{"id":11657,"date":"2015-11-18T15:04:09","date_gmt":"2015-11-18T15:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=11657"},"modified":"2015-11-18T15:04:09","modified_gmt":"2015-11-18T15:04:09","slug":"happy-92nd-birthday-alan-shepard-jr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=11657","title":{"rendered":"Happy 92nd birthday, Alan Shepard Jr."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n

\"alan<\/a><\/p>\n

OK, so he’s no longer alive to celebrate it but I couldn’t let pass an item that I stumbled upon this morning.<\/p>\n

The late Alan Shepard Jr. was born 92 years ago today.<\/p>\n

Shepard enlivened a nation<\/a>, invigorated our national psyche and gave us a sense of mission at a time when we needed it.<\/p>\n

He did it simply by riding atop a rocket for a 15-minute ride into outer space. He splashed down a few hundred miles off the Florida coast into the Atlantic Ocean.<\/p>\n

I was a youngster at the time. On May 5, 1961, when Shepard took off aboard that Redstone rocket, I was just 12. But I was fascinated, along with the rest of the country, by the notion of human beings flying into space.<\/p>\n

The Soviet Union — which would be known later as the Evil Empire — had beaten us into space. Yuri Gagarin had orbited Earth a month before Shepard took off. The Soviets were beating us at our own game! President Kennedy would have none of it.<\/p>\n

Shepard’s flight didn’t measure up to Gagarin’s orbit in the strictest sense, but it didn’t matter to a nation itching to get into the space race. Shepard’s successful flight put us in the thick of the fight.<\/p>\n

He got another shot at space travel. A decade later\u00a0Shepard commanded Apollo 14’s mission to the moon and hit that famous golf shot from the moon’s surface that flew for “miles and miles.”<\/p>\n

I miss those days. I wish we could find it within our national spirit to insist<\/em> on manned space flight. We’re now sending our astronauts into space aboard ships launched by our former arch-enemy; it’s called “Russia” these days, now that the Soviet Union has disintegrated.<\/p>\n

Our space agency is developing a deep-space vehicle that eventually will take future pioneers to places like Mars and perhaps to the asteroid belt.<\/p>\n

Is there national excitement as we await that day? Uhh, no.<\/p>\n

We’re left to remember\u00a0when gutsy test pilots such as Alan Shepard squeezed into tiny space capsules and flew aboard those relatively itty-bitty rockets. He gave us a national thrill that we haven’t duplicated in quite some time.<\/p>\n

I hope I’m alive to see the first flight to Mars.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, happy birthday to a man former President Bill Clinton once described as \u201cone of the great heroes of modern America.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n\n

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OK, so he’s no longer alive to celebrate it but I couldn’t let pass an item that I stumbled upon this morning. The late Alan Shepard Jr. was born 92 years ago today. Shepard enlivened a nation, invigorated our national psyche and gave us a sense of mission at a time when we needed it. … Continue reading Happy 92nd birthday, Alan Shepard Jr.<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[233,5623,2460,2924,5622,4343,4346,5624],"class_list":["post-11657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-news","tag-alan-shepard","tag-apollo-14","tag-jfk","tag-mars","tag-moon-mission","tag-soviet-union","tag-space-race","tag-yuri-gagarin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11657"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11659,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11657\/revisions\/11659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}