"It's a Success"

It was midmorning on May 5, 1961. U.S. President John F. Kennedy, his wife and a group of his closest associates in Government stood in a White House office room, their gaze fastened upon a television screen. Like millions of Americans in millions of other homes, they held their breath, crossed their fingers and prayed as they watched the Redstone rocket belch flame on its Cape Canaveral firing pad, lift off with maddening slowness, then streak magnificently southward.

In a sense, the sight was familiar--similar rockets had taken off many times before; they too had been photographed and filmed. But no one, from the President on down, could forget for an instant that at the tip of this particular Redstone, nicknamed Freedom 7, was a capsule carrying a 160-lb. man named Alan B. Shepard Jr., a Navy commander, a citizen of Derry, N.H., and the first American to attempt to pierce outer space (see SCIENCE cover).

With Shepard rode the hopes of the U.S. and the whole free world in a period of darkness. In recent weeks the U.S. had suffered a succession of setbacks: first, the orbital exploit claimed by the Soviet Union for its Major "Gaga"' Gagarin, then the Cuba debacle, and then retreat in strategic Southeast Asia. For Jack Kennedy, his New Frontier image badly tarnished by cold war defeats, Freedom 7 represented a daring and dangerous gamble. He had given the go-ahead for the man-shoot not to be made in such secrecy as to cast doubt on the actual accomplishment (as in the case of Russia's Gagarin), but with the whole world watching.

For 15 agonizing minutes after Freedom 7's takeoff. President Kennedy tensely watched his television screen; finally, when word came that Alan Shepard was alive and apparently healthy, the President sighed with relief, smiled, and said: "It's a success.'' That the U.S. had been willing and confident enough to attempt the flight in public view was a fact that could only impress the world. Wrote London's Daily Telegraph, in apt summation of the gamble's payoff: "Technically, the Americans were runners-up. Morally, the cup is theirs. Nobody can doubt that Commander Shepard really did it."

The blaze of Alan Shepard's Redstone rocket was a bright light on a dark, cold war horizon. It was a first step in John

Kennedy's fight back from the personal and political Pearl Harbors of Cuba and Laos. But for all its glory, the voyage of Freedom 7 and its lonely passenger could only make more clear the fact that the cold war remains to be won--and can be--on earth.

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