Astronaut preparing for insertion into Freedom 7 Poster

Fellow Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom (in business suit) wishes Alan Shepard good luck as he gets set to climb into his Mercury capsule, dubbed Freedom 7, on the morning of May 5, 1961. Glenn looks on in the background. On the way to the launch pad, Shepard had done what he could to ''kick the tires'' on the Redstone. ''I stopped and ... looked back and up at the beautiful rocket, and thought 'Well, OK buster, let's go and get the job done.''' 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.