NASA Celebrates 50 Years of American Human Spaceflight Tomorrow

Fifty years ago tomorrow, May 5, Alan Shepard became the first American to reach space. Although his 15 minute flight was only suborbital, not orbital like Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s on April 12, it gave President John F. Kennedy enough confidence to announce just three weeks later the goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth by the end of the decade.

Shepard launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS), FL in a Mercury capsule atop a Redstone rocket. The event is being commemorated tomorrow at CCAFS, adjacent to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, at 9:00 am EDT and will be covered live on NASA TV. Shepard died in 1998. He was one of the original seven astronauts selected in 1959. Scott Carpenter, another member of that group, will be at the event tomorrow. It includes a recreation of the flight and recovery, and a tribute to Shepard’s second spaceflight, Apollo 14. (Shepard was grounded for most of the 1960s because of an inner ear disorder.)

The U.S. Postal Service released a stamp honoring Shepard’s flight earlier today.