Launching of the Mercury-Redstone 3 (MR-3) spacecraft from Cape Canaveral on a suborbital mission -- the first U.S. manned spaceflight.

Mercury Redstone 3 (MR-3, also designated Freedom 7) was the first flight of an American rocket with a human on board (Alan B. Shepard, Jr.), occurring twenty-three days after Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight of Vostok 1. The objectives of MR-3 were to: (1) familiarize man with a brief but complete space flight experience, including the lift-off, powered flight, weightless flight (approximately 5 minutes), re-entry, and landing phases of the flight; (2) evaluate man's ability to perform as a functional unit during space flight by demonstrating manual control of spacecraft attitude before, during, and after retrofire and by use of voice communications during flight; (3) study man's physiological reactions during space flight; and, (4) recover the astronaut and spacecraft.