Alan Shepard

American astronaut

• Born: November 18, 1923
• Birthplace: East Derry, New Hampshire
• Died: July 21, 1998
• Place of death: Monterey, California

Shepard flew the first U.S. piloted spaceflight in 1961 and became the only Project Mercury astronaut to walk on the Moon, only the seventh human to have done so.

Early Life

Alan Shepard was born to Colonel Alan B. Shepard and Renza Shepard in East Derry, Hew Hampshire. After attending primary school in East Derry, Shepard graduated from Pinkerton Academy in Derry. He spent a year studying at Admiral Farragut Academy in Toms River, New Jersey, prior to his acceptance into the United States Naval Academy. After several years of distinguished military service, Shepard studied at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, graduating in 1958.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), created on October 1, 1958, received primary authority for Project Mercury, which attempted to send the first humans into space. As a result, astronauts were required. Military service files of test pilots were studied, invitations for application were sent, and NASA accumulated a large set of candidates. Following rigorous medical examinations, psychological tests, and personal interviews, seven individuals were selected as the original Mercury astronauts. Shepard was among that select group.

NASA announced on February 22, 1961, that three astronauts John Glenn, Gus Grissom, and Shepard had been selected to train for the first suborbital Mercury flight. Which astronaut would make that first flight was not revealed until Shepard emerged from the Astronaut Quarters on May 2, 1961, fully suited, only to have poor weather prevent launch that day. By that time, NASA had lost the race to send the first human into space. On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had orbited Earth once in Vostok 1 before landing within the Soviet Union.

Life’s Work

Shepard’s next launch attempt came on May 5, 1961. Before sunrise, Shepard rode out to Pad 5-6. Leaving his transfer van, he paused to look up at the Redstone rocket about to hurtle him down the Atlantic Missile Range. Shepard slipped into his Mercury-Redstone 3 (Freedom 7) spacecraft and was hooked up to life support and communications systems therein. Technicians bolted closed the hatch. Minor difficulties were encountered during the remainder of the countdown. Each was overcome, but each delayed liftoff. The last, a faulty pressure gauge reading, surfaced less that three minutes before liftoff. Once resolved, the countdown continued until, at 9:34 a.m. eastern daylight time (EDT), the Redstone rocket rose from its pedestal. Shepard was on his way. The Redstone exhausted its fuel a little over two minutes into flight. Freedom 7 separated from the spent booster, and the escape tower jettisoned. Shepard assumed manual control and reoriented his spacecraft for retrofire.

Shepard briefly viewed the Earth below using a periscope extended from Freedom 7’s hull. He experienced five minutes of weightlessness before reentry, reaching a maximum altitude of 115 miles. Three retrorockets fired in turn, and then the retropack on which they were located separated from Freedom 7. The spacecraft hit the upper atmosphere at over five thousand miles per hour, slowing down to about three hundred miles per hour over the next minute, the result of which was to subject Shepard to ten times normal Earth gravity.

Parachute deployments occurred normally, and, at 9:50 a.m., Freedom 7 splashed down about one hundred miles from Grand Bahama Island. NASA’s first piloted spaceflight lasted fifteen minutes, twenty-two seconds. The spacecraft traveled 302 miles downrange from Cape Canaveral (now Cape Kennedy). Based on Shepard’s success, a prior chimpanzee (Ham) flight, and a subsequent suborbital flight by Virgil “Gus” Grissom (Liberty Bell 7), NASA was confident to move ahead with orbital missions, beginning with John Glenn’s three-orbit flight on February 20, 1962.

Later, as Project Gemini (the stepping stone between Mercury missions and Apollo lunar flights) evolved from design to test-flight stages, Shepard was considered for an early flight assignment. However, he was dropped from active astronaut status in 1963 and restricted to flying conventional aircraft only with a copilot, having developed Ménière’s syndrome, an inner-ear condition capable of inducing nausea, ringing ears, and vestibular disturbances. Shepard assumed the role of chief of the Astronaut Office but clung to hopes of flying in space again. In 1968 he secretly underwent an experimental surgical procedure. Detailed postsurgical testing by NASA doctors found no evidence of Ménière’s syndrome, and Shepard lobbied for active flight status restoration and assignment to a lunar landing. He received command of Apollo 13. NASA management did not approve and suggested that Shepard needed additional training time because he had been inactive so long. He and fellow crew members Edgar Mitchell and Stuart Roosa were bumped back to Apollo 14, and James Lovell, Fred Haise, and John Swigert moved up to the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission.

Apollo 13’s lunar landing site, the Fra Mauro highlands, was considered too scientifically significant to be missed. Fra Mauro held promise for sampling bedrock material excavated from deep below the lunar surface during the formation of Cone Crater. Originally, Apollo 14 was to land near the crater Censorinus in Mare Tranquilitatis relatively close to where Apollo 11 landed. Fra Mauro became Apollo 14’s landing site. Apollo 14 carried tremendous responsibility for continuing Moon flights in the aftermath of Apollo 13. Budget considerations had already cut three previously planned landings. NASA could not survive another aborted flight and maintain sufficient congressional support for the remaining Apollo missions.

Apollo 14 launched from Cape Canaveral at 4:03 p.m. on January 31, 1971, the thirteenth anniversary of Explorer 1, United States’ first orbital satellite. Ascent into orbit and subsequent translunar injection to boost Apollo 14 toward the Moon were both normal. A series of serious problems arose shortly thereafter, the first when the command and service module (Kitty Hawk) attempted to dock with the lunar module (Antares). Contact was made, but not a latched mating. If the two vehicles could not rigidly dock, Apollo 14’s lunar landing was impossible. On the sixth attempt, Kitty Hawk and Antares achieved hard dock and separated from their Saturn 5 rocket’s spent third stage.

