Sunday, July 26, 1998

A high-flying hero of wit and courage

It was just a 15-minute ride, a flight of a few hundred miles, and if you didn't know the context and the consequences, Alan B. Shepard's 1961 trip aboard a rocket-propelled capsule might seem less an accomplishment, not even the first venture of a human being into space.

The context, though, was a Cold War whose outcome could clearly affect the world's destiny. America's adversary, the Soviet Union, appeared to have taken the lead.

In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, a satellite that seemed to many to signal the Soviets' educational, technological and military superiority. While other Soviet space successes quickly followed, the United States seemed to be making a habit of exploding rockets on their launching pads. The Shepard flight ended the disgrace.

It did more. Even though the suborbital flight in Freedom 7 had been delayed for safety reasons, allowing the Soviets to shoot a man into space first, it renewed American self-confidence and helped prompt President Kennedy to pledge the nation would send men to the moon before decade's end, as it did.

According to some analysts, America's ultimate supremacy in rocketry played a significant role in the Soviet Union's collapse. In scientific terms, the Shepard flight boosted space technology and exploration and all the endless developments in still other fields that have ensued.

Despite the hero's treatment Shepard received when the flight was made, some denigrated the roles of those chosen as America's first astronauts, as if their mental acuity and competence as test pilots mattered little. In fact, their courage, determination, skills and leadership repeatedly proved crucial.

Shepard's courage, for instance, was clearly on display when he went on his first space flight, as it was a decade later when he went to the moon following the close call of the previous moon mission, Apollo 13.

Shepard - a space pioneer who died this week at the age of 74 - may be almost as much remembered as the man who hit golf balls on the moon as for his earlier, more historic space adventure, and he endured some criticism on that score, as if he had committed a sacrilegious act.

Actually, he had exhibited another characteristic that was surely important to his own success and often seems one of the saving graces of the United States - a sense of humor.