Alan Shepard

• 1. Introduction

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  Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. awoke at 01:10 on the 5th of May 1961, ate a breakfast of orange juice, a filet mignon wrapped in bacon, and scrambled eggs, then climbed into a spacecraft perched atop a Redstone rocket. He had been strapped into that capsule for over four hours when his endurance gave out and he was forced to empty his bladder into his suit. Medical sensors had to be switched off to keep them from shorting out in the pooled urine. And yet, when that rocket finally lit and lifted him off the pad, millions of Americans watched live on television as one of their own became the first of their countrymen to reach space.

  Shepard was the second person in history to make that journey, beaten by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin by just twenty-three days. He was grounded for years afterward by a disease that made the world spin and roar in his inner ear. He came back from that, too, and in 1971 he walked on the Moon at age 47, the oldest person ever to do so. What drove a boy from Derry, New Hampshire, who cycled to an airfield doing odd jobs in exchange for the occasional flight, to the surface of another world? That question runs through everything that follows.

• 2. Roots in Derry

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  At 64 East Derry Road in Derry, New Hampshire, Alan Shepard was born on the 18th of November 1923. His family tree reached back to the Mayflower passenger Richard Warren, and through the Shepard line to Scottish emigrants from Berneray in the Outer Hebrides. His grandmother, Annie Bartlett Shepard, served as State Regent of the New Hampshire Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution. His father, known as Bart, worked at the Derry National Bank and had served in France with the American Expeditionary Force during World War I.

  At Adams School in Derry, Shepard's academic performance was sharp enough to skip the sixth grade. He skipped the eighth grade too, at Oak Street School. Pinkerton Academy, a private school in Derry that his own father had attended and where his grandfather had been a trustee, took him in 1936. His Christmas present in 1938 was a flight in a Douglas DC-3. The following year he began cycling to Manchester Airfield, trading odd jobs for rides and informal flying lessons. The fascination was already fixed.

  He passed the Naval Academy entrance exam in 1940 but was sixteen and too young to enter. The Navy sent him to Admiral Farragut Academy, a prep school for Annapolis, where tests returned an IQ of 145. His grades at Farragut were mediocre. He graduated from Annapolis with the Class of 1945 on the 6th of June 1944, ranked 463rd out of 915, commissioned as an ensign. During his Christmas break in 1942, at Principia College visiting his sister Pauline, he met Louise Brewer. He became secretly engaged to her the following month after graduation. They married on the 3rd of March 1945 at St. Stephen's Lutheran Church in Wilmington, Delaware, with his father Bart serving as best man.

• 3. War and Wings

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  In August 1944, Shepard was posted to the destroyer USS Cogswell, already deployed on active service in the Pacific. He joined it when it put in at Ulithi on the 30th of October. Within two days the ship helped rescue 172 sailors from a cruiser torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. In December 1944, Typhoon Cobra battered the fleet and sank three other destroyers. In January 1945, Cogswell battled kamikazes in the invasion of Lingayen Gulf.

  On his second cruise, Shepard was appointed gunnery officer, responsible for the 20 mm and 40 mm antiaircraft guns on the bow. Cogswell served as a radar picket during the Battle of Okinawa, from the 27th of May until the 26th of June 1945. Radar pickets were the first ships Japanese aircraft spotted on approach, which made them the most exposed to attack. The ship later participated in the Allied naval bombardments of Japan and was present in Tokyo Bay for the Surrender of Japan in September 1945.

  Flight training began in earnest in January 1946 at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi. Shepard was an average student and faced being dropped from the program. He paid for private lessons at a local civilian flying school, something the Navy frowned on, and earned a civil pilot's license to supplement his progress. By early 1947 his instructors rated him above average. He received his naval aviator wings at Pensacola, with his father pinning them on his chest. In 1950 he was selected for the United States Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, graduating in January 1951. By that point he had narrowly escaped court-martial after looping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and making low passes over the beach at Ocean City, Maryland. His superiors John Hyland and Robert M. Elder interceded on his behalf.

