Question: On May 5, 1961 which astronaut became the first American in space aboard "Freedom 7", launched by a Redstone booster on a 15-minute ballistic (suborbital) flight?
About the article "NASA", section "Project Mercury (1959–63)".

Candidate passages:
Project Mercury (1959–63).
Shortly after the Space Race began, an early objective was to get a person into Earth orbit as soon as possible, therefore the simplest spacecraft that could be launched by existing rockets was favored.
U.S. Air Force's Man in Space Soonest program looked at many manned spacecraft designs, ranging from rocket planes like the X-15, to small ballistic space capsules.
By 1958, the space plane concepts were eliminated in favor of the ballistic capsule.
When NASA was created that same year, the Air Force program was transferred to it and renamed "Project Mercury".
The first seven astronauts were selected among candidates from the Navy, Air Force and Marine test pilot programs.
On May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space aboard "Freedom 7", launched by a Redstone booster on a 15-minute ballistic (suborbital) flight.
John Glenn became the first American to be launched into orbit by an Atlas launch vehicle on February 20, 1962 aboard "Friendship 7".
Glenn completed three orbits, after which three more orbital flights were made, culminating in L. Gordon Cooper's 22-orbit flight "Faith 7", May 15–16, 1963.
The Soviet Union (USSR) competed with its own single-pilot spacecraft, Vostok.
They beat the U.S. for the first man in space, by launching cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into a single Earth orbit aboard Vostok 1 in April 1961, one month before Shepard's flight.
In August 1962, they achieved an almost four-day record flight with Andriyan Nikolayev aboard Vostok 3, and also conducted a concurrent Vostok 4 mission carrying Pavel Popovich.
Mercury-Redstone 3, or Freedom 7 was the first United States human spaceflight, on 5 May 1961, piloted by astronaut Alan Shepard.
It was the first manned flight of Project Mercury, the objective of which was to put an astronaut into orbit around the Earth and return him safely.
Shepard named his capsule "Freedom 7", setting a precedent for the remaining six Mercury astronauts naming their spacecraft.
The number 7 was included in the spacecraft name to honor the seven members of NASA's Astronaut Group 1, the Mercury 7.
Shepard and his colleagues felt the name conveyed a sense of teamwork, instead of an individual achievement.
Shepard's mission was a 15-minute suborbital flight which reached an altitude of and traveled a downrange distance of .
It was the third Mercury flight launched with the Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, close to the Atlantic Ocean.
During the flight, Shepard observed the Earth and tested the capsule's attitude control system, turning the capsule around to face its blunt heat shield forward for atmospheric entry.
He also tested the retrorockets which would return later missions from orbit, though the capsule did not have enough energy to remain in orbit.
After re-entry, the capsule landed by parachute on the Atlantic ocean off the Bahamas.
Shepard and the capsule were picked up by helicopter and brought to an aircraft carrier.
The mission was a technical success, though American pride in the accomplishment was dampened by the fact that just 3 weeks before, the Soviet Union had launched the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, who completed one orbit on Vostok 1. 
NASA career.
Mercury: "Freedom 7" pilot.
In 1959, Shepard was one of 110 military test pilots selected by their commanding officers as candidates for the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Project Mercury, the first US manned space NASA flight program.
Following a gruelling series of physical and psychological tests, NASA selected Shepard to be one of the original group of seven Mercury astronauts.
In January 1961, Shepard was chosen for the first American manned mission into space.
Although the flight was originally scheduled for October 1960, delays by unplanned preparatory work meant that this was postponed several times, initially to March 6, 1961, and finally to May 5.
On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first person in space and to orbit the Earth.
On May 5, 1961, Shepard piloted the "Freedom 7" mission and became the second person, and the first American, to travel into space."
He was launched by a Redstone rocket, and unlike Gagarin's 108-minute orbital flight, Shepard stayed on a ballistic trajectory—a 15-minute suborbital flight which carried him to an altitude of and to a splashdown point down the Atlantic Missile Range.
Unlike Gagarin, whose flight was strictly automatic, Shepard had some control of "Freedom 7", spacecraft attitude in particular.
The launch was seen live on television by millions.
Shortly before the launch, Shepard said to himself: "Don't fuck up, Shepard ..."According to Gene Kranz in his book, "Failure Is Not an Option", "When reporters asked Shepard what he thought about as he sat atop the Redstone rocket, waiting for liftoff, he had replied, 'The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.
'"After a dramatic Atlantic Ocean recovery, Commander Shepard observed, "... didn't really feel the flight was a success until the recovery had been successfully completed.
It's not the fall that hurts; it's the sudden stop."
After his successful return, Shepard was celebrated as a national hero, honored with parades in Washington, New York and Los Angeles and received the NASA Distinguished Service Medal from President John F. Kennedy.
Later, he was scheduled to pilot the Mercury-Atlas 10 "Freedom 7-II" three-day extended duration mission in October 1963.
The MA-10 mission was cancelled on June 13, 1963.
He was the back-up pilot for Gordon "Gordo" Cooper for the Mercury-Atlas 9 mission. 
  An early scene shows Serov executing Polish resistance fighters who discovered a V-2.
Nothing of the sort happened.
A team of British, Polish and Russian soldiers and scientists formed a mission to retrieve a fallen V-2 near Blizna in Poland.
Footage showing early rocket club activity of von Braun actually shows Reinhold Tiling's rockets, a rival to the VfR club that von Braun belonged to.
The VfR rockets were crude engines attached to sticks.
Key figures are entirely missing from the presented history.
Andrei Tupolev, Vladimir Chelomei and Mikhail Yangel are also conspicuously absent, for example, even in the sequence depicting the disastrous explosion of Yangel's prototype R-16 ICBM.
