Mercury-Redstone 3

9:34 a.m. at Launch Complex 5

At 9:34 a.m. Eastern time on 5 May 1961, Mercury-Redstone 3 launched Alan Shepard from Launch Complex 5 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, making him the first American — and the second human — to travel into space.

The mission was expected to be so brief that his suit had no urine-collection system. After hours of launch delays, he urinated in the suit before liftoff.

A 2 May attempt had been scrubbed because of weather.

Fifteen minutes, hands on the controls

Freedom 7 flew a suborbital ballistic trajectory rather than entering orbit, reaching 116 miles in altitude and 302 miles downrange, and splashing down after 15 minutes 22 seconds.

Shepard manually controlled the capsule's pitch, yaw and roll during part of the flight and photographed the Atlantic below — an option Yuri Gagarin had not been given on Vostok 1 three weeks earlier.

Aboard the carrier in twenty minutes

Splashdown came four miles from the recovery carrier USS Lake Champlain, and a helicopter brought Shepard and the capsule aboard within 20 minutes. An estimated 45 million Americans watched live.

Kennedy awarded Shepard NASA's Distinguished Service Medal three days later and, on 25 May, based his lunar challenge on the confidence this flight supplied.