“LIGHT THIS CANDLE!”

At 1:30 am on 5 May, the prime and backup astronauts, clad in bathrobes, met again at breakfast, before parting. Glenn headed out to the pad to check Freedom 7, while Shepard underwent his pre-flight examination, conducted by physician Bill Douglas. He was instrumented with biosensors – four electrocardiograph pads, glued to his chest, then a respirometer taped to his neck and a rectal thermometer to gauge deep body temperatures – before being helped into a set of long underwear with built-in spongy pads to aid air circulation. He would confess later to “some butterflies” in anticipation of the impending flight and began the 15-minute effort to squeeze into his silver pressure suit, securing zips and connectors and ensuring that the rubber and aluminium-coated nylon garment and his portable, briefcase-like air-condition­ing unit were ready. The latter proved essential: by the time he had donned his suit, wrote Time magazine, Shepard was sweating profusely and breathing hard.

The suit had been designed and built by the B. F. Goodrich Company, under a $98,000 contract awarded by NASA in July 1959, and followed similar principles to the Mark IV pressure garments worn by Navy fighter pilots. The company already had a long history in the field. Indeed, Goodrich engineer Russell Colley, who led the Mercury suit effort, had designed the pressurised ensemble worn by the legendary Thirties aviation pioneer Wiley Post. However, unlike the military Mark IV, which was hampered by problems of weight and mobility, the Mercury suit employed elastic cording, which arrested its tendency to ‘balloon’. Moreover, at just 9.97 kg, it was the lightest military pressure suit yet built. Its other key features included a ‘closed-loop’ system, which eliminated a rubber diaphragm around the pilot’s face; oxygen instead entered the suit through a hose at its waist, circulated to provide cooling and exited either through a hose on the right-hand side of the helmet or through the visor, if it was open. A small bottle, connected by a hose next to the astronaut’s left jaw, was used to pressurise a pneumatic seal when the Plexiglas visor was closed. During flight, the suit would provide and maintain a 0.38-bar atmosphere to keep Shepard alive in the event that Freedom 7 lost cabin pressure.

Elsewhere, the dark-grey nylon outer shell of the military Mark IV was replaced with one of silvery aluminium-coated nylon for improved thermal control – additionally, black boots were substituted for white-coloured leather ones (and, later, by aluminium-coated nylon leather) for the same purpose – and straps and zips provided a snug, though uncomfortable fit. However, the gloves on Shepard’s suit were zipped onto the sleeves, which prevented him from easily rotating his wrists to use the hand controllers. Post-flight modifications, implemented in time for Gus Grissom’s suborbital mission in July 1961, would incorporate wrist bearings and ring locks for greater dexterity. The fingers of the gloves were curved to permit the astronaut to grasp controls and a ‘straight’ middle finger allowed him to better push buttons and flip toggle switches. Each member of the Mercury Seven was supplied with three individually-tailored suits: one for training, another for flight and a third as a spare, costing some $20,000 overall. Body moulds were taken by dressing the men in long underwear, covering them with brown paper tape and cutting the

Clad in his silvery space suit, A1 Shepard prepares to clamber aboard Freedom 7. With him is Gus Grissom and in the background, clad in white cap and clean room garb, is John Glenn.

resultant mould to remove it when dry. So complex was the suit, Wally Schirra told Life magazine, that it required “more alterations than a bridal gown”.

Its intense discomfort was caused by the fact that, when inflated, it took only one shape. Any change in this shape, perhaps by the astronaut trying to walk or sit, reduced the suit’s volume and forced its wearer to exert himself to overcome the increased pressure. Simply walking left Shepard rapidly out of breath and, indeed, not until the Apollo missions would suits be built with ‘constant-volume’ joints to permit movement in the legs and arms without changing the pressure.

