Harmon Trophy
For the record ascent, President John F. Kennedy presented the balloonists (Victor Prather, posthumously to his wife) the 1961 Harmon Trophy for Aeronauts. The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had orbited the Earth almost a month earlier, on April 12, 1961; and the next day, on May 5, Alan Shepard flew a sub-orbital trajectory on the Mercury Redstone rocket.