Three hours on his back before liftoff

Alan Shepard entered the Freedom 7 capsule at 5:15 a.m. — launch was planned for 7:20. Because of weather and technical delays, he ended up waiting on the pad for more than three hours before the Redstone finally lifted off.

Shepard chose the capsule’s name himself, with the approval of program director Robert Gilruth, his wife Louise, and backup pilot John Glenn — the “7” in the name would later stick to every Mercury capsule in honour of the seven chosen astronauts. During the long wait on the pad, Shepard faced an unexpected problem: because the flight was expected to be so short, his suit had no urine-collection device, and before the countdown could resume he had to relieve himself right inside it.

Mercury-Redstone 3 finally lifted off from Pad 5 at Cape Canaveral at 14:34 UTC (9:34 local time) — watched by an estimated 45 million television viewers. Not quite three weeks earlier, the Soviet Union had sent Yuri Gagarin into space, the first human in history to orbit the Earth — American pride was somewhat tempered by coming in second, but this was still the first crewed flight of Project Mercury.