Alan Shepard’s spacecraft on the first U.S. human spaceflight was Freedom 7.
Freedom 7 was a Project Mercury spacecraft launched on 5 May 1961 from Cape Canaveral. Shepard’s suborbital flight lasted only about 15 minutes, but it made him the first American in space and demonstrated that a person could control a spacecraft during flight.
The mission followed Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight by less than a month. Unlike Gagarin’s Vostok 1 mission, Freedom 7 did not complete an orbit; its Redstone rocket sent Shepard on a high arc before the capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean.
Freedom 7 is sometimes confused with Liberty Bell 7, the next crewed Mercury spacecraft, flown by Virgil Grissom. John Glenn later made the first American orbital flight aboard Friendship 7.