At 3:55 am, Grissom accompanied the fully-suited Shepard in the white transport van to Pad 5, after which technician Joe Schmitt fitted his gloves and Gordo Cooper briefed him on the countdown status. Meanwhile, at the top of the gantry, clad in white overalls and cap, John Glenn had spent the last two hours checking that every switch and instrument inside Freedom 7 was ready. At around 5:15 am, Shepard ascended the elevator to a green-walled room at the 20 m level – nicknamed ‘the greenhouse’ – which surrounded the capsule’s hatch. Glenn and Schmitt helped him inside, an effort made all the more difficult by his bulky parachute. America’s first spaceman, though, had an unexpected opportunity for a chuckle when he saw a girlie pin-up and a placard, put there by Glenn, which read ‘No Handball Playing In This Area’. A grinning Glenn, normally considered a straight-arrow and no prankster, quickly pulled it down. Presumably, wrote Neal Thompson, he had second thoughts and did not want to risk the automatic cameras inside Freedom 7, soon to begin rolling, accidentally recording his joke for posterity.

For more than an hour, Shepard lay in his custom-contoured couch and was secured by straps across his shoulders, chest, lap, knees – ‘‘the only time we used knee caps,’’ remembered Joe Schmitt in a 1997 interview, ‘‘because we didn’t know what was going to happen when he went up’’ – and even caps over his toes. Meanwhile, other personnel fitted sensors and adjusted straps before Glenn reached in, shook his gloved hand and wished him luck. The hatch clanged shut at 6:10 am, at which point Shepard’s heart rate quickened. Less than half an hour later, he began a ‘denitrogenation’ procedure, breathing pure oxygen to prevent aeroembolism – ‘decompression sickness’; a pilot’s equivalent of the bends – before sitting tight for liftoff, set for 7:00 am. This, however, was repeatedly postponed, first as banks of clouds rolled over Florida’s south-eastern seaboard, then when one of the 400 hz power inverters to the Redstone experienced regulation difficulties.

The countdown was recycled to the T-35 minute mark and picked up again 86 minutes later, after the inverter had been removed and replaced. Next, an error surfaced in one of the IBM 7090 computers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, responsible for processing Freedom 7’s flight data. By the time engineers had solved this problem, in which they had to completely rerun the computers, Shepard had been on his back inside the capsule for over three hours. Adrenaline pumping, he checked and rechecked the switches and dials on his instrument panel, then peered through the periscope at the throng of spectators lining Cape Canaveral’s beaches. Then, another, more personal, issue arose.

In addition to the discomfort brought about by lying in the cramped spacecraft for three hours, he found that he needed to urinate; the consequence, obviously, of too much orange juice and coffee consumed with Glenn earlier that morning. He eventually radioed ‘‘Man, I gotta pee’’ to Gordo Cooper, stationed in the nearby control blockhouse, and asked if Freedom 7’s hatch could be opened.

Cooper, taken aback, passed Shepard’s request up the chain of command, as far as Wernher von Braun, who emphatically declared that, no, ‘‘ze astronaut shall stay in ze nosecone’’. Exasperated, and in a tirade that was ultimately removed from the official transcript, Shepard warned that he would be forced to urinate in his suit if he was not allowed outside. Immediately, mission managers panicked – could the urine short-circuit the medical wiring attached to his body and the electrical thermometer in his rectum, they wondered – until the astronaut suggested that they switch off the spacecraft’s power until he had ‘been’. Eventually, agreement was received, Cooper confirmed ‘‘Power’s off” and heard shortly thereafter a long, contented ‘‘Ahhhh’’ from Shepard over the radio. ‘‘I’m a wetback now,’’ he told Cooper, as the warm fluid worked its way around his suit and pooled in the small of his back. . .

‘‘It caused some consternation,’’ Shepard admitted in his tape-recorded debriefing of the flight an hour after landing. “My suit inlet temperature changed and it may possibly have affected the left lower chest sensor… [but] my general comfort after this point seemed to be good.” Still, the issue led to the inclusion of a proper, though hastily-engineered, urine-collection device in time for Gus Grissom’s own suborbital mission 11 weeks later.

