Fantastic Fiction: Fifteen Minutes of Fame: Alan Shepard and MR-3
American astronaut Alan Shepard could have become the first person in space, but NASA’s desire for just one more test flight delayed his launch, and he lost that historic position to Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Discover how NASA’s Project Mercury helped to turn the age-old dream of human spaceflight into reality in 1961 as the Cold War Space Race started to heat up.