Although disappointed that they had failed to place the first man in space (that title belongs to Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin who orbited the earth on 4/12/1961) NASA pushed to narrow the gap.

On May 5, 1961, they did just that.  At 9:34 EST Mercury Redstone 3 (MR-3) dubbed "Freedom 7" lifted off its launch pad carring American astronaut Alan B. Shepard.  This made Shepard the first astronaut (and second human) to fly in space.

Following the cutout of the rocket's engine, Shepard experienced only about 5 minutes of weightlessness before his retrorockets fired to bring him home.  During reentry, he experienced nearly 11G's before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean, only a few hundred miles from the launch site at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Alan Shepard returned home to a hero's welcome including a ticker tape parade in New York City and a medal from President John F. Kennedy.

Dispite all the success of the mission (it completed every objective) it did not surpass the Soviet's achievents on April 12th, in fact it didn't even match them.  Shepard's mission was a ballistic trajectory sub orbital flight.  He simply went up and came down.  To even match the Russian's, one orbit was required.  At the time, NASA didn't have a launch vehicle capible of such a feet (the Atlas wasn't yet cleared for manned operation) and they wouldn't orbit until early 1962.  By then, the Soviets would have already orbited a cosmonaut for a whole day.  Clearly, America was behind in the space race at this point.







An interesting side note to this story is that Freedom 7's flight had been delayed 2 months.  The original plan called for the mission to be launched in late March of 1961, which would have been a few weeks before the Soviet's put Gagarin in orbit.  As the March date approached, Werner von Braun was concered about the Redstone rocket's safety and it was decided to do one more unmanned test.  On March 24, 1961, the mission designated MR-BD (Mercury Redstone Booster) launched unmanned and was fully successiful.  Now confident in the rocket, it was cleared for manned opperation.  The launch date for Freedom 7 was selected as May 2, 1961.  On April 12th, NASA's hopes were crushed when news of Gagarin's flight was heard.  May 2nd came and went with no launch, it was postponed until May 5th (when it finally flew).