60 years ago today (May 5): Alan Shepard made U.S. space history

 

It seemed incredible at the time that President John F. Kennedy --- just 20 days after Alan B. Shepard Jr. became the first American in space with a 15-minute suborbital flight a mere three weeks after the Russians beat us by putting cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit on April 12, 1961, --- would commit us to going to the moon by the end of decade, but that’s exactly what he did.
The nation was still celebrating Shepard’s feat --- which occurred 60 years ago today, on May 5, 1961 --- when Kennedy boldly, and some would say foolishly, made what at the time seemed like an impossible promise.
Shepard’s flight --- the first in the Mercury program that established America’s manned presence in space --- was a long way off from the Apollo 11 flight a little more than eight years later; indeed, the lunar rockets and capsules hadn’t even been conceived yet, let alone designed or built.
But that’s what Kennedy did, because he believed in the country’s ability to embrace science and technology in order to reach what seemed like an insurmountable goal.
By doing that, Kennedy --- like the Original 7 Mercury astronauts --- had the Right Stuff.
We’ll need the Right Stuff again to overcome the pandemic and the 2021 divisions that plague us and threaten the very fabric of the country.
(NOTE: Shepard was followed into space by his fellow Mercury astronauts: second American in space Virgil "Gus" Grissom, John Glenn (the first American to orbit the Earth, which he did on Feb. 20, 1962), Scott Carpenter, Walter Schirra Jr. and Gordon Cooper, in May of 1963. The seventh Mercury astronaut, Donald "Deke" Slayton, was sidelined by a medical issue and didn’t fly into space until the July 1975 Apollo-Soyuz flight. He did become the head of the astronaut office, where he basically picked the crews for the Gemini and Apollo programs.)

This column appeared in The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, MA, on May 25, 2011, to commemorate the 50^th anniversary President John F. Kennedy’s address to Congress when he first committed the United States to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely before the end of the decade.

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"First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."
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Although President John F. Kennedy's inauguration speech on Jan. 20, 1961, yielded arguably Kennedy's most enduring quotation from his administration, the speech he delivered 50 years ago today (May 25, 1961), had a longer lasting effect on his legacy.
Kennedy challenged the nation to complete a seemingly unrealistic goal --- getting to the moon by 1970 --- even though the U.S. space program was at its infancy. Indeed, 50 years ago this month, the United States had just entered the space race in earnest after enduring two embarrassing setbacks at the hands of the Soviets --- Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin's flight.
Sputnik, of course, was the first manmade satellite that the Soviets orbited on Oct. 4, 1957. That launch set off alarms within the U.S. political, military and scientific communities, and sparked the decision by President Dwight Eisenhower and Congress to create the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Oct. 1, 1958. NASA soon named the nation's first astronauts --- the Original 7 of Project Mercury --- and the space race was on.
Project Mercury's aim was to get a man into orbit, which it eventually did, but not without a series of setbacks, notably with the launch vehicle. Still the United States was close to putting a man into space when the Soviets beat us again, sending cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit on April 12, 1961.
U.S. space officials were red-faced again, but three weeks after Gagarin's flight, on May 5, 1961, the United States finally put its first man into space, launching Alan B. Shepard on a 15-minute suborbital flight.
It was rather remarkable, therefore, with Shepard's short flight representing the total experience of the U.S. manned spaceflight program, that Kennedy decided to make his grandiose --- many said fanciful or outlandish --- commitment a mere 20 days later and almost nine months before John Glenn would become the first American to orbit the Earth on Feb. 20, 1962.
Kennedy's fateful address to Congress on May 25, 1961, set into motion a flurry of unprecedented activity in the country's scientific and educational communities as young men and women became more motivated to become scientists and engineers than ever before; many would join NASA and play vital roles in the Gemini and Apollo programs that followed Project Mercury. The result, of course, was Neil Armstrong's "giant leap for mankind" on the moon on July 20, 1969.
A half-century later, with NASA and the U.S. space program at a crossroads, America's future scientists will play a major role in the space program's next chapters. The next-to-last shuttle mission (Endeavour's final one) continues, with the landing planned for Monday. After that, the 30-year-old shuttle program will end with a final launch tentatively set for late summer.
At this point, it remains unclear whether we will have the political will to pull off a moon-like challenge (Moon colonies? Mars trip? Stations in deep space? Planetary exploration?). But schools seem to be doing their part toward training students to become the nation's next crop of scientists.
I got a firsthand look at the ingenuity of our younger students when I stopped by the Allen Avenue School's fourth-grade Science Symposium last month. The event at the North Attleboro elementary school featured displays that tackled a variety of intriguing topics, including: Tornadoes; earthquakes; iron in cereal; camouflage; plant growth; solar energy; vegetable growth; rocket flight; the taste of cookie dough if left in the refrigerator before baking; burned cookies; determining why some sodas float and others don't; what triggers sneezing; how to make the best invisible ink; the spread of rabies among wild animals; mold; right brain-vs.-left brain functioning; the health of our water; soda as a rust-removing agent, the thorny issue of whose mouth is cleaner --- dog, cat or human; magnets; how a catapult works; liquids and sound; static electricity; the growth of crystals; which snacks taste better; and how music affects a guinea pig's run through a maze.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the symposium was getting young students familiar with the scientific process. That is an important step if the nation is going to have the capacity to meet the scientific challenges that await us on Earth and in space.