In the series, Glushko is generally identified with all rocket projects competing with Korolev within the USSR, even those for which he had only partial responsibility or was a subcontractor.
The narrator said twice that the Mercury-Redstone could put an astronaut into orbit.
In reality, the best the Redstone rocket could do was putting an astronaut into a 15-minute "suborbital" ballistic trajectory, which peaked out around 120 miles up.
The first orbital flight of an American astronaut did not occur until 20 February 1962, when the Mercury capsule was put into orbit with a more powerful Atlas rocket.
Indeed, NASA report TMX-53107 called Mercury-Redstone "a prelude to an orbital flight program" (pg 1-2).
However, at episode 3, "Race for Survival", is at pains to disclaim orbital capability.
The narrator says (from 8'46" to 8' 51") only that the V-derived Redstone "has only a tenth of the power of Korolev's rocket.
Barely enough to put a man into space."
This of course is why Freedom 7, Alan Shepard's Redstone-launched capsule, was suborbital.
The narrator states that Gagarin flies "over a sleeping America" even though Vostok's flightpath did not take the craft anywhere near North America, except the Aleutian Islands.
Gagarin did say "I'm over America", though.
America, of course, includes South America and Vostok 1's flight path did just touch America in that sense.
Gagarin spoke at night, while still over the Pacific, but only three minutes from the Straits of Magellan; a little earlier he was near Hawaii, which had become one of the United States of America less than two years earlier.
Episode One features a map of Europe with wrongly indicated countries.
Switzerland is labeled Austria, Austria is labeled Yugoslavia and the Czech Republic is labeled Hungary.
Episode One featuring the capture of Wernher von Braun, he had a bad fracture of his arm, which were not depicted.
In Episode Two the narrator states twice that the R-7 rocket has 32 engines.
This is not entirely correct.
The R-7 and its successors have four side boosters and a core booster.
Each side booster has a single rocket engine with four combustion chambers, two vernier combustion chambers, and one set of turbopumps.
The central core has a similar engine but with four vernier combustion chambers instead of two.
This makes total of 32 chambers, not engines.
In the scene where Glushko is supposedly testing the clustering scheme, only one engine is shown.
One of the cosmonauts, after seeing the Vostok's cockpit for the first time (Episode Three), asks where the controls are.
Also the Gagarin flight scene indicates that there were no controls inside.
In fact controls were present on board the Vostoks, but they were blocked to prevent the cosmonauts from manipulating them.
A set of codes was placed aboard, so that the cosmonaut could unlock the controls if necessary.
When the Mission Control is shown for the first time in episode 3 it shows that all the flight controllers have a TV screen showing the launch pad.
In reality only the flight director had a TV screen.
The other consoles had only meters to measure the various systems.  
First human spaceflights.
The first human spaceflight took place on 12 April 1961, when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made one orbit around the Earth aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft, launched by the Soviet space program.
Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space aboard Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963.
Both spacecraft were launched by Vostok 3KA launch vehicles.
Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk when he left Voskhod 2 on 8 March 1965.
Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to do so on 25 July 1984.
The United States became the second nation to achieve manned spaceflight with the suborbital flight of astronaut Alan Shepard aboard "Freedom 7" as part of Project Mercury.
The spacecraft was launched on 5 May 1961 on a Redstone rocket.
The first U.S. orbital flight was that of John Glenn aboard "Friendship 7", launched 20 February 1962 on an Atlas rocket.
From 1981 to 2011, the U.S. conducted all its human spaceflight missions with reusable space shuttles.
Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983.
Eileen Collins was the first female shuttle pilot, and with shuttle mission STS-93 in 1999 she became the first woman to command a U.S. spacecraft.
China became the third nation to achieve human spaceflight when Yang Liwei launched into space on a Chinese-made vehicle, the Shenzhou 5, on 15 October 2003.
The flight also made China the third nation to have launched its own manned spacecraft using its own launcher.
The first Chinese woman, Liu Yang, was launched in June 2012 aboard Shenzhou 9.
Previous European (Hermes) and Japanese (HOPE-X) domestic manned programs were abandoned after years of development, as was the first Chinese attempt, the Shuguang spacecraft.
The farthest destination for a human spaceflight mission has been the Moon.
The only manned missions to the Moon have been those conducted by NASA as part of the Apollo program.
The first such mission, Apollo 8, orbited the Moon but did not land.
The first Moon landing mission was Apollo 11, during which—on 20 July 1969—Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to set foot on the Moon.
Six missions landed in total, numbered Apollo 11–17, excluding Apollo 13.
Altogether 12 men walked on the Moon, the only humans to have been on an extraterrestrial body.
The Soviet Union discontinued its program for lunar orbiting and landing of human spaceflight missions in 1974 when Valentin Glushko became General Designer of NPO Energiya.
The longest single human spaceflight is that of Valeriy Polyakov, who left Earth on 8 January 1994, and did not return until 22 March 1995 (a total of 437 days 17 hr.
58 min.
16 sec.).
Sergei Krikalyov has spent the most time of anyone in space, 803 days, 9 hours, and 39 seconds altogether.
The longest period of continuous human presence in space is on the International Space Station, exceeding the previous record of almost 10 years (or 3,634 days) held by Mir, spanning the launch of Soyuz TM-8 on 5 September 1989 to the landing of Soyuz TM-29 on 28 August 1999.
For many years beginning in 1961, only two countries, the USSR (later Russia) and the United States, had their own astronauts.
Citizens of other nations flew in space, beginning with the flight of Vladimir Remek, a Czech, on a Soviet spacecraft on 2 March 1978. , citizens from 38 nations (including space tourists) have flown in space aboard Soviet, American, Russian, and Chinese spacecraft.