Vintage News Bulletins & More, 1961, Alan Shepard First US Manned Space Flight

Description

This is an enormous opportunity to own an original piece of early space flight history.
This lot includes more than fifteen feet of original Associated Press teletype bulletins and news scripts related to the first  United States manned space flight which took place on May 5, 1961.
That first American manned flight was piloted by Alan Shepard and was part of Project Mercury.  Shepard’s flight lasted all of 15 minutes and traveled 263.1 nautical miles at an altitude of 101.2 nautical miles, according to Wikipedia.  Top flight speed was 5100 miles per hour.  The purpose of the flight was to monitor the high g-forces on the human body during launch and re-entry.
John F. Kennedy had been elected President in 1960.
He invited Commander Shepard to attend a ceremony at the White House just three days after the flight (May 8, 1961), and awarded Shepard the NASA Distinguished Service Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Space Technology.
An original program from that White House visit and medal presentation is also included with this lot of first space flight memorabilia.
While Shepard’s was the first US manned spaceflight, in a race for space the Soviet Union had launched its own human spaceflight just three weeks earlier.
The Associated Press teletype material in this lot includes at least four Bulletins and other significant news script material distributed to radio and television stations for broadcast.
The material was originally gathered and maintained by Jim Thomas, a newscaster who worked for a television station in Washington state.
News bulletins and other news scripts like this rarely survive the events of the day because they are constantly being updated and replaced.
The fact that Mr. Thomas saw fit to save this original teletype material is a credit to his keen sense of history as he knew that this normally ephemeral material represented a significant milestone in US history.
This year (2021) is the 60
th
anniversary of the first American in Space, and the Mercury-Redstone (MR-3) spacecraft (which Shepard had dubbed “Freedom 7”) is now on display at a Smithsonian site in Chantilly, VA.
It has previously been displayed at the US Naval Academy and the John F. Kennedy Library.
This original teletype material and the brochure from the White House ceremony are truly pieces of our country’s history that need to be preserved for posterity.  Selling the entire pre-owned one-of-a-kind lot “as-is” with FREE SHIPPING in the US.  Please review the accompanying photos as they are considered part of the description. Thank you for your interest in this material.  It represents the country’s fledgling steps into a space program that would ultimately bring much greater achievements as well as much greater risks.  Thank you for your interest in saving and preserving this important piece of American space flight history.