Alan Shepard

Russians are still proud of that accomplishment and celebrate Yuri's Day every year.

The United States sent astronaut Alan Shepard into space less than a month after Gagarin.

But Shepard's flight lasted only about 15 minutes and did not orbit Earth.

President John F. Kennedy wanted a goal that would give the United States a chance to move ahead.

And Katherine Johnson worked directly on some of the most important space missions in American history.

Yeah.

She calculated the flight path for Alan Shepard, and John Glenn asked her to personally check the electric computer's math before he orbited Earth.

Then she helped calculate the flight path for Apollo 11.

And so, uh, that's how things got started.

And you mentioned that von Braun was really pushing Eisenhower to have a manned space program, and our first astronaut then was Alan Shepard.

And could you talk about, uh, his, his first mission?

mission?Yes, Alan Shepard was, uh, the first American astronaut to fly.

Uh, he, uh, did a suborbital flight, whereas G- Gagarin's flight, the very first human to fly in space, uh, I believe it went three orbits.

So it was an orbital flight, so much more complex and difficult thing to do, much more powerful rocket.

It goes up in a parabolic arc, uh, it goes above the, uh, uh, the official boundary of space, which at the time was 50 miles.

It's now gen- or internationally agreed to be 100 kilometers, or about 62 miles.

Now, at this point in time, in the early 1960s, the Soviet Union was keeping their space training operation top secret because they were competing with the United States in the great space race, the race to see who would be the first to conquer space travel.

In America, the astronaut Alan Shepard was training for the same mission, hoping to be the first person in space.

Okay, I'm gonna stop us right here to quickly go into the speculation zone.

Speculation zone.

Just make a bigger rocket with more propellant.

You can put Alan Shepard into orbit.

For a ICBM until recently, they were gonna be nuclear because they weren't gonna be accurate enough to say hit the Pentagon or the White House or the Kremlin or KGB headquarters.

So you had to just say, well, we'll just have to take out Moscow or Washington or New York.

Because of its size, it's the only one of the lunar seas to be called an ocean.

During Apollo 14, Alan Shepard hit golf balls on the moon.

What other sporting event did Edgar Mitchell imitate using a staff from a solar wind experiment? The javelin, yes.

Mitchell claimed that his javelin actually went about four inches further than Sheffield's golf ball.

He was.

Alan was coaching from 1987, 1991.

That kind of era.

And Craig was the ball boy, which I love.

No!

No, there were in fact two golf balls.

Apollo 14, Alan Shepard hit them with a little makeshift six

iron.

They went off to the Moon.

It was Alan Shepard, guy named Edward Mitchell, Stuart Roosa, and they launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a manned mission to the Moon.

On February fifth, after suffering some initial problems in docking the lunar and command modules, Shepard and Mitchell descended to the surface of the Moon.

Upon stepping out of the module, Shepard, who in nineteen sixty-one on the Freedom seven was the first American in space, he became the fifth athron- astronaut to walk on the Moon.

move on.

Interestingly enough, I lucked out and I had lunch with Alan Shepard.

And he said while he was on the moon, he could see in the shadow of the mountains several hard objects with the U.S. star and insignia on it indicating the Americans had already been there when they were walking on the moon in 69.

That told me a whole lot.

Only 30 extraordinary men and women in a long period of time in the history of our country have received this extremely rare and distinguished honor.

Real legends like Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, Alan Shepard, and the immortal heroes of Apollo 1.

Today we add four new names to this elite roster of fearless explorers.

That's really what they are when you think of it, fearless explorers that are very smart.