Fortunately, the urine was absorbed by his long cotton underwear and evaporated in the 100 per cent pure oxygen atmosphere of the capsule and Shepard, thankfully, received no electrical shocks. NASA was spared, wrote Neal Thompson, of the embarrassment of having to report that America’s first spaceman had been electrocuted by his own piss. Humour aside, there remained a very real chance that 5 May 1961 might have ended with a dead astronaut. In such a dire eventuality, press spokesman John ‘Shorty’ Powers had readied statements to the effect that ‘Astronaut Shepard has perished today in the service of his country’, all adjusted slightly to take into account the point at which disaster struck: during launch, whilst in space or during re-entry. President Kennedy, too, was nervous, even though he had been assured by NASA Deputy Administrator Hugh Dryden back in March that no unwarranted risks would be taken. As late as a few weeks before launch, some senators, including Republican John J. Williams of Delaware and Democrat J. W. Fulbright of Arkansas, felt that it should be delayed and run in secret to avoid a much-publicised failure.

Such attempts were vetoed by most members of Congress. The Soviets, it was pointed out, had received much international criticism for staging Vostok 1 under such ridiculous secrecy – to such an extent that some observers doubted Gagarin had flown at all – and felt tradition dictated that the press should have free access to cover an event of such historic magnitude. Moreover, said Ed Welsh, secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, ‘‘why postpone a success?’’ Still, even on 5 May, Kennedy questioned the need to televise the event live, even pressing NASA Administrator Jim Webb to play down the feverish publicity. Webb’s assurance that the Redstone’s LES tower would yank Freedom 7 and Shepard to safety in the event of a malfunction had little impact and Kennedy’s fears continued throughout the mission. Only minutes before the television networks picked up the countdown, NASA public relations officer Paul Haney was forced to reassure Kennedy’s press secretary Pierre Salinger that the escape tower would indeed save Shepard in an emergency. Salinger promised to pass this information to the president.

The decision to televise the launch in front of the media would also offer a poke in the eye for Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, whose regime had insisted on cloaking Gagarin’s flight in secrecy until success could be confirmed. In many minds, America’s ‘bravery’ at accomplishing the feat in front of the world placed it on a par with, or even above, the Vostok achievement. Khrushchev would publicly ridicule Freedom 7 as a ‘‘flea hop’’ in comparison to the Soviet triumph and, in truth, he was right, but on 5 May 1961 America won the moral high ground. A few days later, the Istanbul newspaper Millyet reported that Turkish journalists had asked the Soviet consul-general why his nation had not revealed the full story of Gagarin’s mission. In response, a Tass correspondent was quoted as explaining, somewhat lamely, that Russia was ‘‘mainly interested in the people’s excitement and reaction’’.

Shortly before 9:00 am, yet another halt was called when pressures inside the Redstone’s liquid oxygen tanks climbed to unacceptable levels. Instead of resetting the pressure valves, which would have meant scrubbing the attempt for the day, it was decided to bleed off some of the pressure by remote control. After cycling the vent valves several times, pressures returned to normal. The decision to do this was aided, at least partly, by an irritable Shepard, who, after almost four hours on his back and now lying in his dried-up urine, snapped “I’m cooler than you are! Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?’’ The words, like Gagarin’s “Poyekhali!” three weeks earlier, have since achieved immortality and truly epitomise the ‘right stuff which Shepard and everyone associated with Project Mercury had in shovelfuls. With two minutes to go, as the television networks started broadcasting live, the voice of Cooper in the blockhouse was replaced by that of Deke Slayton, serving as the first ‘capsule communicator’ – ‘capcom’ – from the Mercury Control Center at the Cape. Thirty seconds before launch, an umbilical cable, supplying electricity, communications and liquid oxygen, separated from the rocket as planned.

As the final seconds ticked away, Shepard’s biosensors would testify that his pulse rose from 80 to 126 beats per minute; privately praying that he would not screw up, his hand tightened around the abort handle. Already described by the physicians as the calmest man on the Cape that morning, his pulse rate was comparable to that of a driver moving from a service road onto a freeway. In total, he had been lying supine for four hours and 14 minutes – the delays alone had cost more than three and a half hours, enough time for a dozen Freedom 7 missions – and the jolt he expected at the instant of liftoff was instead replaced by what he would describe as something ‘‘extremely smooth… a subtle, gentle, gradual rise off the ground’’.

