Mercury Redstone 3 May 5th 1961

These are 1/72 scale decals for Mercury-Redstone 3, launched on 5 May 1961 from Cape Canaveral, Florida — the rocket that carried Commander Alan B. Shepard Jr. into space aboard Freedom 7, making him the first American in space.

The flight lasted just 15 minutes and 22 seconds, a suborbital arc that reached a peak altitude of 187 kilometers before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean — but those fifteen minutes changed America forever. Shepard's flight came just 23 days after Yuri Gagarin had become the first human in space for the Soviet Union, and the pressure on NASA and the nation was immense. Watched live on television by an estimated 45 million Americans, MR-3 demonstrated that the United States was in the Space Race to compete — and just 20 days later, President John F. Kennedy stood before Congress and committed the nation to landing a man on the Moon before the end of the decade.

The Mercury-Redstone 3 vehicle was the culmination of von Braun's Redstone program — the Jupiter A and Jupiter C test flights, the Mercury-Redstone BD booster development mission, and years of painstaking engineering all led to this moment. Shepard himself named his capsule Freedom 7, the "7" honoring the original seven Mercury astronauts. His calm, precise performance during the flight — including manually controlling the capsule's attitude — set the standard for the astronaut corps that would follow him to orbit, to the Moon, and beyond. Shepard himself would return to space a decade later, walking on the Moon during Apollo 14.

The rocket that launched America's human spaceflight program — an essential subject for any space history collection. Please allow some time for decal printing and shipping.