Mercury-Redstone 3

• 1. Introduction

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  Mercury-Redstone 3, known to the world as Freedom 7, carried Alan Shepard into space on the 5th of May, 1961, making him the first American ever to leave the Earth's atmosphere. The flight lasted 15 minutes and 22 seconds. That is all the time Shepard needed to change the course of a nation's ambitions. But the road to those 15 minutes was longer, stranger, and more precarious than most people realize. A chimpanzee had nearly drowned in the Atlantic. A rocket had been swapped out at the last moment. A countdown stretched more than two and a half hours past its scheduled end. And when the moment finally came, Shepard was lying on his back in a capsule with a full bladder, watching the clock. What drove a mission so close to disaster before it ever left the ground, and what did Shepard actually do once he got there?

• 2. A Difficult Road to the Pad

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  Mercury capsule number 7 arrived at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on the 9th of December, 1960, and immediately began causing problems. Engineers had hoped to be ready for launch not long after the hardware arrived, but the capsule required so much rework that a tentative launch date of March 6 came and went without a flight. The booster originally assigned to the mission, Redstone number 3, had been repurposed for a test flight in December and was no longer available. Its replacement, Redstone number 7, did not reach the Cape until late March.

  The delays were not just logistical. A deep anxiety about the Redstone rocket had been building since the MR-2 test flight, which carried a chimpanzee named Ham. That flight went badly: the capsule flew too high, too far, and too fast. The re-entry subjected Ham to 14.7 g instead of the planned figure of roughly 12 g. The splashdown landed sixty miles from the nearest recovery ship, and it took more than two and a half hours before a helicopter could reach the capsule. By that point it had nearly sunk with Ham still inside.

  NASA refused to fly a crewed mission until those problems were fixed. By late February, engineers had identified seven major alterations to the booster that still required testing. An extra flight, known as MR-BD for Booster Development, was added to the schedule and launched on March 28, pushing the crewed mission back by a month. MR-BD went almost completely successfully, and the path finally cleared. Robert R. Gilruth, head of the program, had already chosen his crew in early January: Alan Shepard of the Navy as primary pilot, with John Glenn of the Marines and Gus Grissom of the Air Force as backups. Their names were announced to the press together on the 22nd of February, with no indication of who was actually expected to fly.

• 3. The Name That Started a Tradition

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  Shepard called his capsule Freedom 7, and the reasoning he gave was simple. "Pilots have always named their planes," he said. "It's a tradition. It never occurred to me not to name the capsule." He talked the name over with his wife Louise, with backup pilot John Glenn, and with Gilruth. All of them liked it.

  The number 7 carried a double meaning from the start. On one level it honored NASA's first group of astronauts, the Mercury Seven, of whom Shepard was one. On another level, it reflected a more concrete fact: the capsule itself was McDonnell factory model number 7. Both readings were in play simultaneously, and Shepard's choice set a pattern that every subsequent Mercury astronaut followed. All six crewed Mercury spacecraft ended their names with the number 7. Shepard had established two precedents at once: that Mercury capsules would be named at all, and that those names would share a common structure.

• 4. Launch Day

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  The first attempt to launch came on the 2nd of May, 1961, and failed before it began. Weather problems forced the scrub two hours and 20 minutes before the scheduled launch time, with Shepard already suited up in a hangar. A second attempt two days later was delayed again by weather, ultimately setting the lift-off for the 5th of May with an expected launch time of 7:20 a.m. Eastern.

  Shepard's countdown began the previous night at 8:30 p.m. He ate breakfast that morning: steak and eggs, toast, coffee, and orange juice. That meal would soon become a pre-launch tradition for American astronauts. He was inside the capsule by 5:15 a.m., more than two hours before the planned lift-off. At 7:05 a.m. the count stopped for an hour to allow cloud cover to clear, because good visibility was needed for photography of the Earth, and to fix a power supply unit. Then the count stopped again so engineers could reboot a computer at Goddard Space Flight Center.

  By the time the holds were resolved, Shepard had been lying on his back in the capsule for nearly three hours. He told the blockhouse crew that he needed to urinate. Because the mission was expected to run under 20 minutes, no one had thought to include a urine collection device. The crew explained that letting him out would require setting up the White Room again and unbolting the hatch, costing significant time. Shepard replied that he would simply go in his suit. When the blockhouse objected that urine would short out the medical electrodes attached to his body, he told them to turn the power off. They did. Because of his position and the oxygen flowing through the suit, he dried out within a reasonable time. After the flight, Mercury suits were modified to include a liquid waste collection device.

