During the Apollo 14 flight he conducted private ESP experiments with his friends on Earth.
Ping.
Maybe so but he was always my favorite. When I was in 7th Grade I watched Shepard's Mercury launch—about 50 miles distant—from the grounds of my junior high in Orlando. Thirty years later I got to visit his launch pad at Kennedy Space Center. It was absolutely tiny compared to the sites used for the Saturn V and later the Shuttle.
I liked Al Shepherd a hell of a lot more than that fraud john Glenn. Al was a Navy guy and also friendly with conservative Coors family as he had I think a Coors beer distributorship.
“When reporters asked Shepard what he thought about as he sat atop the Redstone rocket, waiting for liftoff, he had replied, ‘The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.”
NASA was good when the Germans ran it.
Wow. That site is hard to load up.
Is it some kind of spyware distribution center?
Who can ever forget the Alan Shepard prayer from the first Mercury launch?
I had the priviledge of meeting him later that year... which for a 16 year old kid (who closely followed the space program) was a dream come true.
I had just left my high school (Admiral Farragut Academy) for the summer, and went to France where my parents lived. I got home, still in my uniform, and my dad said "Alan Shepard is in town getting an honary wine society award...let's go".
Once in the small town square, packed with people, someone approached me and asked me to stay put... he said the Admiral wanted to talk to me. Shepard noticed the uniform as he attended the same school years earlier. We chatted a few minutes... it was a real high for me.
According to Tom Wolfe’s book, there were “two” Alan Shepards.
The one that got things done and took no crap from anyone was the “Commander Shepard” persona. He was the cool, detached get-it-done-now-or-else kind of guy.
The other Shepard was “Smilin’ Al of the Cape”. He was the fun-to-be-with guy, the guy who would occasionally pop up and play practical jokes on the test crews and scientists.