Alan Shepard

Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. was born on 18 November 1923 in Derry, New Hampshire, into an old New England family. He earned a Bachelor of Science from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1944 and served aboard a destroyer in the closing months of the Second World War before earning his naval aviator wings. A gifted and famously competitive pilot, he graduated from the Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River and flew experimental aircraft, logging thousands of hours as a test pilot. In 1959 NASA selected him as one of the Mercury Seven, the original American astronauts, and from that group he was chosen to make the very first crewed flight.

On 5 May 1961, Shepard rode a Mercury-Redstone rocket into space aboard the capsule he named Freedom 7, becoming the first American in space. The flight was suborbital, lasting about fifteen minutes and reaching an altitude of roughly 187 kilometres before splashing down in the Atlantic — a shorter journey than Gagarin's orbital flight three weeks earlier, but a decisive demonstration that the United States could put a human in space and recover him. Shepard's career was then interrupted by Ménière's disease, an inner-ear disorder that grounded him in the mid-1960s and threatened to end his flying days. Surgery corrected the condition, and he returned to flight status to command Apollo 14 in 1971. Launching on 31 January and returning to Earth on 9 February, the mission set down in the Fra Mauro highlands, and Shepard, at 47, became the fifth person to walk on the Moon and the only one of the Mercury Seven to do so. During the second of his two moonwalks he improvised a golf club from a sample-collection tool and hit two golf balls across the lunar surface, a moment that became one of the most famous of the Apollo era.

Across his two flights Shepard logged nearly 217 hours in space and about nine hours of lunar surface activity. He was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor and served as Chief of the Astronaut Office at NASA, mentoring the astronauts who followed. After retiring he became a successful businessman in banking and real estate, and he helped found the Mercury Seven Foundation (later the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation) to fund science and engineering students. In 1994 he co-authored the memoir "Moon Shot," a firsthand account of America's race to the Moon. Shepard died of leukemia on 21 July 1998 at the age of 74; his wife of more than five decades, Louise, died just weeks later. He is remembered as the steely, driven pilot who opened America's human spaceflight program and, a decade later, planted his own bootprints on another world.