vbid/9783319011561

Description

Inevitably, there are times in a nation�s history when its hopes, fears and con�dence in its own destiny appear to hinge on the fate of a single person. One of these pivotal moments occurred on the early morning of May 5, 1961, when a 37-year-old test pilot squeezed himself into the con�nes of the tiny Mercury spacecraft that he had named Freedom 7. On that historic day, U.S. Navy Commander Alan Shepard carried with him the hopes, prayers, and anxieties of a nation as his Redstone rocket blasted free of the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, hurling him upwards on a 15-minute suborbital �ight that also propelled the United States into the bold new frontier of human space exploration. This book tells the enthralling story of that pioeering �ight as recalled by many of the participants in the Freedom 7 story, including Shepard himself, with anecdotal details and tales never before revealed in print. Although beaten into space just three weeks earlier by the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, Alan Shepard�s history-making mission aboard Freedom 7 nevertheless provided America�s �rst tentative step into space that would one day see its Apollo astronauts � including Alan Shepard � walk on the Moon.Typham this is the title: Freedom 7 The Historic Flight of Alan B. Shepard, Jr.