Apollo 14 entered lunar orbit on February 4 amid concern over a suspect docking apparatus. Examination of the command module’s probe failed to relieve that concern or identify the cause of earlier difficulties. Kitty Hawk dropped down to an orbital low point of only eleven miles above the surface, the point from which Antares would begin its powered descent to touchdown.

On February 5, Antares separated from Kitty Hawk, but before its braking engine could fire, a major computer problem required resolution. A false signal was being sent to Antares guidance computer, one that would automatically trigger an abort twenty-six seconds after power descent initiation and send the astronauts back up to orbit. After two hours, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) computer specialists devised a software patch that circumvented that action. Then, as Antares steadily descended toward the lunar surface, the radar altimeter failed to lock on and provide critical altitude data to the guidance computer. After technicians recycled the radar’s circuit breaker, critical data started flowing at an altitude of just 2,500 feet.

Antares touched down at 4:17 a.m., resting in a small depression tilted 8 degrees. Five and one-half hours later, Shepard and lunar module pilot Mitchell stood on the surface at Fra Mauro to begin the first of two moonwalks, the primary focus of which was to assemble a small science station that would provide data for months after the astronauts returned home. One experiment required active data collection. Shepard and Mitchell fired small pyrotechnics while a seismometer registered subsurface vibrations. Before concluding the first moonwalk, there was time for collecting geological samples.

The second moonwalk began at 3:10 a.m. on February 6, this one dedicated to careful geological sampling during a traverse to the rim of Cone Crater. Shepard pulled behind him a special rickshawlike transporter in which he stored tools and samples during the climb up Cone Crater’s slope. The slope of the crater proved steeper than anticipated, and determination of position among the boulders and depressions was difficult. Shepard and Mitchell terminated their ascent and settled for sampling a promising boulder field just short of Cone Crater’s rim. Before returning to Antares, Shepard, an avid golfer, took time to chip a pair of golf balls using a sample-collecting tool affixed with a club head. With limited moon-suit mobility, Shepard could only swing one arm, but the balls went quite far in the reduced lunar gravity.

Antares lifted off from the Moon carrying Shepard, Mitchell, and 108 pounds of lunar samples at 1:49 p.m. on February 6. This time, docking was trouble free, and the journey home was devoid of nagging problems. Apollo 14 ended after slightly more than nine days with a gentle ocean splashdown.

Shepard returned to his post of chief astronaut, remaining in that capacity from June, 1971, until August 1, 1974. Shepard retired simultaneously from NASA and the Navy (at the rank of rear admiral) to enter private enterprise, joining the Marathon Construction Company in Houston, Texas. Shepard had other business ventures in his post-Apollo period and served as president of Seven-Fourteen Enterprises in Houston. He was instrumental in several different efforts to both memorialize early spaceflights and educate young people. Shepard, along with the other Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts, was inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame in Titusville, Florida, where the Kitty Hawk is on display.

Shepard had planned to be present at the Kennedy Space Center to view his former colleague John Glenn’s historic return to space after thirty-six years when the space shuttle Discovery launched in late 1998. Unfortunately, the United States’ first human in space succumbed to leukemia and passed away at age seventy-four on July 21, 1998. That passing was noted by all major Western media news services with great nostalgia and respect for Shepard’s contributions to the early years of the U.S. space program.

Significance

The name and contributions of Shepard loom large in the U.S. space program’s early history. His laurels include being the original Mercury astronaut, the first American in space, the seventh human to walk on the Moon, and the first astronaut to be posted as chief of the Astronaut Office. Shepard’s suborbital Mercury flight came three weeks after Russian cosmonaut Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth. Although Shepard’s flight only lasted fifteen minutes, Freedom 7 provided enough confidence for President John F. Kennedy to challenge the Soviets to achieve a piloted lunar landing before the end of the 1960’s. That challenge was issued nine months before NASA was even able to match Gagarin’s orbit with John Glenn’s Friendship 7 flight.

Bibliography

Caidin, Martin. Man Into Space. New York: Pyramid, 1961. Perhaps somewhat difficult to locate, this book provides an excellent account of the early days of the space program leading up to and including Shepard’s suborbital Freedom 7 flight told from that period’s viewpoint. The author is a noted writer of historical spaceflight books for the general audience.

Carpenter, M. Scott, et al. We Seven. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962. The original Mercury astronauts provided insight from personal experience as part of the first U.S. piloted space program. Four sections and one entire chapter were provided by Shepard. The chapter chronicles his Freedom 7 suborbital flight.

Shepard, Alan, et al. Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America’s Race to the Moon. Atlanta, Ga.: Turner, 1994. Plenty of texts chronicle the United States’ race to the Moon from an engineering, exploration, or political viewpoint. Written by two astronauts instrumental in the rich story of Apollo, assisted by two of the most experienced space journalists, this book provides the inside story of NASA’s golden age of piloted spaceflight, detailing Shepard’s participation in and supervision of that effort. A video version of this material is also available.

Slayton, Deke, with Michael Cassutt. Deke! U.S. Manned Space: From Mercury to the Shuttle. New York: Forge, 1994. Although an autobiography of Deke Slayton, this book also provides plenty of insight into the life of Alan Shepard, who, like Slayton, was an original Mercury astronaut and suffered a long period during which a medical condition forced him off active flight status. Slayton and Shepard developed a close friendship working together in the Astronaut Office.

Thomson, Neal. Light This Candle: The Life and Times of Alan Shepard, America’s First Spaceman. New York: Crown, 2000. Comprehensive biography based on exclusive access to Shepard’s private papers and interviews with his family and fellow astronauts.