Mercury-Redstone 3 (Freedom 7)

On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard rode the Freedom 7 capsule to an altitude of 116 miles, becoming the first American in space. The suborbital flight lasted just 15 minutes and 22 seconds from launch to splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean, but it proved that a human could survive launch, weightlessness, and reentry aboard the tiny single-seat Mercury spacecraft.

Coming three weeks after Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight, Freedom 7 was a critical morale boost and a proof point for NASA’s human spaceflight program. Shepard manually controlled the capsule’s attitude during flight — a first — demonstrating that astronauts could be pilots rather than passengers. Twenty days later, President Kennedy committed the nation to landing on the Moon.