Joachim kuettner may have felt a pang of guilt as he j handed Alan Shepard his award. Kuettner was one of the NASA officials who, a few months earlier, had made the tough call to push back the launch of Mercury-Redstone 3 from March 1961 to May, which cost Shepard the title of first person in space. Yuri Gagarin launched on April 12. As the Mercury-Redstone project manager at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, Kuettner (who died last February) was responsible for ensuring that the rocket was safe to launch a human being, something no rocket had ever done.
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