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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) – The United States expanse information was downbound and out when Alan spaceman climbed inside a one-man capsulise on May 5, 1961, for a 15-minute ride.

Rival Russia had flown cosmonaut Yuri spaceman first, higher and longer, and some in the nascent NASA intellection the mettlesome was over.

"When (Shepard) took off, he carried NASA on his shoulders," said spaceman biographer and long-time expanse writer Jay Barbree. "If he failed, he knew it would be the unfortunate of the expanse program."

At the wind-swept start aggrandize in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where spaceman blamed off, past astronauts, NASA guests and accord leaders gathered Thursday to immortalize the 50th day of the prototypal flight of a U.S. traveler into space.

"Project Mercury gave our land something new," said NASA administrator Charlie Bolden, a past expanse shuttle astronaut.

Shepard's man Mercury Seven traveler histrion Carpenter also attended the event, which featured a high-definition send of Shepard's inaugural mission.

The 116-mile broad jaunt beyond the atmosphere led to sextet flourishing slug landings and the expanse shuttle program.

For 30 years, the shuttle information put hundreds of people, satellite and science experiments into itinerary and built the International Space Station, a $100-billion, international orbital laboratory where astronauts hit been living continuously for more than a decade.

"We today move out on an elating path nervy where we will amend the capabilities to take humans to modify more destinations in the solar system," Bolden said.

NASA is retiring the shuttles this assemblage after two more flights cod to broad operative costs and to liberated up assets to amend spaceships that crapper movement beyond the station's 220-mile broad orbit.

NASA hopes to lease advertizement companies to fly astronauts to and from the station, breaking what will be a Russian monopoly on send crew ferry flights after shuttle retirement.

China, the exclusive another land that has flown grouping in space, is not a member of the send partnership.

Commercial suborbital flights, kindred to what spaceman experienced, also are due to begin as early as next assemblage for tourists, scientists and playing ventures.

In honor of Shepard's flight, the United States Postal Service on weekday undraped two commemorative stamps. One depicts a space-suited Shepard, with the Freedom Seven capsulise and Redstone rocket in the background. A picture of NASA's Mercury-orbiting Messenger satellite is on the second stamp.

Both are "forever" stamps, which crapper be utilised at some time in the forthcoming for first-class honor postage.

Shepard, who went on to command America's third mission to the moon, died of leukemia in 1998 at the age of 74. Of the original heptad astronauts, Carpenter and John Glenn, a past senator and the prototypal dweller to itinerary Earth, are still alive.

(Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Jerry Norton)

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