Alan Shepard

The space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was at its most intense in the late 1950s and on into the 1960s. First came Sputnik and a rush of satellites. But the next big contest--apologies to the dogs and chimps rocketed aloft--was to get a man into space, and again the Soviets claimed victory with the April 12, 1961 flight of Yuri Gagarin.

The U.S. wasn't far behind, however. Just over three weeks later, at 9:34 a.m. ET on May 5 of that year, NASA launched the second human and first American into space, a 37-year-old U.S. Navy test pilot named Alan Shepard.