In 1961, the year astronaut Alan Shepard Jr. made his milestone 15-minute flight, hysteria about the U.S.- Soviet Union space race was in full swing. Russia had already put a man in orbit and had launched the world's first artificial satellite, the Sputnik 1, in 1957, igniting fears that the United States was losing its status as the dominant world power. The United States quickly assembled scientific teams that had been working on space travel; the race to achieve the first manned spaceflight was on. The new U.S. space agency was named the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, and the manned spaceflight program was named the Mercury Project, after the Roman god of swift travel and transit between worlds.
First forays into space
Shepard, a U.S. Navy commander who had experience with aircraft test flights, was selected to pilot the first manned Mercury spacecraft. He wrote later that when he informed his wife he had been selected to become the first American to travel to space, she quipped: "Who let a Russian in here?" But her presumption was right. Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin beat Shepard into space by one month, manning the Vostok 1 as it made one orbit around the earth April 12, 1961.
Expedition 47 Commander Tim Kopra of NASA captured this brightly lit night image of the city of Chicago on April 5, 2016, from the International Space Station
Shepard made his own historic journey three weeks later, in a less spectacular journey that went only 187 kilometers above the Earth and lasted only 15 minutes. But it was seen as an important milestone as the United States strove to catch up to its Cold War rival in technological innovation. The competition continued throughout the 1960s, finally culminating with the U.S. moon landing on July 20, 1969. Shepard made his own journey to the moon on the third Apollo mission in 1971. Despite being one of the best known names in U.S. space travel, Shepard flew only two missions.
Cooperation on the new frontier
In the four decades between Shepard's last spaceflight, much has changed between the United States and its onetime rival in space. With the 1998 launch of the International Space Station, pushing further into space has become a collaborative effort, including not just the United States and Russia, but also the European Union, China, and Japan. Over the years, at least 222 spaceflight technicians from 18 countries have worked together on long-term projects as they orbit the Earth every 90 minutes.
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