At 9:34 am, with 45 million Americans watching or listening in person, on television, on the radio or over loudspeakers, the Redstone roared to life, prompting Shepard, who had just activated the on-board timer, to confirm ‘‘Roger… liftoff and the clock is started!’’ Slayton, with a nod to comedian Bill Dana’s astronaut character Jose Jimenez, replied ‘‘You’re on your way, Jose!’’ So significant was the next quarter of an hour that it brought much of the United States to a standstill. A Philadelphia appeals court judge interrupted proceedings to make an announcement, free champagne flowed in taverns, traffic slowed on Californian freeways and people danced and sang in Times Square. President Kennedy broke up a National Security Council meeting, walked into his secretary’s office and stood, dumbstruck, hands in his pockets, watching Freedom 7’s rise to the heavens.

‘‘I remember hearing [the] firing command,’’ Shepard recalled less than an hour later aboard the Lake Champlain recovery ship, ‘‘but it may very well be that, although Deke was giving me other sequences. . . prior to main stage and liftoff, I did not hear them. I may have been just a little bit too excited. I do remember being fairly calm at T-0 and getting my hand up to start the watch when I received the liftoff from the control centre. I must say the liftoff was a whole lot smoother than I expected. I really expected to have to use full volume control to be able to receive. . . [but] all my transmissions over UHF were immediately acknowledged, without any repeats being requested.’’

Shepard had little time to sit still and do nothing. He had already agreed with Project Mercury’s operations director, Walt Williams, that he would talk as much as possible throughout the mission, to keep everyone updated on even the tiniest details. As the Redstone speared higher and higher, his voice crackled out the data – “This is Freedom 7,’’ he exulted, “the fuel is go; 1.2 G; cabin is 14 psi; oxygen is go; all systems are go’’ – and, 16 seconds after launch, the rocket commenced a pitchover manoeuvre of two degrees per second, from 90 to 45 degrees, a procedure that was complete some 40 seconds into the flight. He had anticipated around 6 G during ascent, even though he had trained and endured more than twice as much in the centrifuge and the MASTIF. Although the liftoff was smooth, his ride turned bumpy and caught him off-guard when he reached the turbulent transition between the edge of the ‘sensible’ atmosphere and space. Eighty-eight seconds after launch, Freedom 7 began shuddering violently and Shepard’s head, wrote Neal Thompson, was “jackhammering so hard against the headrest that he could no longer see the dials and gauges clearly enough to read the data’’. As a result, he waited until the vibrations had calmed before transmitting any more status updates to Slayton.

Lack of visibility, in fact, had been one of the fundamental medical effects that physicians had most feared: could the astronauts see properly in and around their capsules? Such questions seem trivial today, but aerospace scientists had for years written quite seriously about the possible impact of weightlessness on the muscle structure around and beneath the eyes and the possibility that it might change shape over several hours, permanently ruining their vision. John Glenn was assigned to investigate this possibility on his Friendship 7 mission, the first American orbital flight, in February 1962. ‘‘On the instrument panel,’’ he told an interviewer in 1997, ‘‘is a little Snellen chart like the eye chart they use in doctors’ offices, miniaturised for the distance from my eyes to the panel, and I was to read the smallest line I could read every 20 minutes during flight and report what that was, so if my eyes were changing shape or vision was changing, I would be able to report this.’’

Uncontrollable nausea and vertigo, triggered by the random movement of fluids in the inner ear, was another possibility and, although other astronauts have since been known to suffer ‘space sickness’, the irony of Project Mercury was that the capsules were too small and cramped to give their pilots an opportunity to move around and become disorientated. There were other concerns. ‘‘They didn’t know whether you could swallow properly,’’ explained Glenn and, added Gordo Cooper, ‘‘There were a lot of these medical experts who said that the cardiovascular system would not be able to function under zero gravity’’. The simple, yet vital, work done by the Mercury astronauts and their Vostok counterparts exemplified how little was known about how human beings could function in the weightless environment, high above their home planet, at the dawn of the Sixties. They were pioneers, taking the first steps into a strange new environment.

