here's your reward, if you haven't seen it - a very cool video of Shepards entire flight, showing him and the cockpit the whole time.

I remember watching this with my grandfather when I was a kid.

Which often meant getting up before 5am, since we lived in Colorado.

I love this clip

I assume you watched HBO's From The Earth to the Moon, too. Great piece of television.

It's always seemed to me that Glenn got more recognition and Shepard's been kind of overlooked. Well, suborbital, not the first time, and Al was no boy scout. But Wolfe points out how friggin' dangerous the whole thing was. "Our rockets always blow up." When Al told the boys to "light that candle," he had no way of knowing if that would be the last thing he ever said.

We're so blase about space flight now.

-- Mal

... Shepherd never quit and went to the moon.

Thanks fora the reminder, LongTomH!

My memory is not Funes'. From its dim recesses I recall:

Deke's issues, according to Joseph and Susan B. Trento, were somehow "overlooked" by Nixon's NASA leadership in order to get Deke out of Flight Operations so they could win astronaut office approval of the solid-liquid shuttle stack combo. NASA knew with him there, they couldn't get approval past the 1:100 solid rocket motor failure rate.

http://www.amazon.com/Prescription-Disaster-Apollo-Betrayal-Shuttle/dp/0517564157

.....compromised from the beginning. I'm also very critical of the way that some technologies from the Shuttle era are being recycled for asteroid and Mars missions intended for the 2020s and 2030s, mostly the same segmented solid rockets used on the Shuttle.

I did a quick Google search on "Prescription for Disaster Challenger." One of the more interesting sources I found was a pdf file of a report from the University of Texas Austin for a course in Studies in Ethics, Safety, and Liability for Engineers:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=23&ved=0CDkQFjACOBQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.engr.sjsu.edu%2Fnikos%2Fcourses%2Fae171%2FSS%2520Design.doc&ei=RdtrU5O2EYqpyAGW6YCQDA&usg=AFQjCNEtDtoynqohGA3QvnWQXbbitPTtJQ&sig2=wA_ZZaBvA4V4K7PSNE1oLA&bvm=bv.66111022,bs.1,d.cWc

The authors asked some very important ethics and safety questions:

I followed in their footsteps and went through military pilot training, never did get to go to the moon. Some of my friends' heroes were in sports or the movies. Funny how none of us wanted to grow up and be a politician...no heroes there.

Instead, I went into IT, back in '72. Did some work for NASA, even. That and music gave me two great careers, but ya know, I still dream about flying in space.

for Al!

that is my life now as well...

Thanks for posting!

The first elementary school report I remember writing was about him. I was in first grade. Absolutely loved We Seven and still have the first edition somewhere. Naturally I wanted to be an astronaut, but it's kind of hard to do that without depth perception.

As I got older I appreciated him more. Him and Pete Conrad, who was such a loon he joked his way into Group 2.

Oh, and not to quibble, but his name is spelled "Shepard."

-- Mal