Throughout the history of flight from Montgolfier’s eighteenth century balloons to the Wright Brothers and beyond, the enduring quest to reach higher, farther, and faster has been a hallmark of the arena of flying. For naval aviation, few times epitomized this more than the weeks of May 1961.
A new President was in office promising a New Frontier and none was as important in the Cold War era as the exploration of outer space. With the Soviet Union having launched the first orbiting satellite and placed the first man in space, the United States was seeking to gain its own foothold in the stars when Navy Commander Alan B. Shepard strapped into his Mercury space capsule Freedom 7 and blasted off from Cape Canaveral on the morning of May 5th, thus becoming the first American in space.
While Shepard ascended to new heights with the roar of rocket engines, two other naval officers did so in silence the day before from the deck of the aircraft carrier Antietam (CVS 36) operating in the Gulf of Mexico. Wearing silver high-pressure suits of the type Shepard wore the following day, naval aviator Commander Malcolm D. Ross and naval flight surgeon Lieutenant Commander Victor A. Prather, MC, climbed into the cramped spaces of an open gondola named Stratolab V, which is now in the museum’s collection. Beneath a billowing balloon that reached hundreds of feet into the air, the pair ascended to a height 113,739.9 feet during a 2 hour and 36 minute flight that established a world record. However, the accomplishment was marred by tragedy when Prather fell from the sling of the recovered helicopter and drowned.
May 24th proved another record-day for a new generation of naval aircraft. Beneath the spinning rotors of an HSS-2 Sea King helicopter, Commander Patrick L. Sullivan and Lieutenant Beverly W. Witherspoon, set their second rotary-wing speed record of the month, reaching 174.9 M.P.H. over a 100 kilometer course in Connecticut.
That same day in neighboring New York City, an F4H Phantom II flown by Lieutenant Richard F. Gordon and Lieutenant (junior grade) Bobbie R. Young landed after flying from Los Angeles, covering 2,421. miles in just 2 hours and 47 minutes in establishing a new transcontinental speed record and winning the Bendix Trophy. Gordon would later become a NASA astronaut, traveling to the moon as the command module pilot of Apollo XII.