Even before he reached space, Shepard had satisfied one of the physicians’ main worries: by proving that he could indeed survive the rigours of a rocket launch. Yet it was only after passing through ‘Max Q’ – a period of maximum aerodynamic turbulence; the phase at which Freedom 7, by now accelerating through the sound barrier and into the rarefied air of the high atmosphere, was subjected to massive loads – did he finally grunt to Slayton that the ride was “a lot smoother now”. Then, 141.8 seconds after launch, the Redstone’s engine finally burned out, followed, a second later, by the jettisoning of the LES tower. Although the latter should have been automatic, it was actually performed manually, but Shepard would not recall ever pulling the manual ‘JETT TOWER’ override ring. The Redstone burnout triggered the initiation of small explosive charges, which, 38 seconds later, severed the link with Freedom 7 and three posigrade rockets on the capsule pushed the pair apart at 4.6 m/sec. By now, Shepard’s pulse had climbed to 132 beats per minute, but calmed dramatically when he saw and reported to Slayton that the green ‘CAP SEP’ indicator light confirmed the capsule had indeed successfully separated from the rocket.

Now flying free of the Redstone, Shepard’s tasks – to prove that, unlike Gagarin, he was able to actively control his ship – got underway. Firstly, the attitude-control system moved the capsule into a heat shield-forward position for the rest of the flight, introducing momentary oscillations which were quickly damped out by a five – second firing of the automatic thrusters. He switched Freedom 7 from automatic to manual control about three minutes after launch and, using a MASTIF-like stick, tilted the capsule through pitch, yaw and roll exercises, ‘controlling’ his spacecraft for the first time, whilst travelling at 8,200 km/h – nearly eight times the speed of sound and almost three times faster than any American in history. Shepard found that he was able to exercise control crisply and Freedom 7 responded very much like the simulator, although his ability to hear the spurting hydrogen peroxide jets was virtually drowned out by the crackling of the radio. He actually operated his spacecraft by three means – fully automatic, manual and a ‘fly-by-wire’ combination of the two. He reported that the manual mode responded well, although the capsule tended to roll slightly clockwise. Post-flight inspections uncovered a piece of debris lodged in the hydrogen peroxide tubing, which probably caused their jets to leak a tiny increment of thrust.

At 9:38 am, four minutes after launch, Shepard experienced weightlessness for the first time, as his body gently floated from his couch and against his shoulder harnesses. Flecks of dust drifted past his face, together with a stray washer, which quickly vanished from view. As he neared the apex of his arc into space, he made an attempt to observe the world beneath him through Freedom 7’s periscope. Unfortunately, during the morning’s lengthy delays, to minimise the blinding sunlight, he had flicked a switch that covered the lens with a grey filter and had forgotten to remove it before launch. Now he was greeted only with a grey-coloured blob on the screen before him. When he tried to reach across the cabin to flick off the filter, his wrist hit the abort handle and he thought it best to leave well alone.

Shepard’s dramatic description of Earth – ‘‘What a beautiful view!’’ – was surely sincere, but was certainly not accompanied by glorious colour. Still, he later told NASA officials, the vista was ‘‘remarkable’’ and he was able to see Lake Okeechobee, on the northern edge of Florida’s Everglades, together with Andros Island, shoals off Bimini and some cloud cover over the Bahamas. Although he would later tell a Life journalist of the ‘‘brilliantly clear’’ colours around Bimini, he would privately admit that the grey filter ‘‘obliterated most of the colours’’. When questioned by Wally Schirra, his response was “shit, I had to say something for the people!”

At the top of the long arc over the Atlantic – rising, at apogee, to almost 188 km – the periscope automatically retracted and Shepard was obliged to strain to look for stars and planets through the two small, awkwardly-placed portholes, one to his upper-left side and the other to his lower-right. He wanted the chance to see what Yuri Gagarin had claimed to have seen, but in fact could see nothing, no matter which way he twisted or turned. Looking for stars and planets placed him slightly behind schedule. Although the entire mission would span only 15 minutes, and barely a fraction of that would be spent ‘in space’, NASA had overloaded him with tasks, lasting a minute here or two minutes there. To catch up, Shepard feverishly put Freedom 7 through its paces, before eventually radioing to Slayton that the three retrorockets had successfully fired at their prescribed five-second intervals and his spacecraft was positioned in its proper re-entry attitude.

