Support was growing, in Congress and among scientists, for a United States civilian space agency. Soon, Congress passed a bill creating NASA -- the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. President Eisenhower signed the bill into law.

NASA's job was to be scientific space exploration. Its major goal was sending the first Americans into space.

Within three months, the program had a name: Project Mercury. Mercury was the speedy messenger of the Greek gods. While engineers built the spacecraft, NASA looked for men to fly them.

NASA wanted military test pilots because they test fly new planes. Test pilots are trained to think quickly in dangerous situations. On April seventh, nineteen fifty-nine, the space agency announced the seven Mercury astronauts. They would be the first American space travelers. Alan Shepard was one. The others were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Virgil Grissom, Walter Schirra and Donald Slayton.

SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Nine months after the project started, NASA made its first test flight of the Mercury spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida. In the next two years, many other tests followed, all without astronauts.

Alan Shepard is seen in his space suit prior to launch on the spacecraft Freedom 7 at the Kennedy Space Center

The final test flight was at the end of January, nineteen sixty-one. It carried a chimpanzee named Ham on a seven-hundred-kilometer flight over the Atlantic Ocean. Several problems developed. But Ham survived the launch and the landing in the ocean. Later, Alan Shepard often was asked how he became the first human American to fly in space. "They ran out of monkeys," he joked.