The Birthday of Alan Shepard (1923) – Mathematics of Spaceflight

Alan Shepard was the first American in space (1961). His Mercury flight was a ballistic trajectory – a parabola. The mathematics of re‑entry: the capsule’s heat shield ablates, modelled by the Stefan problem (moving boundary). Shepard later walked on the Moon (Apollo 14). He famously hit a golf ball on the Moon – the trajectory on the Moon (g/6) gave it longer range. The mathematics of lunar gravity (F = GMm/r²) is the same as on Earth, just with different parameters. Spaceflight is Newton’s laws writ large.