Just sixty years ago, on May 5, 1961, nearly 45 million American viewers lined up in front of their television to watch one of their own, astronaut Alan Shepard, soaring into space for the first time from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Its flight lasts only about fifteen minutes, but it will mark the history of the country forever.
A few days earlier, on April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had already attempted and succeeded in flying into space aboard his Vostok 1 Alan Shepard, American astronaut, had learned the news with frustration and a lot of anger. Among the astronauts of the Mercury 7 program Selected to pilot America's first crewed spacecraft, he had indeed trained hard for 21 weeks and earned the right to be the first person in history to make his way into space.
Eventually, he will be the second. The feat is all the more bitter as Shepard will only offer a suborbital flight of a few minutes before plunging into the Atlantic, while Gagarin had placed himself in orbit around the Earth.
This blow was not the first. At that time, the Mercury project had indeed faced many delays. A few years earlier, an Atlas rocket had even exploded after less than a minute in flight. These failures were all the more humiliating because, due to NASA's policy of total transparency, they had been exposed to the public eye .
The May 5 launch comes after several delays due to bad weather. D-Day is not easy either. At T minus 15 minutes, one of the IBM 7090 computers at the Goddard Space Flight Center does indeed develop an error that requires rechecking, and therefore a delay of more than two hours.
All in all, Shepard sits in his pod (named Freedom 7) for four hours and fourteen minutes . After three hours, the astronaut, unable to restrain himself, asked permission to urinate in his suit. Despite the refusal of the control center, he relieves himself anyway. The flow of oxygen from his suit then took care of drying everything.
Meanwhile, unlike Gagarin who took off in the greatest secrecy, Shepard is in the spotlight with several hundred journalists present on the scene and several million viewers in front of their black and white television set.
Two minutes and twenty-four seconds after liftoff at 9:34 a.m., Shepard's capsule finally separated from the booster of the Mercury-Redstone 3 (MR-3) rocket. Eleven seconds later, the autopilot takes care of orienting the ship so that its heat shield is face down.
Just five minutes after takeoff, Shepard then took manual control of the craft at an altitude of approximately 185 km , performs a few maneuvers, before returning to autopilot to perform a controlled reentry. As he falls, the astronaut tries to see some stars through the tiny portholes of his capsule, in vain.
Barely ten minutes after taking off, the parachute main body of his capsule finally deploys to let it drift towards the recovery zone in the North Atlantic, off the Bahamas. The entire mission will only have lasted 15 minutes and 22 seconds .
By today's standards, this suborbital mission was relatively simple, but in 1961 it confirmed that the United States had mastered the technology to send a human being safely into the space.
