Alan Shepard
Alan Shepard
Rear Admiral Alan Bartlett "Al" Shepard Jr.was an American naval officer and aviator, test pilot, one of the original NASA Mercury Seven astronauts, and businessman, who in May 1961 made the first manned Mercury flight. Shepard's craft entered space, but did not achieve orbit. He became the second person, and the first American, to travel into space, and the first person to manually control the orientation of his spacecraft...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAstronaut
Date of Birth18 November 1923
CityDerry, NH
CountryUnited States of America
I can hit it farther on the moon. But actually, my swing is better here on Earth.
I think about the personal accomplishment, but there's more of a sense of the grand achievement by all the people who could put this man on the moon.
Al is on the surface. And it's been a long way, but we're here.
On the periscope . . . . What a beautiful view. Cloud cover over Florida - three to four tenths near the eastern coast. Obscured up to Hatteras . . . I can see [lake] Okeechobee. Identify Andros Island. Identify the reefs.
Why don't you fix your little problem and light this candle?
I know you're all saying I can go to the moon but I can't find Pasadena.
There's no question that all the generations got excited about the first flights, with Kennedy's inspiration to go to the moon, leaving the planet for the first time, and fortunately coming back.
If somebody'd said before the flight, 'Are you going to get carried away looking at the Earth from the Moon?' I would have say, 'No, no way.' But yet when I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the Moon, I cried.
We need a continuing presence in space.
I didn't mind studying. Obviously math and the physical science subjects interested me more than some of the more artistic subjects, but I think I was a pretty good student.
We also knew it would be difficult, because of the financial condition of the family, for me to go to college.
Because of the suit I was wearing, I couldn't make a good pivot on the swing. And I had to hit the ball with one hand.
I think all of us certainly believed the statistics which said that probably 88% chance of mission success and maybe 96% chance of survival. And we were willing to take those odds.
So everything turned out fine, and we were given the opportunity to go to Washington and be briefed on the project of man in space, and given the opportunity to choose whether we wanted to get involved or not.