Launched in 1961, Freedom 7, commanded by Alan Shepard, was the first crewed spacecraft in the United States' Project Mercury program. Its primary objectives included

determining whether a human could survive a flight to space, gathering data on human physiological responses during a suborbital flight, and validating the performance of spacecraft systems. Freedom 7 safely splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, where it was recovered by the USS Lake Champlain.

Shepard became the first American in space and the second person overall, following Yuri Gagarin's flight a month earlier, later becaming…