Those were the words Alan Shepard used 60 years ago Wednesday to note his cockpit timepiece had begun running. This meant his Redstone rocket booster had left the ground sending him and his one-man ...

On the morning of May 5th, 1961, 37-year-old Alan Shepard woke up, ate a breakfast (consisting of a filet mignon wrapped in ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. On May 5, 1961, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to go to space. He launched from Cape Canaveral on a Mercury ...

As NASA fought to catch up to the Soviet Union in the space race, they selected a Navy veteran as the first astronaut. But ...

In the late 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a Space Race. The Soviets had already taken an early lead by launching the first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. Just weeks before ...

In May 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, a short suborbital mission that proved humans could survive launch, weightlessness, and reentry. Behind the calm headlines was Project ...

On the morning of May 5, 1961, the Mercury-Redstone 3 launch vehicle lifted into the sky from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. Over the next 15 minutes, Shepard ascended ...

Part 2 explores the dramatically different approaches to the launch systems, and the surprising similarities in the factors that contributed to their success. Although they served very different ...