On this day in space! May 5, 1961: Alan Shepard becomes 1st American in space

On May 5, 1961, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to go to space. He launched from Cape Canaveral on a Mercury-Redstone rocket in a space capsule named Freedom 7.

Astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American in space, poses here in his Mercury flight suit. — Fans dressed as characters from the Star Wars universe attend the 2017 Star Wars Celebration convention. (Image credit: NASA)

— Mercury Redstone 3: Photos from Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 Spaceflight

— FAQ: Alan Shepard's Historic Flight as First American in Space

— Building Project Mercury: Test Flight Photos of NASA's First Spaceship

Shepard's flight was suborbital and lasted only 15 minutes, but he did experience weightlessness. During the flight, he tested the capsule's attitude control system and retrorockets, which would be used to help future orbital missions land.

He reached an altitude of 116 miles before he parachuted back down to Earth. The Freedom 7 space capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean near the Bahamas. The capsule tilted over onto its side after the landing, but it slowly turned itself upright after about a minute of bobbing in the water. Recovery teams arrived by helicopter and quickly helped him out of the water, and the mission was deemed a huge success.

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Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.