Overview
- Tells the almost forgotten story of the first manned U. S. spaceflight, Freedom 7, flown by Cdr. Alan Shepard, Jr., for NASA and the United States
- Based on exclusive interviews with Shepard and several of the surviving leading players in the program
- Examines the Mercury program and Shepard's flight in the context of the space race with the former USSR
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Springer Praxis Books (PRAXIS)
Part of the book sub series: Space Exploration (SPACEE)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
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.
Reviews
From the reviews:
“The book contains many fascinating photographs and several appendixes, including Shepard’s postflight report, transcripts of voice communications, and more. While this volume will interest space flight enthusiasts, it covers little ground that has not been extensively considered by other works. … Summing Up: Recommended. General readers; comprehensive undergraduate space history collections.” (J. Z. Kiss, Choice, Vol. 51 (9), May, 2014)Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Freedom 7
Book Subtitle: The Historic Flight of Alan B. Shepard, Jr.
Authors: Colin Burgess
Series Title: Springer Praxis Books
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01156-1
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Physics and Astronomy, Physics and Astronomy (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-01155-4Published: 09 October 2013
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-01156-1Published: 27 September 2013
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXVII, 266
Number of Illustrations: 190 b/w illustrations
Topics: Aerospace Technology and Astronautics, Popular Science in Astronomy, Space Sciences (including Extraterrestrial Physics, Space Exploration and Astronautics), History of Science