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The first plane ride was in a homemade glider my buddy and I built. Unfortunately we didn't get more than four feet off the ground, because it crashed.

Alan Shepard

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Alan Shepard
Age: 74 †
Born: 1923
Born: November 18
Died: 1998
Died: July 22
Aircraft Pilot
Astronaut
Entrepreneur
Naval Officer
United States Naval Aviator
Derry
New Hampshire
Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr.
Feet
Aeroplanes
Four
Buddy
Didn
Plane
Firsts
Unfortunately
First
Ride
Planes
Ground
Crashed
Built
Homemade

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Roger, liftoff, and the clock is started.
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I think the sense of family and family achievement, plus the discipline which I received there from that one-room school were really very helpful in what I did later on.
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The same way people are now paying a couple thousand dollars to fly to other parts of the world, people will be paying $50,000 to spend a weekend on a space station.
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Obviously I was challenged by becoming a Naval aviator, by landing aboard aircraft carriers and so on.
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The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.
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I guess those of us who have been with NASA kind of understand the tremendous excitement and thrills and celebrations and national pride that went with the Apollo program is just something you're not going to create again, probably until we go to Mars.
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We worked with the engineers in the design and construction and testing phases in those various areas, then we would get back together at the end of the week and brief each other as to what had gone on.
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Then there was the challenge to keep doing better and better, to fly the best test flight that anybody had ever flown. That led to my being recognized as one of the more experienced test pilots, and that led to the astronaut business.
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Then I thought, with the same clubhead speed, the ball's going to go at least six times as far. There's absolutely no drag, so if you do happen to spin it, it won't slice or hook 'cause there's no atmosphere to make it turn.
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We also knew it would be difficult, because of the financial condition of the family, for me to go to college.
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I just wanted to be the first one to fly for America, not because I'd end up in the pages of history books.
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When I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the Moon I cried
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The excitement really didn't start to build until the trailer - which was carrying me, with a space suit with ventilation and all that sort of stuff - pulled up to the launch pad.
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You may not have any extra talent, but maybe you are just paying more attention to what you are doing.
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We wanted to be in great shape, we wanted to be able to cope with zero gravity, we wanted to be able to cope with accelerations and decelerations and so on. So all of us trained so that we were probably in the best physical condition we had ever been in up until that point.
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I think about the personal accomplishment, but there's more of a sense of the grand achievement by all the people who could put this man on the moon.
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But when I was selected, after my very first tour of squadron duty, to become one of the youngest candidates for the test pilot school, I began to realize, maybe you are a little bit better.
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You've done it in the simulator so many times, you don't have a real sense of being excited when the flight is going on. You're excited before, but as soon as the liftoff occurs, you are busy doing what you have to do.
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