Patch: Mercury 3/Freedom 7

This commemorative patch marks the Mercury Redstone 3 mission of May 5, 1961, the first human spaceflight by an American. In this mission, a Mercury-Redstone rocket boosted Alan B. Shepard, Jr. in his Freedom 7 capsule to an altitude of almost 188 kilometers and a distance of almost 500 kilometers down range from Cape Canaveral. The mission proved to the world that the United States could safely perform human spaceflight, just a little less than four weeks after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.