  Mercury-Redstone 3 lifted off at 9:34 a.m. Eastern. An estimated 45 million television viewers in the United States watched it happen.

• 5. What Shepard Did Up There

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  Two minutes and 22 seconds after lift-off, the Redstone engine shut down. Shepard had endured a peak acceleration of 6.3 g. Freedom 7's space-fixed velocity at that point was 5,134 mph, close to the planned value. Ten seconds after the booster shut down, explosive bolts on the Marman clamping ring fired, separating the capsule, which then used its posigrade rockets to pull away from the spent booster. The automatic attitude control system yawed the capsule around 180 degrees so the heat shield faced forward.

  Shepard then began testing manual control of the spacecraft, taking over one axis at a time: pitch first, then yaw, then roll. He found that the manual response felt roughly the same as the Mercury simulator on the ground, though he could not hear the control jets firing due to background noise in the capsule. He also looked through the periscope at the Earth below. During the long wait on the launch pad he had inserted a medium-gray filter in the periscope to cut sun glare, and he never managed to remove it during the flight: reaching for the filter knob caused his suit's wrist to bump the handle that would have manually activated the launch escape system. Even though the escape tower was long gone, Shepard left the filter in place rather than risk the handle. The gray filter washed out colors, but he was still able to identify the east coast of Florida, Lake Okeechobee, and Andros Island, the largest island in the Bahamas.

  At apogee, an altitude of roughly 115 miles, the sequence for retrofire began. A misunderstanding about the capsule's pitch indicator led Shepard to place the spacecraft at a slightly wrong angle during the retrorocket burn: the indicator's reference position had been updated from -43 degrees to -34 degrees, but Shepard had not been told. He compensated for the old setting, leaving his actual pitch too high. For this suborbital mission the error made no practical difference to where he landed. After retrofire, Shepard switched to fly-by-wire mode, reporting that it felt smooth and gave him a clear sense of being fully in control. He held that control through re-entry until g-forces peaked at 11.6 g, then handed off to the automated system.

  A drogue parachute deployed at roughly 21,000 feet and a main parachute at 10,000 feet. Splashdown, the source notes, felt comparable to landing a jet aircraft on an aircraft carrier. Freedom 7 tilted about 60 degrees onto its right side but showed no signs of leaking and righted itself after a minute. A recovery helicopter arrived, lifted the capsule partly from the water, and Shepard squeezed out through the main hatch and into a sling hoist. The entire recovery process, from splashdown to arrival aboard USS Lake Champlain, took eleven minutes.

• 6. Context and Aftermath

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  Three weeks before Shepard's flight, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had completed one full orbit of the Earth aboard Vostok 1, becoming the first human in space. That fact hung over the American achievement. The mission was a technical success, but the satisfaction of reaching space was complicated by the knowledge that the United States had arrived second.

  Engineers who examined Freedom 7 after recovery found it in such good condition that they concluded it could have been flown again. NASA gave the capsule to the Smithsonian Institution. It was displayed for a period at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and in 2012 it appeared at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts. Beginning on the 5th of May, 2021, the 60th anniversary of the flight, Freedom 7 went on display at the Smithsonian's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. It now resides at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2017, the first National Astronaut Day was held on May 5 as a tribute to the flight that Shepard and Freedom 7 made possible.

• 7. Freedom 7 in Popular Culture

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  In June 1961, Laurie Records released a 45 rpm single by William Allen and Orchestra titled "Space Flight Freedom 7," with recreations of tower-to-astronaut communications laid over instrumental music. The record appeared within weeks of the flight itself, a measure of how quickly the mission entered the public imagination.

  Tom Wolfe documented the Mercury-Redstone 3 mission in his 1979 book The Right Stuff, and Philip Kaufman adapted it for his 1983 film of the same name, with Scott Glenn playing Shepard. The 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon revisited the mission in its episode "Can We Do This?", with Ted Levine in the role of Shepard. The 2016 film Hidden Figures cast Dane Davenport as Shepard, and the 2020 miniseries The Right Stuff featured Jake McDorman in the part.

  The mission also found a place in the 2008 video game Fallout 3, which imagines an alternate timeline diverging from reality after World War II. Players can visit a museum exhibit about a variant of the mission called Defiance 7, supposedly launched on the same date of the 5th of May 1961, and piloted by a fictional astronaut named Carl Bell. In that game's version of history, Bell became the first human in space but did not survive the flight, dying in a crash landing. His skeleton and suit are on display in the game's Museum of Technology, located in the ruins of a post-nuclear Washington, D.C.