Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mercury-Redstone 3, also called Freedom 7, was the first United States human spaceflight. It launched on the 5th of May, 1961, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, piloted by astronaut Alan Shepard.
The Freedom 7 flight lasted 15 minutes and 22 seconds. It was a suborbital mission that reached an altitude of 116.5 statute miles and traveled a downrange distance of 302.8 statute miles.
Shepard named the capsule Freedom 7 as both a tribute to NASA's first group of seven astronauts, the Mercury Seven, and a reference to the fact that the spacecraft was McDonnell factory model number 7. He cited the tradition of pilots naming their aircraft. The naming set a precedent that all six crewed Mercury spacecraft followed, each ending its name with the number 7.
Robert R. Gilruth, head of the Mercury program, selected Shepard as the primary pilot in early January 1961. John Glenn and Gus Grissom served as his backups. Their names were announced together to the press on the 22nd of February, with no public indication of who would actually fly until after the initial launch attempt was scrubbed.
Engineers found Freedom 7 in such good condition after splashdown that they determined it could have flown again. NASA donated it to the Smithsonian Institution. It was displayed at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, then at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston in 2012. Beginning on the 5th of May, 2021, it went on display at the Smithsonian's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, and it currently resides at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
The mission appears in Tom Wolfe's 1979 book The Right Stuff and Philip Kaufman's 1983 film adaptation, with Scott Glenn playing Shepard. It was also dramatized in the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, with Ted Levine as Shepard, in the 2016 film Hidden Figures with Dane Davenport, and in the 2020 miniseries The Right Stuff with Jake McDorman.