![]() Television networks began their live coverage.ĭata from his biomedical sensors would later reveal a quickened Little problem and light this candle?” His words appeared to have the desired Mutterings of whether to scrub for the day or bleed off the pressure remotely. Steadily rising pressures inside the Redstone’s liquid oxygen tank and Rescheduled for launch at 9 a.m., the clock was halted yet again by In this view, taken on 21 April 1961, it was being prepared for a mission which would demand every ounce of reliability it could muster. Was quickly absorbed by his long cotton underwear and rapidly evaporated in theġ00-percent pure oxygen atmosphere of Freedom 7.ĭescended from Nazi Germany’s fearsome V-2, the single-stage Redstone missile earned the moniker of ‘Old Reliable’ as a US weapon of war. Several of his sensors, but it certainly improved his comfort. In his post-flight debriefing, recorded on hour later on the USS LakeĬhamplain, Shepard noted that urinating in his own suit may have affected Temporarily and a drawn-out “Ahhhh” came from the astronaut… Suit if the hold went on for much longer. Nose-cone!” Exasperated, Shepard told Cooper he would have to urinate in his Thick German accent, von Braun snapped: “No! Ze astronaut shall stay in ze Reached the ears of Wernher von Braun, head of NASA’s Marshall Space FlightĬenter (MSFC) in Huntsville, Ala. Unfortunately, with only a 15-minute flight planned, it had not beenĮxpected that he would ever be aboard Freedom 7 for long enough to “need to go”.Ĭooper duly passed the request up the chain of command, where it eventually “Check and see if I can get out quickly and relieve myself.”įellow astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom (in suit, right) accompanies Alan Shepard to his Freedom 7 capsule in May 1961. I gotta pee,” he grumbled to Capcom Gordon Cooper in the nearby controlīlockhouse. By this time, Shepard hadīeen lying on his back, fully suited, in the capsule for other three hours. Responsible for processing mission data, hiccuped. Then aĬomputer glitch at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Md., The Redstone booster also exhibited trouble and needed replacement. Southeastern seaboard quickly produced a raft of delays. There by his backup, fellow astronaut John Glenn. Shepard’s first action inside the tiny capsule was toĬhuckle at a picture of a pin-up girl and a placard-“No Handball Playing In This Early on, he boarded the bell-shaped Freedom 7 capsule on Padĥ at the Cape, ready for a voyage that promised to end either with his own death Meantime Shepard would fly a converted Redstone ballistic missile into suborbital United States had a similar capability with its Atlas rocket, but in the Just three weeks earlier Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man toĮnter space and orbit the Earth. Shepard’s launch almost six decades ago came on the heels of soil, for the first time in nearly nine years. And in three weeks’ time, more history will be set when the Demo-2 mission sees U.S. Other missions launched this month in history include the most recent manned flight on an Atlas booster, the Apollo 10 dress rehearsal for Neil Armstrong’s historic lunar landing, the salvation of Skylab, the first International Space Station (ISS) docking mission, the maiden and swansong voyages of shuttle Endeavour and the last Hubble Space Telescope (HST) servicing call. Fifty-nine years ago today, on, the nation saw Alan Shepard become the first American to voyage into space a short suborbital “hop”, in which he ascended 116.5 miles (187.5 km) in the tiny Freedom 7 capsule, rising from Cape Canaveral and splashing down 15 minutes later in the Atlantic Ocean. “A damn fine month,” actor Morgan Freeman’s character Ellis “Red” Redding remarked in the movie Shawshank Redemption and, indeed, for America’s space program, the month of May-newly dawned-has long been a historic one for off-the-planet U.S. ![]() One of the few grainy images of Shepard, acquired during his brief moments of weightlessness.
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