• 4. The Mercury Seven

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  On the 4th of October 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1. The moment shattered American confidence and set off what became known as the Sputnik crisis. NASA was established on the 1st of October 1958, and Project Mercury, announced publicly on the 17th of December 1958, set the goal of launching a man into Earth orbit and returning him safely.

  NASA screened the service records of 508 graduates of military test pilot schools, narrowing the field to 110 who met minimum standards: under 40, a bachelor's degree or equivalent, and no taller than 5 feet 11 inches. That height limit was firm because of the cramped dimensions of the Mercury spacecraft. The first group of 35, which included Shepard, assembled at the Pentagon on the 2nd of February 1959. That evening Shepard talked over the day's events with fellow naval aviators Jim Lovell, Pete Conrad, and Wally Schirra. They were worried about their careers, but they agreed to volunteer.

  After grueling physical and psychological tests at the Lovelace Clinic and the Wright Aerospace Medical Laboratory, only Jim Lovell was eliminated on medical grounds, and that diagnosis was later found to be wrong. Director Robert R. Gilruth found he could not choose just six from the final eighteen candidates and selected seven. Shepard learned of his selection on the 1st of April 1959. Two days later he traveled to Boston with Louise for a cousin's wedding and shared the news with his parents and sister. The Mercury Seven were publicly announced at a press conference at Dolley Madison House in Washington on the 9th of April 1959: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton. On the night of the 18th of May 1959, the seven gathered at Cape Canaveral to watch their first rocket launch. An SM-65D Atlas exploded spectacularly a few minutes after liftoff. Turning to Glenn, Shepard said: "Well, I'm glad they got that out of the way."

• 5. Freedom 7

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  Facing stiff competition from the other astronauts, particularly John Glenn, Shepard quit smoking and took up Glenn's morning jog. On the 19th of January 1961, Robert Gilruth told the seven that Shepard had been chosen for the first American crewed mission. When Shepard told Louise she had her arms around the man who would be first in space, her reply was: "Who let a Russian in here?" His flight was originally scheduled for the 26th of April 1960 but was pushed back five times before it reached its final date. On the 12th of April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space. When Shepard heard the news, he slammed his fist on a table so hard a NASA public relations officer feared he might have broken his hand.

  On the 5th of May 1961, the Mercury-Redstone 3 mission launched. Shepard named his capsule Freedom 7. The flight stayed on a suborbital trajectory for fifteen minutes, reaching an altitude of 101.2 nautical miles before splashing down 263.1 nautical miles down the Atlantic Missile Range. Unlike Gagarin's 108-minute orbital flight in a Vostok spacecraft three times the size of Freedom 7, Shepard had some control of his craft, spacecraft attitude in particular. The entire recovery process after splashdown took eleven minutes.

  Gene Kranz, in his 2000 book Failure Is Not an Option, recorded what Shepard said when reporters asked what he thought about while waiting for liftoff: "The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder." After recovery, Shepard said he "didn't really feel the flight was a success until the recovery had been successfully completed. It's not the fall that hurts; it's the sudden stop." President John F. Kennedy awarded him the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. Ticker-tape parades followed in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. One practical consequence of his discomfort in the suit led directly to the liquid waste collection feature built into Gus Grissom's suit for the Mercury-Redstone 4 flight the following July.

• 6. Grounded by Meniere's

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  In late 1963, Shepard began hearing a loud, clanging noise in his left ear, accompanied by episodes of extreme dizziness and nausea. He tried to hide it, knowing that a similar episode in flight or in space could be fatal. After an episode during a lecture in Houston, he confessed to Deke Slayton, who by then was Director of Flight Operations. Doctors diagnosed Ménière's disease, a condition in which fluid pressure builds up in the inner ear, making the semicircular canals and motion detectors hypersensitive. On top of this, they found glaucoma. An X-ray turned up a lump on his thyroid. On the 17th of January 1964, surgeons at Hermann Hospital removed 20 percent of his thyroid.

