There was a time in the history of the world when two global superpowers stood face-to-face in the most important game of chicken humanity has ever known. The period of the Cold War between the United States of America and the Soviet Union was one of the most tense in human history, and bled over into almost every aspect of civilized life: economics, politics, religion, security and sport. Science was no exception to this, of course: for decades, the best and the brightest of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. competed with one another to excel in the field of academia, with important discoveries boasted about across the Iron Curtain and each new leap forward deigned to become a political salvo in the ongoing struggle between the communist East and the capitalist West.
Into this foray of socioeconomic and geopolitical maelstroms came the Space Race, a period of time loosely defined between 1957 and 1975 between the two superpowers where they competed with one another to upend the other in the scientific achievements of spaceflight. At stake was far more than bragging rights, however; though it seems difficult to believe with hindsight, there was a period of time during the mid-to-late 20th century where the world seemed to be choosing sides, and there was still a high degree of ambiguity over which side, communism or capitalism would come out on top to thrive in the 21st century.
For a time, it appeared as though the Soviet Union and the communist bloc was in the lead in that endeavor, particularly when it came to advancements in space. The Soviets launched the first artificial satellite into orbit, Sputnik in 1957 and followed that achievement up by launching the first animal, a dog named Laika into orbit later that same year. Their crowning achievement came four years later on April 12, 1961 when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel into space, orbiting once before returning safely to Earth. The Soviets had won all of the early major milestones in the Space Race, leaving the United States lagging behind. It appeared as though the Soviets might continue on and dominate the remainder of the contest, ultimately acquiring the grand prize and landing a man on the moon.
The United States, in desperate need of a win of their own, was at a crossroads. In truth, they needed something akin to a miracle.
What they got was the personification of courage in action.
The Right Stuff
Alan B. Shepard, Jr. was born in Derry, New Hampshire in 1923 to Alan Sr. and Pauline Shepard. From an early age, Alan excelled in his coursework, skipping both the sixth and eighth grades and attending a private academy to complete his schooling. As he grew up, his fascination with flying also intensified, and he would often do odd jobs around Manchester Airfield in order to gain infrequent flying lessons from aviators around the airport. He would attend the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, where he was an avid athlete, competing in multiple sports. During the wartime years, it was expected of future naval aviators (to which Shepard had begun receiving instruction at Annapolis) to first serve a tour in the surface fleet; Shepard began his tour after graduation aboard the destroyer Cogswell in August 1944 in the Pacific.
Shepard’s wartime experience would not be an easy one; in addition to participating in the Battle of Okinawa and the Invasion of Lingayen Gulf aboard the destroyer as a gunnery officer, he would also endure the full force of mother nature in the form of Typhoon Cobra in 1944. Kamikaze raids against the Cogswell would be an ever-present threat until the end of operations in the Pacific in August 1945. After the war concluded, Shepard would realize his dream and become a naval aviator for the United States Navy. Originally flying off the carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt in the F4U Corsair, he would also attend the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at NAS Patuxent River in Maryland. His flying career would continue on throughout the 1950s, with Shepard racking up more than 3,600 hours of flying time – 1,700 of which were in the fairly new class of jet fighter technology. His prestige as a naval aviator earned him placement as one of NASA’s Mercury Seven astronauts in April 1959.
Spam in a Can
NASA’s earliest endeavors were not always met with success; in fact, much of the earliest work employed by the space agency could be chalked up to “useful failures” owing to the unreliability of America’s rocketry and the growing pressure being placed on the agency by Washington in light of the Soviet Union’s apparent accomplishments. As one of America’s first seven astronauts, Shepard and his colleagues (Wally Schirra, Gus Grissom, Deke Slayton, Scott Carpenter, John Glenn and Gordon Cooper) were already playing with proverbial fire, trekking where none had dared – or even been able to – go before: outer space. With the unreliability of the Atlas rocket giving the astronaut an almost 50/50 chance of survival by 1961, the option of the more successful (but less powerful) Redstone rocket was chosen.
Yuri Gagarin’s launch in April 1961 was a bitter pill for NASA to swallow, having lost the race to put a man into space first to the Soviets. If anything however, the pressure was now even greater to get a man into space to prove that the United States could keep apace of the Soviets in outer space. No one was sure that the astronaut chosen to fly first would come back alive from the mission, yet Shepard volunteered to go anyway.
On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard climbed atop his Redstone rocket for the Mercury Redstone 3 mission, better known to history as Freedom 7. Many believed it to be a suicide mission that would kill the astronaut; Shepard himself added a brief bit of levity before the launch while strapped into his capsule, uttering the now-(in)famous “Shepard’s Prayer” (“Don’t f—k up, Shepard”). With all systems go, Shepard instructed launch control to proceed, and Alan Shepard left the earth to become the second human in history and the first American to travel to outer space. He would go on to splashdown successfully in the Atlantic Ocean, recovered by the USS Lake Champlain carrier and immortality.
Shepard’s career at NASA would wax and wane over the years to come; he was grounded by Ménière’s disease from 1964 to 1969 when a surgical procedure finally allowed him to be restored to flight status. Once again, he would face a call to courage when piloting the Apollo 14 mission to the Moon in 1971 following the near-disaster of Apollo 13. Shepard became the only Mercury Seven astronaut to walk on the Moon, going so far as to hit two golf balls off the lunar surface in the process, becoming the first and only golfer to putt out on two different worlds. He would pass away as a beloved American hero on July 21, 1998 from leukemia.
As a coda to the legacy of Shepard, on December 11, 2021 his daughter Laura Shepard Churchley would follow in her father’s footsteps by traveling to space as part of the Blue Origin program. The name of the ship that carried her up? The New Shepard 5.
Courage in action, indeed.
