Episode 44: Project Mercury, Part III

Hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens pour into Red Square the celebrate Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's (left) first space flight and orbit of earth. When Gagarin arrived back in Moscow, Khrushchev pulled him up on to of Lenin's Tomb and the crowd went wild at the sight of their new hero.

The Americans were not rushing to catch up, but honestly, they lacked the technology to keep pace. In 1961, they didn't have a rocket with enough thrust to get a Mercury capsule into orbit so they had to be content with a ballistic flight, getting an astronaut into space, but not high enough to get into a low earth orbit. Alan Shepard was the first to go into space. His successful up and down trip lasted 15 minutes. At the end of the flight, he splashed down in the ocean near the Bahamas and was pulled out of the Caribbean by the aircraft carrier USS Lake Champlain.

Shepard named the Mercury capsule that carried him into space Freedom 7. He added the seven as a way to honor all seven Project Mercury Astronauts. Today, Freedom 7 is on display at the Udvar-Hazy Center next to Dulles International Airport in northern Virginia; an annex of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum, headquartered in Washington, DC. The DC museum has some really cool artifacts in it, but is relatively small. The Udvar-Hazy Center is huge and is where they keep a LOT of their large items and is a must see if you're ever in the area.