  Shepard had already been designated commander of the first crewed Gemini mission, with Thomas P. Stafford as his pilot. That assignment evaporated. Grissom and John Young flew Gemini 3 instead. Shepard was named Chief of the Astronaut Office in November 1963, responsible for training programs, mission scheduling, and astronaut input into spacecraft design. He also sat on the selection panel for the NASA Astronaut Group 5 in 1966.

  Tom Wolfe, in The Right Stuff, captured the two sides of Shepard that those around him came to know: "Smilin' Al" and the "Icy Commander." His secretary Gaye Alford kept two photographs of him, one smiling and one grim, and hung the appropriate one on her office door each morning to warn visitors what kind of day it would be. Shepard spent much of his grounded period investing in banks and real estate, including a part-ownership stake in a ranch in Weatherford, Texas, that raised horses and cattle. In 1968, fellow astronaut Tom Stafford came to his office with news that an otologist in Los Angeles had developed a surgical cure.

• 7. Apollo 14 and the Moon

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  On the 14th of May 1968, Shepard checked into St. Vincent's Hospital in Los Angeles under the pseudonym Victor Poulos. Otologist William F. House opened his mastoid bone, made a tiny hole in the endolymphatic sac, and inserted a small tube to drain excess fluid. The surgery succeeded. Shepard was restored to full flight status on the 7th of May 1969.

  Deke Slayton put him down to command Apollo 13. When the crew assignments went to NASA headquarters, George Mueller rejected them as too inexperienced. Jim Lovell, who had been scheduled for Apollo 14, agreed to swap and take Apollo 13 instead. Apollo 13 then suffered an oxygen tank explosion that aborted the Moon landing and nearly killed its crew. Shepard and Lovell turned it into a running joke between them, with Lovell offering to give Shepard the mission back every time they crossed paths. The failure of Apollo 13 pushed Apollo 14 into 1971 and switched its target to the Fra Mauro formation, the original destination of Apollo 13.

  Shepard flew as commander of Apollo 14 from the 31st of January to the 9th of February 1971. He piloted the Lunar Module Antares. At 47, he became the fifth person and the oldest to walk on the Moon, and the only member of the original Mercury Seven to do so. On the lunar surface, he attached a Wilson six-iron head to a lunar sample scoop handle and, hampered by thick gloves and a stiff suit, struck two golf balls with one hand. He joked that the second went "miles and miles and miles." Analysis of high-resolution film scans later put the first shot at about 24 yards and the second at about 40 yards. Apollo 14 was also the first mission to broadcast extensive color television coverage from the lunar surface, using the Westinghouse Lunar Color Camera.

• 8. Life After the Moon

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  President Richard Nixon appointed Shepard a delegate to the 26th United Nations General Assembly, a position he held from September to December 1971. Nixon also promoted him to rear admiral on the 26th of August 1971, making him the first astronaut to reach that rank. He retired from both NASA and the Navy on the 31st of July 1974.

  In civilian life, Shepard served on the boards of many corporations and ran Seven Fourteen Enterprises, an umbrella company he named after his two flights, Freedom 7 and Apollo 14. In 1984, along with the other surviving Mercury astronauts and Betty Grissom, Gus Grissom's widow, he founded the Mercury Seven Foundation to fund college scholarships in science and engineering. The organization was renamed the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation in 1995. Shepard served as its first president and chairman until October 1997, when he was succeeded by Jim Lovell.

  In 1994, Shepard published Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon with journalists Jay Barbree and Howard Benedict, and with fellow Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton as a co-author. The book was turned into a television miniseries that same year. He was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 1996 and died on the 21st of July 1998 in Pebble Beach, California. Louise Shepard planned to scatter his ashes, but before she could, she died of a heart attack on the 25th of August 1998 at 17:00, the same time of day at which Shepard had always called her when they were apart. They had been married for 53 years. Their ashes were scattered together from a Navy helicopter over Stillwater Cove in front of their home. On the 11th of December 2021, their daughter Laura Shepard Churchley flew suborbitally above the Karman line aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft, the vehicle named in her father's honor.