Liftoff of Freedom 7

Freedom 7 lifts off from Cape Canaveral atop a Mercury-Redstone rocket, carrying Alan Shepard on the fifteen-minute suborbital flight that made him the first American in space. The mission came just three weeks after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight, and its success gave NASA the confidence to commit to landing astronauts on the Moon. Shepard's capsule reached an altitude of about 116 miles before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean, where it was recovered by the Navy.