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Mercury-Redstone 3, or Freedom 7, was the first United States human spaceflight, on May 5, 1961, piloted by astronaut Alan Shepard. It was the first crewed flight of Project Mercury . The project had the ultimate objective of putting an astronaut into orbit around the Earth and returning him safely.
The flight was designed to be controlled from the ground via the Manned Space Flight Network, a system of tracking and communications stations; back-up controls were outfitted on board. Small retrorockets were used to bring the spacecraft out of its orbit, after which an ablative heat shield protected it from the heat of atmospheric reentry .
Apollo 7 heads into orbit with its crew of three, 1968. This is a list of all crewed spaceflights throughout history. Beginning in 1961 with the flight of Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1, crewed spaceflight occurs when a human crew flies a spacecraft into outer space.
The period between the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011 and the first launch into space of SpaceShipTwo Flight VP-03 on 13 December 2018 is similar to the gap between the end of Apollo in 1975 and the first Space Shuttle flight in 1981, and is referred to by a presidential Blue Ribbon Committee as the U.S. human spaceflight gap.
United States astronaut badges are the various badges of the United States which are awarded to military and civilian personnel of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the various child departments of the Department of Defense, or a private space-faring entity, who have performed (or in some cases, completed training for) a spaceflight.
Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States. It ran from 1959 through 1963 with the goal of putting a human in orbit around the Earth. The Mercury-Atlas 6 flight on February 20, 1962, was the first Mercury flight to achieve this goal. [9]
The Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle, designed for NASA's Project Mercury, was the first American crewed space booster.It was used for six sub-orbital Mercury flights from 1960–1961; culminating with the launch of the first, and 11 weeks later, the second American (and the second and third humans) in space.
[13] [14] [15] On June 14, 1949, the US launched the first mammal into space, a rhesus macaque monkey named Albert II, on a sub-orbital flight, though Albert II died when the parachute failed. [16] On July 22, 1951, the Soviets launched the Soviet space dogs, Dezik and Tsygan, who were the first dogs in space and the first to safely return. [17]