On the morning of May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard crawled into the cramped Mercury capsule, "Freedom 7," at Launch ...

His spacecraft, Freedom 7, was a tribute to the seven Project Mercury astronauts, and to one of our Nation's founding principles: freedom. " Related Spacecraft launched by Soviet Union in 1972 is ...

Mercury astronaut John Glenn was 77 when he returned to orbit on a short shuttle flight in 1998. But he’d been gone from NASA for decades and was close to wrapping up his Senate career.