NASA marks 50th anniversary of manned US space flight

The United States space program was down and out when Alan Shepard climbed inside a one-man capsule on May 5, 1961, for a 15-minute ride. Cold War rival Russia had flown cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin first - less than a month before on a flight that was higher and longer - and some in the nascent NASA thought the space race was already lost.
"When (Shepard) took off, he carried NASA on his shoulders," said Shepard biographer and long-time space journalist Jay Barbree. "If he failed, he knew it would be the failure of the space program." At the wind-swept launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where Shepard blasted off, former astronauts, NASA guests and community leaders gathered Thursday to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first flight of a US astronaut into space.