On May 5, 1961, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to go to space.
He launched from Cape Canaveral on a Mercury-Redstone rocket in a space capsule named Freedom 7.
This was the first manned flight of Project Mercury, which NASA created to put astronauts in orbit.
Shepard launched just three weeks after the Soviet Union launched the first person into orbit.
Shepard’s flight was suborbital and lasted only 15 minutes, but he did experience weightlessness.
During the flight, he tested the capsule’s attitude control system and retrorockets, which would be used to help future orbital missions land.
Source: https://www.space.com/39251-on-this-day-in-space.html
