May 1961: Alan Shepard becomes the first American in space

In the early days of the space race, the US was forever playing catch-up with the considerably more technologically advanced Soviet effort.

And when, on May 5^th 1961, commander Alan Shepard became the first American in space, The Engineer was relatively underwhelmed by the technical significance of the achievement.

“In comparison with the around-the-word space flight by Soviet “cosmonaut” Yury Gagarin the fifteen-minute flight by “astronaut” Shepard some 115 miles into space and 290 miles downrange of the launching pad was a modest and belated jump into space,” it reported.

The article goes on to list all the ways in which the US effort didn’t measure up to the Soviet achievement: “His launching rocket had only one-tenth the power of the Soviet missile, and his capsule was one-fifth as heavy. The flight was only one-sixth as long in time and about one-ninetieth in distance.”

The publication stopped short of calling the launch a publicity stunt, although does note that when Wernher Von Braun (the German rocket scientist who relocated to the US after World War II) had proposed a similar mission just a couple of years earlier it had been shot down for precisely that reason.