Alan Shepard

Legendary astronaut Alan Shepard was born on November 18, 1923, in East Derry,
New Hampshire. After completing high school, Shepard enrolled at the U.S. Naval
Academy. Shepard served on the destroyer Cogswell in the Pacific during World
War II. After the war, he trained to become a pilot.

In 1959, Shepard won a coveted spot in the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration's program for space exploration. He and six others, including John
Glenn and Gus Grissom, became known as the "Mercury 7." They were an elite
group chosen from one hundred test pilot who have volunteered for the program.

Mercury- Freedom 7, was the first United States human spaceflight, on May 5,
1961, piloted by astronaut Alan Shepard. It was the first crewed flight of Project
Mercury, the objective of which was to put an astronaut into orbit around the
Earth and return him safely.

Shepard's mission was a 15-minute suborbital flight with the primary objective of
demonstrating his ability to withstand the high g-forces of launch and
atmospheric re-entry.. He became the first American in space, a month after the
Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had earned the distinction as the first person in
space.
After roughly four hours of delays, Shepard traveled more than 300 miles in his
15-minute-long mission. Shepard came down in the Atlantic Ocean near the
Bahamas.

Shortly after returning to the United States, Shepard traveled to the White House
to receive the NASA Distinguished Service Medal from President John F. Kennedy.
He was also honored with a ticker-tape parade in New York City.

For nearly a decade after his famous first mission, Shepard was grounded because
of an ear problem. He had surgery to fix his condition, hoping to make it back into
space. In 1971, Shepard got his wish. He and Ed Mitchell were selected for the
Apollo 14 mission to the moon.

They took off on January 31, 1971, and they spent more than 33 hours on the
moon. During this mission, Shepard became the fifth person to walk on the moon,
and the first to play golf on its surface. He had packed a specially designed golf
club just for this purpose.

Shepard made some waves of his own during the Apollo 14 mission by hitting a
golf shot that was, quite literally, out of this world.
According to PGA.com, Shepard wanted to do “something special” while on the
moon and decided to take a few hacks on the unfriendly lie that is the moon’s
surface.

His second shot, as observed by Shepard himself, traveled for “miles and miles
and miles.” Of course, golfers do tend to exaggerate how far they can hit the ball,
but thanks to there being less gravity on the moon’s surface, it’s quite possible
that Shepard’s ball flew a few miles before settling down somewhere on the
moon’s surface.

Shepard passed away in 1998 from Leukemia at age 74, but his historic legacy as
an astronaut and the world’s foremost lunar-based golfer will remain forever.

At the time of his passing, fellow astronaut John Glenn spoke about Shepard with
The New York Times: "He was a patriot, he was a leader, he was a competitor, a
fierce competitor. He was a hero. Most importantly to us, he was a close friend."

President Bill Clinton remembered Shepard as "one of the great heroes of modern
America," according to a separate report in The New York Times.