Alan Shepard 1923-1998 The First American to Fly in Space

And I'm Steve Ember with the VOA Special English program People in America. Each week we tell about someone important in the history of the United States. This week we tell about astronaut Alan Shepard, who was the first American to fly in space.

MISSION CONTROL: “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four three, two, one, zero. Liftoff!"

SHEPARD:"Ah Roger, liftoff and the clock has started."

MISSION CONTROL: [unintelligible]

SHEPARD: “Yes sir, reading you loud and clear. This is Freedom Seven. The fuel is go, one point two g, cabin at 14 psi, oxygen is go!”

SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: The clock has started. With those words, Alan Shepard became the first American to travel into space. He was in a small spacecraft called Freedom Seven. It was on top of a huge rocket traveling at more than eight thousand kilometers an hour

On April twelfth, nineteen sixty-one, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin flew in space for one hundred eight minutes. He circled the Earth once. The Soviets again were winning the "space race," but not for long. Three weeks later the United States also put a man into space. He was a thirty-seven-year-old officer in the Navy -- Alan Shepard.

SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Alan Bartlett Shepard, Junior, was born on November eighteenth, nineteen twenty-three in East Derry, New Hampshire. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in nineteen forty-four. He married soon after his graduation. Then he served for a short time on a destroyer in the Pacific during World War Two.

In nineteen forty-seven, Alan Shepard became a pilot in the Navy. Later he became a test pilot. The life of a test pilot can be very dangerous. It helped prepare Alan Shepard for an even greater danger in the future.