Alan B. Shepard

Even near the end, the first American to look down on Earth from the heavens was thinking about the country's next few steps into space. Alan B. Shepard, whose 1961 flight rocketed the United States into the age of manned space exploration, was on the phone just weeks ago, talking with fellow Mercury astronaut John Glenn about Glenn's return to space on a shuttle this fall. "He wanted to be there (at the launch pad) if he could, didn't know if he could," Glenn said. "He was interested in some of the things I'd been training on." Shepard died in his sleep Tuesday at a Monterey, Calif., hospital, where he was being treated for leukemia. He was 74. Shepard will be buried in a private ceremony in California, longtime friend Howard Benedict said today. Benedict, head of the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame near Cape Canaveral, said Shepard's widow, Louise, told him there would be no announcement about the place or time. A generation ago, when human space travel was more the stuff of fiction than fact, Shepard's description of the Earth as seen through a periscope on the Freedom 7 space capsule "it had no window" captured the event with an understatement that became the Mercury astronauts' hallmark. "What a view," he said. Edgar Mitchell, who walked the moon with Shepard during the 1971 Apollo 14 mission, said Shepard had "an explorer's disposition to go where humans haven't been before, to check it out, and the determination to get there." "It was our common attitude: 'We get paid to do this?' It was the greatest adventure of a lifetime," Mitchell said. Shepard's Mercury 3 mission lasted only 15 minutes _ five of them in space _ yet its sheer glory helped persuade President Kennedy to pledge the nation to a moon landing within a decade. And it energized generations of engineers, scientists and astronauts. "He was one of my inspiring forces. Those Mercury 7 men led the way for the rest of us," said former astronaut Jon McBride, who flew on the space shuttle Challenger in October 1984 and met Shepard in 1978. President Clinton called Shepard "one of the great heroes of modern America." "None of us who were alive then will ever forget him sitting so calmly in Freedom Seven atop a slender and sometimes unreliable Mercury Redstone rocket," Clinton said. Despite tremendous disappointment that Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had beat him into space by 23 days, Shepard was excited as he sat in the tight Mercury cabin atop the rocket for more than four hours on the launch morning while engineers sorted through a series of problems. At one point he barked to Mission Control: "Why don't you fix your little problem and light this candle?" At 9:34 a.m., the rocket roared away from the Cape Canaveral, Fla., launch pad, soared to an altitude of 115 miles, reaching a speed of 5,100 mph and plunged back through the atmosphere, landing 302 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean. One of the original seven Mercury astronauts, Shepard made a second flight, to the moon, which made him the fifth of only a dozen humans who have walked on the lunar surface _ and the only one to swing a golf club there. He later said that when he finally reached the moon, he was so touched by the beauty and by the fragility of Earth that he wept. His death came just months before Glenn, the 77-year-old senator from Ohio, was scheduled to return to space, decades after he became the first American to orbit the Earth. Between his own two space missions, Shepard suffered six years of frustration with an inner ear condition that kept him grounded. During that time he served as head of the astronaut office, a job he found frustrating, preferring to fly himself. Some regarded Shepard as the epitome of "the right stuff" _ a phrase author Tom Wolfe made famous in a book of that name. It was a tag that Shepard detested. He was athletic, cocksure and quick witted, with little tolerance for fools. Shepard left NASA in 1974, retired from the Navy with the rank of admiral, and became a millionaire with investments in banks, oil wells, quarter horses, real estate and a beer distributorship. He was born in Derry, N.H., and graduated from the U.S. Navy Academy in 1944, just in time to see World War II action aboard the destroyer Cogswell. After the war, he stayed in the Navy, earned his aviator wings and later became a test pilot. Shepard is survived by his widow, Louise, three daughters, and six grandchildren.