One of the famous Mercury 7 astronauts selected to fly ... rocket exploding after less than a minute in flight and a Redstone booster only rising about 4 ft (1 m) from the pad before coming ...

which was still on the pad at Cape Canaveral atop the Redstone booster rocket. He'd been selected in January 1961 as the primary pilot for Mercury Redstone 4, with John Glenn as his backup.

The mission was known as the Mercury Redstone Booster Development flight, and it wasn't originally planned as part of the Mercury Program. The previous Mercury Redstone flight carried a chimpanzee ...

Glenn looks on in the background. The Redstone booster carrying Mercury astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr. lifts off from Cape Canaveral at 9:34 a.m. Eastern on May 5, 1961. His 15 minute sub-orbital ...

Powered by a Redstone booster, Shepard's flight, part of Project Mercury, lasted all of 15 minutes and 28 seconds. Project Mercury, which ran from 1959 through 1963, had the singular goal of ...

The escape tower was jettisoned, but the spacecraft did not separate from the booster. The Mercury capsule was refurbished and later launched as with a new launch vehicle as Mercury Redstone 1A.

but the Mercury Redstone suborbital flights, of which Freedom was one, were also intended to test the spacecraft's Mercury capsule and booster to make sure that the capsule would be ready for ...

Launch of the Mercury-Redstone 3 rocket with Alan Shepard onboard ... system that would quickly separate the capsule from the booster in case of a launchpad explosion. "What a beautiful view ...

The booster that lofted the New Shepard crew ... first person to complete a suborbital spaceflight. His May 5, 1961 Mercury-Redstone 3 launch aboard the Freedom 7 capsule ended in a splashdown ...