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This book details the almost forgotten story of the first manned U. S. spaceflight, Freedom 7, flown by Cdr. Alan Shepard, Jr., for NASA. It examines the Mercury program and Shepard´s flight in the context of the space race with the former USSR.

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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 ight that also propelled the United States into the bold new frontier of human space exploration.

This book tells the enthralling story of that pioeering ight 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.

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History and Development of the Mercury-Redstone Program.- The Precursory Flight of Chimpanzee Ham.- NASA´s First Space Pilot.- Countdown to Launch.- Liftoff of Freedom 7.- Fifteen Minutes That Stopped a Nation.- Splashdown.- Epilogue: A Man and His Spacecraft.- Appendix.

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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)

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