5 May 1961
Freedom 7 Mercury
Shepard pilots Freedom 7 on the first crewed American suborbital spaceflight, demonstrating the basic Mercury spacecraft and recovery system.
Historical place archive
Browse historical events and people recorded at Cape Canaveral, Florida in United States of America. The records below are rendered directly from the World History Database into this page's initial HTML.
Shepard pilots Freedom 7 on the first crewed American suborbital spaceflight, demonstrating the basic Mercury spacecraft and recovery system.
Grissom pilots Liberty Bell 7 on the second American crewed suborbital flight under Project Mercury.
Carpenter pilots Aurora 7 on a three-orbit Project Mercury mission that confirms the success of America's first orbital flight.
Mariner 1 is launched toward Venus but a guidance failure forces controllers to destroy the spacecraft shortly after liftoff.
Mariner 2 launches on the first successful American mission to Venus.
Cooper launches aboard Faith 7 on the final crewed mission of Project Mercury.
Mariner 5 launches to perform a close Venus flyby focused on atmospheric and space-environment measurements.
Voyager 2 launches on the mission that will eventually perform humanity's first close reconnaissance of Neptune.
Pioneer Venus Orbiter launches to study Venus's atmosphere, ionosphere, gravity field and cloud-hidden surface.
Pioneer Venus Multiprobe launches carrying one large and three small atmospheric probes toward Venus.
MESSENGER launches to begin a complex seven-year journey that will culminate in the first orbital mission around Mercury.
The New Horizons spacecraft arrives in Florida for final testing and launch preparations for its journey to Pluto.
New Horizons launches aboard an Atlas V rocket, beginning the first spacecraft journey to Pluto.
Provenance
These entries are generated from stored World History Database records whose country and place fields match United States of America and Cape Canaveral, Florida. Names, dates, event labels and descriptions are reviewed and normalised as the database develops. Historical place names may not match modern administrative boundaries.
This database is a research index. For formal scholarly citation, verify individual claims against appropriate primary, archival, academic or specialist sources.