Alan Or Yuri

History will forever record that Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, not American astronaut Alan Shepard, was the first human in space. Some historians argue, however, that it could have gone differently. They say that Shepard's mission was probably ready to go by March, 1961, but program managers decided on one extra test flight of the Mercury-Redstone rocket stack, which pushed Shepard's flight back to May 5. Gagarin flew April 12. How might history have changed had Shepard gone first? Possibly, not much. Shepard's mission was suborbital while Gagarin made one orbit of Earth. So, if Shepard had flown in March, all else being the same, Gagarin's orbital flight in April would have quickly trumped the American achievement. A young, aggressive President Kennedy may well have still seen the need to demonstrate the superiority of the American model, and of American technology. The Space Race may still have been run.