🇺🇸Alan
Shepard

Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. was not the kind of man who accepted being second at anything. Born on November 18, 1923, in East Derry, New Hampshire, to a family with deep New England roots, he was studious, competitive, and possessed of a self-assurance that his teachers found either admirable or infuriating depending on whether they had been outmaneuvered by it yet. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1944, immediately deployed to the Pacific theater of World War II aboard the destroyer USS Cogswell, then came home and decided he wanted to fly. He earned his wings in 1947, became a test pilot, and by the mid-1950s was one of the Navy's most accomplished aviators, flying experimental aircraft off aircraft carriers in conditions that would have kept most pilots on the ground. He was selected as one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts in 1959 and immediately positioned himself as the frontrunner for the first flight.

The Mercury program had been designed to get an American into space before the Soviets, and for a year it looked like it might succeed. Shepard was chosen as the first to fly. His mission was scheduled for late 1960, then pushed back to early 1961 as engineers found problems and fixed them and found more problems. Then, on April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin completed a full orbit of the Earth in 108 minutes, and the calculus changed entirely. America had been beaten. Shepard, who had been sitting in his spacecraft on the launch pad for a countdown rehearsal when news of Gagarin's flight reached the control room, is reported to have said something unprintable. He was given the mission anyway — not an orbit, the rockets weren't powerful enough yet, but a suborbital flight, fifteen minutes above the atmosphere and back — and on May 5, 1961, twenty-three days after Gagarin, Alan Shepard climbed into the Mercury capsule he had named Freedom 7 and became the first American in space.

The Freedom 7 mission lasted fifteen minutes and twenty-two seconds. Shepard reached an altitude of 116 miles, experienced five minutes of weightlessness, and looked down at the curved edge of the Earth from a capsule the size of a telephone booth. He could see the coastlines of Florida. He felt the weight come back as the capsule re-entered the atmosphere and the g-forces climbed toward twelve, pressing him into his couch with the equivalent of twelve times his body weight. Then the parachutes deployed, the capsule splashed into the Atlantic, and a helicopter plucked him out of the water while a nation watched on television. He was not yet famous — that would come in the next hour — but he had done what he had been selected to do, and he had done it with precisely the level of coolness that his training and his character had prepared him for. President Kennedy called to congratulate him. Three weeks later, Kennedy announced the Moon program.

Shepard should have been a central figure in the Gemini program and the early Apollo missions, but in 1963 he was diagnosed with Ménière's disease, an inner ear disorder that causes disabling attacks of vertigo and removed him from flight status. He spent years watching his fellow Mercury astronauts fly while he was grounded, serving as chief of the Astronaut Office — a powerful administrative role, and an entirely insufficient substitute for flying. In 1969, an experimental surgical procedure called an endolymphatic shunt drained fluid from his inner ear and restored his balance. He immediately petitioned for reinstatement to flight status, was cleared, and was assigned to command Apollo 14.

Apollo 14 launched on January 31, 1971, and landed in the Fra Mauro highlands — the rugged lunar terrain that had been the intended landing site for Apollo 13 before that mission's near-fatal oxygen tank explosion. Shepard, at forty-seven, was the oldest person to have walked on the Moon. He named his lunar module Antares and his command module Kitty Hawk — a New Hampshire man's gesture toward the Wright Brothers. During his nine-hour moonwalk, he produced a makeshift six-iron assembled from a rock-sampling tool handle and a smuggled club head and hit two golf balls on the lunar surface, declaring that in the Moon's one-sixth gravity, the second ball went "miles and miles and miles." The balls actually traveled an estimated 40 yards and 200 yards respectively — but the spirit of the thing was exactly right. Here was a man who had waited ten years to get back into space, who had clawed his way back from a disabling illness through surgery and sheer refusal to accept his grounding, and his response to finally standing on the Moon was to play golf.

Shepard retired from NASA and the Navy in 1974, became a successful businessman, and remained a prominent figure in the astronaut community until his death from leukemia on July 21, 1998, at the age of seventy-four. His co-pilot on Apollo 14, Edgar Mitchell, died in 2016. His Mercury capsule Freedom 7 is on display at the United States Naval Academy. He was, in the judgment of many who knew him, the most competitive person in a group of people selected in part for their exceptional competitiveness — a man who turned his grounding from flight status into a decade of administrative mastery, turned an inner ear surgery into a second spaceflight, and turned a moment on the lunar surface into a golf joke that has been told approximately six hundred million times and never gets old.