In May 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, a short suborbital mission that proved humans could survive launch, weightlessness, and reentry. Behind the calm headlines was Project ...

Those were the words Alan Shepard used 60 years ago Wednesday to note his cockpit timepiece had begun running. This meant his Redstone rocket booster had left the ground sending him and his one-man ...

On May 5, 1961, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to go to space. He launched from Cape Canaveral on a Mercury-Redstone rocket in a space capsule named Freedom 7. This was the ...

50th anniversary of Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 flight. May 5, 2011 — -- Fifty years ago today, astronaut Alan Shepard squeezed into a tiny Mercury capsule and challenged the heavens. He called his ...

Shortly after 9 AM on May 5, 1961, Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. became the second person—and the first American—in space, rocketing to a height of 116.5 miles inside his Mercury capsule. Unlike Soviet ...

CC0 Usage Conditions ApplyClick for more information. This collection consists of twenty-one U.S. Navy photographs compiled for the press kit prepared for the Mercury-Redstone 3 (MR-3) mission as well ...

Part 2 explores the dramatically different approaches to the launch systems, and the surprising similarities in the factors that contributed to their success. Although they served very different ...

The Redstone engine is one of the most significant developments in US rocket technology. This collection consists of 36 pages of 17 x 11 inch schematic drawings of the Redstone launch vehicle's ...