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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.
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 ]
1 Yuri Gagarin: 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 ...
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. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Shepard saw action with the surface navy during World War II. He became a naval aviator in 1947, and a test pilot in 1950.
They piloted the six spaceflights of the Mercury program that had an astronaut on board from May 1961 to May 1963, and members of the group flew on all of the NASA human spaceflight programs of the 20th century – Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle. Shepard became the first American to enter space in 1961, and walked on the Moon on ...
1 Deep Space Rendezvous. ... 19 May: Venera 1: First flyby of Venus: ... Orbital launch attempts by country in 1961: Country Launches Successes
March 5 The launch of the spacecraft Freedom 7 in a 15-minute sub-orbital spaceflight is seen by 45 million American television viewers. [1] Alan B. Shepard becomes the first U.S. astronaut in space. He was the second person to travel into space, [2] following the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. [3] May 5
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 crewed space flight lasting over twenty four hours by Gherman Titov, who is also the first to suffer from ...