Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
May 5, 1961: Launch of Freedom 7 At 9:34 a.m., Alan Shepard became the first American in space as Mercury 3 lifted off from Cape Canaveral . Shepard's spacecraft Freedom 7, first of the Mercury program , reached an altitude of 115 miles (185 km) without achieving orbit, and was recovered 19 minutes later by the aircraft carrier USS Lake ...
12 April 1961 Vostok 1: First crewed spaceflight. Reached Low Earth Orbit (LEO), flew around the Earth one time. 2 Alan Shepard (1) 5 May 1961 Mercury-Redstone 3 : First American crewed spaceflight. Did not reach Earth orbit, maximum altitude: 187 km (116 miles). [1] [2] 3 Gus Grissom (1) 21 July 1961 Mercury-Redstone 4 (Liberty Bell 7)
Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. (November 18, 1923 – July 21, 1998) was an American astronaut.In 1961, he became the second person and the first American to travel into space and, in 1971, he became the fifth and oldest person to walk on the Moon, at age 47.
The most recent person and first geologist to have arrived on the Moon Vladimír Remek, 88th person in space and the first from a country other than the US or the Soviet Union Sigmund Jähn, 91st person in space and the first German Georgi Ivanov, 93rd person in space and the first Bulgarian Phạm Tuân, 97th person in space, and the first ...
Alan Shepard became the first American in space on a suborbital flight three weeks later, on May 5, 1961. [138] John Glenn, the third Mercury astronaut to fly, became the first American to reach orbit on February 20, 1962, but only after the Soviets had launched a second cosmonaut, Gherman Titov , into a day-long flight in August 1961. [ 220 ]
12 April 1961: First human spaceflight (Yuri Gagarin). First human-crewed orbital flight. USSR Vostok 1 [11] [12] 5 May 1961: First human-piloted space flight (Alan Shepard). First human-crewed suborbital flight. USA Freedom 7: 19 May 1961: First planetary flyby (within 100,000 km of Venus – no data returned). USSR Venera 1: 6 August 1961
First flyby of Venus Spacecraft was already non-functional as communication had been lost en route, closest approach: 100,000 kilometres (62,000 mi) [ 1 ] Notable creations of orbital debris