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For an endless, heart-stopping moment, the tall, slim rocket hung motionless —incredibly balanced above its incandescent tail. Slowly it climbed the sky, outracing the racket of its engine as it screamed toward space. In the returning silence, the amplified thump of an electronic timer beat like a pulse across the sands of Florida's Cape Canaveral. The pulse of the nation beat with it. For this was no routine rocket shoot. Riding that long, white missile as it soared aloft last week was Navy Commander Alan B. Shepard Jr., first U.S. astronaut ever fired into space. And riding with him was his country's pride, the prestige of his country's science, the promise of his country's future on the expanding frontiers of the universe.
As the missile arced into high, cool air, millions of awed Americans followed its flight. On television sets from Canaveral to California they watched while its widening vapor trail was twisted into antic patterns by winds aloft. They listened while the calm, businesslike voice of the astronaut reported by radio as he progressed along his predetermined path. Schoolrooms knew an unaccustomed hush as students concentrated on Shepard's dangerous trip. Traffic thinned in thousands of cities as drivers pulled to the curb and tuned their radios. In Indianapolis, a judge halted courtroom proceedings so that all hands could watch a TV set that had been picked up by police as part of a thief's loot. Tension built steadily until the proud word came: Commander Shepard had landed safely in his space capsule, 302 miles downrange in the Atlantic, six miles from the predicted impact point. He and his capsule had been hauled from the sea by a Marine helicopter, and both were safely aboard the aircraft carrier Lake Champlain.
After 28 months of bickering. and breakdowns, of painful delays and wrecked plans, the U.S. Mercury man-in-space project had finally achieved its first objective: an American astronaut had been shot out of the earth's atmosphere and had returned alive. Shepard's trip, to be sure, had been brief (15 min.). Top speed of his capsule had been only 4,500 m.p.h., not significantly faster than the design speed of the U.S.'s piloted rocket plane X-15. Though his capsule had curved along its course with infinite precision, its ballistic trajectory could not be compared with the far more complicated orbital flight that Russia claimed last month for its own astronaut, Yuri Gagarin (TIME cover, April 21). Still, it was a magnificent milestone on man's path into space; it was a signal achievement of U.S. science. And it brightened the cold-war world with a luster all its own. It was a gaudy American gamble, a nation going for broke in the glare of pitiless publicity.
Having won its wager in the presence of prying television cameras and all the world's press, the U.S. could take special satisfaction in the fact that its spacemen did not keep secrets from science. They had worked in the open, unafraid of failure, unshielded by the compulsive secrecy that still surrounds much of the voyage of Yuri Gagarin's Vostok. Now, like Kilroy, Shepard had been there—and while he traveled, the world had watched.