Six minutes and 13 seconds after launch, as the tiny capsule began its plummet towards the ocean, the now-spent retrorocket package automatically separated. Even though his time in weightlessness had been so brief, he would later remark aboard the recovery ship Lake Champlain, ‘‘there is no question about it: when those retros go, your transition from zero-G to essentially 0.05 G is noticeable”. Flying with its base facing in the direction of travel, such that it could properly absorb the intense heat caused by friction with the upper atmosphere, Shepard was shoved into his couch with 11 times the force of normal terrestrial gravity. This part of the ride, he knew, was among the most physically demanding and ‘‘not one most people would want to try in an amusement park’’. In less than 30 seconds, Freedom 7 slowed from its 8,200 km/h suborbital velocity to around 800 km/h. During this time, the astronaut could scarcely speak, so high were the G forces, and could barely manage a series of grunted ‘‘okays’’ to Slayton. Then, from an altitude of 24 km down to 12 km, the frictional heating raised temperatures at the base of the capsule to a blistering 1,200°C; within, however, conditions held steady at 38°C and, inside his pressure suit, Shepard experienced a balmy, but relatively comfortable, 28°C. It was, he said, ‘‘like being in a closed van on a warm summer day’’.

As the descent continued, the automatic stabilisation and control system detected the onset of re-entry and initiated a roll of ten degrees per second to keep Freedom 7 on track. Six and a half kilometres above the Atlantic, and still barely nine minutes after launch, Shepard felt relief as the drogue parachute popped from the spacecraft’s nose, followed, seconds later, by the jettisoning of the antenna capsule and deployment of the 19.2 m-diameter orange and white main canopy. This blossomed open, arresting the capsule with ‘‘a reassuring kick in the butt’’. A snorkel valve opened to equalise cabin pressure with the outside air, after which the heat shield dropped 1.2 m and the landing bag was extended. Shepard would later describe the deployment of the main chute, not surprisingly, as the most beautiful sight of the whole mission. It slowed the capsule to a stately 30 km/h and even the splashdown itself, some 490 km east of Cape Canaveral and 160 km north of the Bahamas, felt no worse than the shove he used to experience from the catapults aboard naval aircraft carriers.

His precise landing co-ordinates were 75 degrees 53 minutes West longitude and 27 degrees 13.7 minutes North latitude. Freedom 7 initially listed over to its right side, about 60 degrees from an upright position, but righted itself within a minute or so. The parachutes cast loose to prevent dragging the capsule and a patch of fluorescent green marker dye spread across the water, although recovery forces had already been monitoring Shepard’s descent for several minutes and were closing in. America’s first manned spaceflight had lasted 15 minutes and 28 seconds.

Shortly thereafter, Wayne Koons, the pilot of one of the five Marine Air Group 26 rescue helicopters despatched from the Lake Champlain, was hovering overhead and his co-pilot George Cox had snagged Freedom 7 with hook and line (though not before the spacecraft’s high-frequency antenna had pronged upwards and dented the base of the chopper). Shepard, still midway through removing his helmet and releasing his restraints, asked the impatient Koons to lift the capsule slightly above the waterline. Eventually, America’s first astronaut popped open the hatch and leaned out to grab the ‘horse’s collar’ – a padded harness that Cox had lowered – then pulled it towards him and looped it over his head and under his arm. He gave a thumbs-up and was pulled to the helicopter. Koons’ crew had trained for more than a year for this moment and had established themselves as experts at hovering above Mercury capsules, hooking them and getting astronauts out. Indeed, Cox had successfully fished Ham out of the drink just a few months earlier.

Even now, it was a nervous time for Shepard. Only hours before, he had read a disturbing report of the harrowing experience of fellow naval aviators Malcolm Ross and Victor Prather. On 4 May, only hours after the Freedom 7 countdown had begun, the pair had ascended 34.6 km above the Gulf of Mexico in a balloon gondola, part of the Navy’s Stratolab high-altitude research effort. During their nine-hour ascent, the two pressure-suited men had been subjected to temperatures as low as -70°C and, since their weights were doubled by their equipment, they had found it virtually impossible to move within the gondola. Their mission to the very edge of space was successful and satisfactorily evaluated the performance of their pressure suits, but, after landing, Prather, mistakenly thinking himself to be out of danger, opened his helmet visor. As he clambered up the ladder to the rescue helicopter, he slipped, fell and drowned when his suit filled with water. Prather’s tragic death would surely have reinforced to Shepard that, even home from space, he would not be truly ‘safe’ until he was standing on the deck of the recovery ship. Indeed, his weight on the end of the winch actually caused Koons’ helicopter to drop slightly and the astronaut’s splayed legs splashed briefly back into the Atlantic, before finally being pulled clear.

