Alan Shepard

Alan Shepard: Fifteen Minutes, Then a Decade on the Ground

The flight that made Alan Shepard famous lasted about fifteen minutes and never went into orbit. It came twenty-three days after Yuri Gagarin had circled the entire planet, which meant that the first American in space was, by any technical measure, comprehensively second. What Shepard did next is the more interesting story: he lost his flight status to an inner-ear disease, spent most of a decade running other men's careers from a desk, had himself surgically repaired, and at forty-seven walked on the Moon.

East Derry and Annapolis

He was born on 18 November 1923 in East Derry, New Hampshire. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1944 and went straight to the Pacific war, serving aboard the destroyer USS *Cogswell*.

Aviation came afterwards. He won his naval aviator's wings in 1947, went through the Naval Test Pilot School, and qualified as a test pilot in 1951, working on high-altitude aircraft and on the specific horror of carrier deck landings. He completed the Naval War College at Newport in 1957. It is a conventional path made unusual only by how completely he finished each stage of it: academy, war, wings, test school, war college.

The Mercury Seven

In April 1959 NASA named its first seven astronauts, and Shepard was among them. The selection drew almost entirely on military test pilots, for a reason that was clear at the time: the job consisted of riding an unproven rocket built by the lowest bidder, and the profession that came closest to it was flying prototype aircraft nobody had yet certified as survivable.

It was not an obvious career move. The Mercury programme had flown nothing and proved nothing, and the men who joined it were giving up conventional advancement in the armed services for a project that might be cancelled or might kill them. Shepard was thirty-five, a Naval War College graduate with eight years of test flying behind him, and had a settled naval career to walk away from.

5 May 1961

Shepard flew *Freedom 7*, a Mercury capsule, on a Redstone booster on 5 May 1961. The flight was suborbital, reaching roughly 115 to 116 miles in altitude and lasting about fifteen and a half minutes from launch to splashdown. It made him the first American in space.

The context is worth keeping in view. Gagarin's orbital flight on 12 April had already answered the question of whether a human being could survive spaceflight. Shepard's contribution was not the discovery but the demonstration — American, televised, and made by a man sitting on top of a booster that was still very much a new machine.

Grounded

In 1964 he was diagnosed with Ménière's disease, a disorder of the inner ear that produces vertigo, and NASA took away his flight status. For an operational pilot this is ordinarily the end.

Instead he became chief of the Astronaut Office, running it from 1963 to 1969 — the man who decided which of his colleagues flew which missions during the years that took America to the Moon. In 1969 he had corrective surgery, and it worked. He was restored to flight status after five years on the ground and nearly a decade after his only spaceflight. After Apollo 14 he went back to the same desk, running the Astronaut Office again from 1971 until he left NASA.

Fra Mauro

He commanded Apollo 14, which flew from 31 January to 9 February 1971 with Stuart Roosa and Edgar Mitchell. Shepard and Mitchell made the first landing in the Fra Mauro highlands and worked the surface, returning with more than a hundred pounds of lunar samples and deploying a set of experiments.

He also brought a golf club head, improvised onto the handle of a sample-collection tool, and hit two balls one-handed in a pressure suit. It remains the single most-repeated fact about him, which is either a comment on the public or on Shepard's instinct for what the public would remember.

Why Alan Is Called a Genius

This is the thinnest genius claim here, and it should be said plainly: Shepard was no scientist, published no research, advanced no theory. *Freedom 7* was a fifteen-minute ballistic arc Gagarin had already pre-empted.

The real skill was test piloting, worth describing rather than waving at. A test pilot takes a machine nobody fully understands to the edge of what it can do, reads instruments accurately under g-load and genuine fear, distinguishes an instrument fault from a structural one in seconds, and comes back with data precise enough to be useful. It is applied engineering performed by a person who is also the experiment's most fragile component. He was good enough to be picked from the entire American military pilot pool, and good enough afterwards that NASA put him in charge of judging everyone else's readiness to fly.

The second quality is patient nerve. Riding a Redstone in 1961 took one sort of courage. Accepting six years behind a desk, undergoing elective ear surgery on the chance it might restore his licence, then commanding a lunar landing at forty-seven took a rarer sort.

The counter-case is straightforward. His fame rests on being first by nationality rather than by achievement; Apollo 14, the mission that mattered scientifically, was a crewed operation whose value lies in its samples, not in any individual insight of its commander; and the thing everyone remembers is the golf shot. Call it superb operational craft, exceptional courage, and a talent for the historically legible gesture. Genius, strictly, is somebody else's word.

Legacy

Shepard retired from NASA and from the Navy in 1974, leaving with the rank of rear admiral, and went into private business in Texas, alongside volunteer work in education. He held the NASA Distinguished Service Medal and the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. In 1994 he co-authored *Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon*.

He died of leukaemia on 21 July 1998 in Monterey, California, at seventy-four. His flight log runs from a fifteen-minute hop above the Atlantic to the lunar highlands: the whole arc of the American space programme, compressed into one man's career, with a five-year grounding in the middle that ought by every precedent to have ended it.

Achievements

• National Aviation Hall of Fame — 1977
• Affiliated with National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• Educated at Naval War College, Admiral Farragut Academy and United States Naval Test Pilot School
• Worked as naval officer, astronaut and aircraft pilot