US human spaceflight
Alan Shepard → Space Race: US human spaceflight. Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. was an American astronaut. In 1961, he became the second person and the first American to travel into space and, in 1971, he became the fifth and oldest person to walk on the Moon, at age 47. The Space Race was a 20th-century competition between the Cold War rivals, the United States and the Soviet Union, to achieve superior spaceflight capability.