The efforts to ensure his safety had been nothing short of extraordinary. Fire trucks had been stationed close to Pad 5, ready to offer support in the event of a launch accident, whilst helicopters stood by with technicians, physicians and frogmen to recover Shepard if he landed unhappily. Waiting out at sea were naval speedboats, whilst other craft were prepared to fish Freedom 7 from the Banana River, a lagoon between Cape Canaveral and Merritt Island. Meanwhile, near the prime recovery zone in the Atlantic, the Lake Champlain bristled with its recovery helicopters and a flotilla of six destroyers was strung out along the tracking range.

An exhausted Shepard is welcomed aboard the Lake Champlain.

Elsewhere, at the Cape itself, radars and high-flying aircraft monitored the skies for virtually every second that the astronaut was aloft.

Declaring that it was truly “a beautiful day”, Shepard was flown back to the recovery ship, where 1,200 sailors covered the decks, cheering his success. Koons and Cox lowered Freedom 7 – soon to be exhibited at 1961’s Paris Air Show – onto a specially-made stack of mattresses, disconnected it and touched down in what Shepard would call “the most emotional carrier landing I ever made”. Barely 11 minutes after splashdown, he set foot on the carrier deck.

Similar emotions were being played out across the nation: Floridian crowds cheered, John Glenn jovially asked the recovery ships to remain in the Atlantic in the hope that NASA might set up another Redstone for him, New Hampshire’s governor visited East Derry, schools closed and military aircraft dropped confetti as Shepard’s proud parents and sister rode in an open-topped convertible. For the astronaut’s wife, Louise, the calm after the storm came when she received word from NASA that her husband was safely aboard the Lake Champlain. As she chatted to journalists outside her Virginia Beach home, a Navy jet spelled out the letter ‘S’ in the sky to honour the United States’ newest hero.

The hero himself, after guzzling orange juice in the quarters of the ship’s captain, was handed a tape recorder and asked to record his initial thoughts. He was then grilled by the physicians, as he relived every detail of the 15-minute flight – and the hours on the pad beforehand: no, he did not sleep, no, he did not defecate, yes, there was a noticeable odour in the cabin (urine) and so on. Midway through this debriefing, he received the first of many calls from his commander-in-chief, President Kennedy, who congratulated him. Privately, the administration could breathe a sigh of relief now that, 23 days after Gagarin’s mission and still smarting from the Bay of Pigs, the United States finally had something in which to take pride. That afternoon, the president announced that ‘‘this is an historic milestone in our own exploration of space’’. Added journalist Julian Scheer, later to become NASA’s public affairs officer: ‘‘Shepard bailed out the ego of the American people. As a nation, we desperately wanted a success and we got not only a success, but an instant hero’’.

An hour after his arrival aboard the Lake Champlain, the astronaut set off aboard a two-engined C-1 transport aircraft, which took him to Grand Bahama Island for three days of tests. He was greeted by Wally Schirra, who had watched his launch from the front seat of an F-106 aircraft that morning, together with Gus Grissom and capcom Deke Slayton. Thirty-two specialists debriefed him, with Carmault Jackson questioning his medical health, Bob Voas probing his performance as Freedom 7’s pilot and Harold Johnson and Sigurd Sjoberg focusing on the operation of the capsule’s systems. After downing a huge shrimp cocktail, a roast beef sandwich and iced tea, Shepard learned that he had lost 1.3 kg in weight since breakfast. Nonetheless, the doctors proclaimed him in good shape and jubilant spirits. His $400 million mission had cost each American taxpayer $2.25 and the astronaut himself was surely overjoyed to receive an extra $14.38 in naval flight pay.