Alan Shepard

He skipped two grades in Derry, New Hampshire, where his father worked at the family bank, and finished Pinkerton Academy at 16 — too young for Annapolis, so his family parked him a year at a naval prep school, where a test put his IQ at 145 and his marks stayed ordinary. The Naval Academy compressed four years into three for the war, and he came out on June 6, 1944, ranked 463rd in a class of 915. The destroyer Cogswell carried him through Typhoon Cobra, kamikazes at Lingayen Gulf and radar picket duty off Okinawa, the station the Japanese hit first. He married Louise Brewer in March 1945. In flight training he was rated a below-average student and quietly paid for civilian lessons to catch up.

By 1957 he had 3,600 flying hours, a Naval War College diploma and a near court-martial for looping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. NASA named him one of the Mercury Seven in April 1959 and told him in January 1961 that he had the first American flight. Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth in April. Freedom 7 went up on May 5 — 15 minutes, 116 miles high, 302 miles downrange, with attitude controls he could actually work. Asked what he thought about on the pad, he said the fact that every part of the ship was built by the lowest bidder. Ten years later he walked on the Moon at 47, the oldest man to do it and the only one of the original seven, and hit two golf balls with a six-iron head on a sample scoop.

The trouble arrived in late 1963 as dizziness, nausea and a clanging in his left ear, and he tried to keep it quiet. Doctors named Meniere's disease, found glaucoma as well, and took out a fifth of his thyroid in January 1964. He was off flight status for more than five years. He ran the Astronaut Office in the meantime and kept two photographs by the door, one smiling and one not, so his secretary could warn visitors which man was inside — Tom Wolfe called the two of them Smilin' Al and the Icy Commander. He spent the same years building a fortune in banking, real estate and oil, running a bank by telephone from a NASA office. He checked into a Los Angeles hospital in 1968 for the ear surgery under the name Victor Poulos.

He founded the Mercury Seven Foundation with the other survivors and Gus Grissom's widow in 1984, and it still hands out science scholarships under a new name. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia was diagnosed in 1996 and killed him on July 21, 1998, at Pebble Beach. Louise had meant to scatter his ashes. She died of a heart attack five weeks later, on August 25, at five in the afternoon — the hour he had always telephoned her when they were apart. Their family cremated them both, and a Navy helicopter scattered them together over Stillwater Cove in front of the house. Blue Origin named its suborbital rocket New Shepard, and on December 11, 2021, his daughter Laura rode it.

Alan Shepard's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Freedom 7 mission
  15 minutes and 116 miles up — the first American in space 1961
• Apollo 14 mission
  Commanded the lunar module Antares to Fra Mauro, and became the fifth man on the Moon 1971
• Mercury Seven Foundation company
  Science scholarships, renamed the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation in 1995 1984
• Moon Shot book
  Written with Deke Slayton and two journalists, and made into a television miniseries 1994

• November 18, 1923 aged 0 Born at Derry, New Hampshire
• June 6, 1944 aged 20 Graduates from the Naval Academy on the morning of the Normandy landings The course had been cut from four years to three for the war.
• March 3, 1945 aged 21 Marries Louise Brewer at Wilmington, Delaware The marriage lasted 53 years, ending five weeks apart.
• April 9, 1959 aged 35 Introduced as one of the Mercury Seven
• May 5, 1961 aged 37 Flies Freedom 7 and becomes the first American in space Four hours on the pad meant he had to urinate in the suit. Later suits had a fitting for it.
• November 1963 aged 39 Grounded and made Chief of the Astronaut Office Meniere's disease. Gus Grissom and John Young flew Gemini 3 in his place.
• May 14, 1968 aged 44 Has a drainage shunt put into his inner ear in Los Angeles He registered under the name Victor Poulos. Flight status came back a year later.
• February 5, 1971 aged 47 Walks on the Moon at 47, the oldest man to do it He drove two golf balls, the second about 40 yards.
• July 21, 1998 aged 74 Dies of leukemia at Pebble Beach, California

• Tom Wolfe 1930–2018
  New Journalism pioneer whose The Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities chronicled American culture. wrote him into The Right Stuff
• Wernher von Braun 1912–1977
  German-American aerospace engineer who led the development of the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the Moon. built the rocket under him
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. pinned the medal on him
• Jim Lovell 1928–2025
  Commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, whose calm leadership brought the crew home safely. traded missions with
• Jeff Bezos b. 1964
  Founder of Amazon who transformed e-commerce and cloud computing, becoming one of the wealthiest people in history. named a rocket after him