clouds of orange and grey smoke billowed out of the skinny Redstone.

“Ignition. Liftoff!” Alan B. Shepard was on his way. It was 9:34 A.M.

The tension-filled launch was absolutely flawless.

The trusty booster rocket performed perfectly, and as the escape tower tumbled uselessly from atop the space capsule into the ocean depths, a collective sigh of relief wafted over the Cape and across the waves.

When the perky voice of Freedom 7′s skilful pilot came forth from space, a huge cheer erupted far and wide — and a new phrase took root in the universal lexicon: “Everything is A-OK!” reported the inventive Shepard as he commenced to check off the myriad readings from his instrument panel.

Everything certainly was A-OK to the scientists at mission control and over three hundred million excited onlookers around the shrinking globe.

The little craft jettisoned the exhausted Redstone and sped into space, exploring the mysteries of space travel by the score en route. Weightlessness was probably the most intriguing condition to be experienced and assessed by Lieutenant Shepard, and he found it to be no problem.

The Russian Gagarin had also experienced the eerie state three weeks before, but the official Soviet silence made such details and accounts unavailable to the men of Mercury.

One mystery that Gagarin hadn’t explored was the actual manual manoeuvring of his spacecraft. This was a primary task for the pilot of Freedom 7. He was to do this not so much as a ritual or test, but as an exercise vital to his safe return.

Shepard fired the little propellants located about the craft, and the capsule pitched forward as expected. Then he fired again, and his spaceship shifted – or “yawed” – from one direction to another, as if operating in a turret. Finally, the little booster rockets caused the capsule to roll over and over.

Having concluded that all three manoeuvres had proceeded “A-OK,” Shepard guided Freedom 7 to the proper position for re-entry into the atmosphere.

Shepard attained a maximum altitude – known as his “apogee” in the official vocabulary – of 116 statute miles about midway into his flight, just about as had been expected for a suborbital flight with its ballistic trajectory. His top speed was in excess of five thousand miles per hour; while modest by today’s post-lunar landing standards, it was downright wondrous just fourteen years ago.

As he sped downrange, his vision reached as far as North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras twelve hundred miles away.

“What a beautiful view!” he exulted in an inevitable understatement, one that would be repeated almost verbatim by succeeding space explorers for years to come.

Fifteen minutes after leaving the planet aboard his reliable Mercury-Redstone B, Alan B. Shepard passed through a flaming re-entry period toward his landing point 302 statute miles across the Atlantic Missile Range, near Grand Bahama Island.

Within minutes, a helicopter had spotted the bobbing blue craft, and the hero was hauled aboard in perfect condition.

The flight of Freedom 7 was, at that time, a culmination of a highly distinguished career for Alan Shepard. After graduating from the Annapolis Naval Academy in 1944, Shepard fought in the Pacific theatre in World War II aboard the destroyer USS Cogswell. He subsequently entered flight training and received his wings in 1947.

Just three years later, he became a test pilot for the US Navy, first conducting high-altitude experiments, then testing high-velocity vehicles such as the F2H3 Banshee, F3H Demon, F8U Crusader, F4D Skyray, and F11F Tigercat.

After logging more than three thousand hours in jet aircraft alone, Shepard was selected – in April of 1959 – as one of the seven original Mercury astronauts, along with such familiar names as Walter Schirra, John Glenn, Virgil Grissom, Donald Slayton, Scott Carpenter, and L. Gordon Cooper.

Following the glittering success of the now-legendary Freedom 7 flight, Shepard returned to training and assumed far greater responsibilities.

Now a Naval Commander, he was designated Chief of the Astronaut Office in 1963, a job which put him in charge of all pilot training programs for manned space projects.

Misfortune, however, befell Alan Shepard and curtailed his plans for future space assignments; he was sidelined by a curious inner-ear disorder that deterred his hopes for further space missions until 1969, when surgery finally corrected it.

He was restored to full flight status in May 1969.

Many spaceflights have taken place since that little lob on 5 May 1961 – Shepard himself eventually commanded the crew of Apollo 14, becoming both the only Mercury astronaut to pin down such an assignment, and the only man in history to swing a golf club on the surface of the moon (President Kennedy would’ve got a kick out of that) – but outside of John Glenn’s flight and Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 moon landing, no manned mission approached Freedom 7 for fascination, thrills, and sheer romance.

Some called Alan B. Shepard a “latter-day Columbus.” Others think of him in terms of the great American explorers and pioneers.

His achievements certainly deserve such plaudits. Alan B. Shepard secured his niche at the forefront of mankind’s ultimate adventure: the conquest of space.

From Nostalgia Illustrated, June 1975. Original author: R.T. Allin.