Alan Shepard became the first American in space when the Freedom 7 spacecraft blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on May 5, 1961, aboard a Mercury-Redstone rocket. Ten years later, Shepard would leave Earth's atmosphere again to become the fifth man to walk on the moon — and the first one to play a bit of lunar golf.
Born on Nov. 18, 1923, to Renza Emerson and Alan Shepard, Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. grew up in rural New Hampshire. After graduating from high school, he attended the U.S. Naval Academy and graduated on June 7, 1944, one day after D-Day. Shepard spent the last year of World War II on a destroyer in the Pacific.
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