Facts about Alan Shepard Mission
- 07
Freedom 7's control systems relied on 18,000 individual components, with only 6,000 of them having been previously tested in spaceflight during the Mercury-Redstone 2 mission carrying Ham the chimpanzee.
- 06
President John F. Kennedy watched Alan Shepard's launch live from Cape Canaveral on May 5, 1961, marking the first time a sitting U.S. president witnessed an American astronaut's spaceflight in person.
- 05
Shepard's suborbital trajectory reached its peak altitude in just 5 minutes, giving him approximately 3 minutes of weightlessness during the Freedom 7 mission.
- 04
Before launch, Alan Shepard was denied permission to urinate, forcing him to remain in his spacesuit for seven hours as engineers feared depressurizing the suit would compromise the mission.
- 03
Shepard's Freedom 7 capsule was only 10 feet 7 inches tall and weighed 4,265 pounds, making it considerably smaller than the Soviet Vostok 1 that Yuri Gagarin flew just weeks earlier.
- 02
Shepard's capsule experienced a maximum deceleration of 11 Gs during re-entry, subjecting the astronaut to forces eleven times Earth's gravitational pull before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean.
- 01
On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space aboard Freedom 7, reaching an altitude of 116.5 kilometers in a 15-minute suborbital flight.