Inevitably, there are times in a nation's history when its hopes, fears and confidence in its own destiny appear to hinge on the fate of a single person. One of these pivotal moments occurred on the early morning of May 5, 1961, when a 37-year-old test pilot squeezed himself into the confines of the tiny Mercury spacecraft that he had named Freedom 7. On that historic day, U.S. Navy Commander Alan Shepard carried with him the hopes, prayers, and anxieties of a nation as his Redstone rocket blasted free of the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, hurling him upwards on a 15-minute suborbital flight that also propelled the United States into the bold new frontier of human space exploration. This book tells the enthralling story of that pioeering flight as recalled by many of the participants in the Freedom 7 story, including Shepard himself, with anecdotal details and tales never before revealed in print. Although beaten into space just three weeks earlier by the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, Alan Shepard's history-making mission aboard Freedom 7 nevertheless provided America's first tentative step into space that would one day see its Apollo astronauts - including Alan Shepard - walk on the Moon.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Springer International Publishing Ag
ISBN-13
9783319011554
eBay Product ID (ePID)
190219036
Product Key Features
Author
Colin Burgess
Publication Name
Freedom 7: the Historic Flight of Alan B. Shepard, Jr.
Format
Paperback
Language
English
Subject
Engineering & Technology, Science
Publication Year
2013
Type
Textbook
Number of Pages
266 Pages
Dimensions
Item Height
240mm
Item Width
168mm
Item Weight
4993g
Additional Product Features
Title_Author
Colin Burgess
Series Title
Space Exploration
Topic
Astronomy
Country/Region of Manufacture
Switzerland
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