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 spaceflight, 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, and later became the fifth man to walk on the moon.

Soon after the flight, Kennedy challenged the nation to "commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth."