Alan Sheppard

WASHINGTON (AP) - Astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to fly in space and the fifth human to walk on the moon, died Tuesday of leukemia. He was 74.
Shepard was one of the revered original seven Mercury astronauts named by NASA in April 1959. He made a 15-minute suborbital flight - five of those minutes in space - on May 5, 1961, aboard the Freedom 7 Mercury spacecraft. Ten years later, after overcoming a serious inner-ear disorder, he returned to space for his second and last flight as commander of Apollo 14 on Jan. 31, 1971. It was the third of the six Apollo lunar landings and made Shepard one of only a dozen people to walk on the moon. Shepard and Edgar Mitchell spent 33 hours on the moon while their crewmate, Stuart Roosa, orbited overhead. The moon walkers made a difficult and dangerous climb to the rim of a crater and gathered moon rocks. Shepard ended his moon visit by playfully whacking golf balls with an improvised six-iron. Although Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin beat Shepard into space by 23 days, Shepard's 1961 flight marked the beginning of the U.S. manned space program.

Shepard left NASA in 1974, retired from the Navy with the rank of admiral and concentrated on business. He became a millionaire with investments in banks, oil wells, quarter horses, real estate and a beer distributorship.