History for the day: 1961: The first American in space

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History.com has this for 5 May:

From Cape Canaveral, Florida, Navy Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. (photo, top front) is launched into space aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule (photo, top rear), becoming the first American astronaut to travel into space. The suborbital flight, which lasted fifteen minutes and reached a height of 116 miles into the atmosphere, was a major triumph for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
NASA was established in 1958 to keep American space efforts abreast of recent Russian achievements, such as the launching of the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the two superpowers raced to become the first country to put a man in space and return him to Earth. On 12 April 1961, the Russian space program won the race when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched into space, put in orbit around the planet, and safely returned to Earth. One month later, Shepard’s suborbital flight restored faith in the American space program.
NASA continued to trail the then-Soviets closely until the late 1960s and the successes of the Apollo lunar program. In July of 1969, the Americans took a giant leap forward with Apollo 11, a three-stage spacecraft that took American astronauts to the surface of the Moon (photo, bottom) and returned them to Earth. On 5 February 1971, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, became the fifth astronaut to walk on the Moon as part of the Apollo 14 lunar landing mission:

Rico says brave men (and woman) all....