For the week ending May 7, 1961

AMERICAN ASTRONAUT ROARS 115 MILES INTO SPACE

America’s first astronaut roared 115 miles above the earth today aboard a spacecraft named Freedom 7 and won for America a historic breakthrough: The first flight in space controlled by the pilot himself.

Astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr., 37, and his spacecraft both performed without a flaw, and both came home from the sky in perfect condition. Unlike Russia’s rocket attempts, anybody who wanted to could watch. Tens of thousands did.

“Man, what a ride!” was the astronaut’s grinning comment to the men who picked him up at sea.

Freedom 7, a bell-shaped capsule perched on the nose of a Redstone rocket, blasted off from Cape Canaveral at 7:34 a.m. PDT. The hollow, whistling roar was heard for miles.

It pushed up into a blue sky — 115 miles up — with a speed that reached 5,100 miles an hour. The capsule pushed free from the spent rocket, arched into a high trajectory that put Shepard into the weightless realm of space for five minutes, and then rushed back toward the sea. Shepard controlled its movements, though not its course, during that five minutes.

The Navy commander hit the sea 15 minutes after blasting off. Minutes later he told President Kennedy by radio telephone that “Everything worked just about perfectly.”

“… We are awfully pleased and proud,” the president told him. For Werner von Braun and his rocket scientists, the Redstone virtually scored a bullseye with its payload.

The next step is to put an astronaut in orbit around the earth and bring him back — as Russia has done — and then comes three-man trips through space. In time, said Dr. Hugh Dryden, deputy administrator of NASA, there will be spacecraft to the moon and back.

Another spaceman, Russia’s Yuri Gagarin, had gone higher and farther and faster. But Alan Shepard was the first man in history to exercise control over the motions of a craft he was riding in space.

Yuri Gagarin on April 12 flew around the world in a five-ton spacecraft which was operated entirely by automatic or ground controls.

Shepard, during much of his ride put the capsule through various maneuvers. He changed the way it pointed in space. He controlled its pitch, roll and yaw.

He reported what was happening to him when gravity forces multiplied his weight some six times during powered flight and 11 times when he came back down through the atmosphere.

Throughout the physical stresses and the mental strain of watching or operating more than 100 instruments, Shepard reported back constantly by voice radio that everything was “okay.”