On May 5, 1961, a Navy test pilot named Alan Shepard climbed into a tiny capsule called Freedom 7, perched on top of a Redstone rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida. He waited four hours on the launchpad while engineers fixed problems. Finally, at 9:34 a.m., the rocket blasted off, and 37-year-old Shepard became the first American to fly into space. The whole flight lasted just 15 minutes and 28 seconds.
The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had beaten him by less than a month, orbiting Earth back in April. America was desperate to catch up in the space race, and millions of people watched Shepard's launch live on television - schools rolled TVs into classrooms so kids could see it happen. Freedom 7 didn't orbit Earth; instead it shot up 116 miles, gave Shepard five minutes of weightlessness, then splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean. A helicopter scooped him out of the sea.
Shepard wasn't done with space, either. Ten years later, he commanded Apollo 14 and walked on the Moon, where he famously whacked two golf balls across the lunar dust with a makeshift club. The flight of Freedom 7 made President John F. Kennedy bold enough to announce, just 20 days later, that America would put a man on the Moon before the decade ended. That promise launched the whole Apollo program. Shepard's short hop above the clouds was the spark that lit the way to humans walking on another world.
