Today in 1961 Alan B. Shepard, Jr. became America’s first space traveler as he made a 15 minute suborbital flight aboard Mercury capsule Freedom 7. Alan, and three of his fellow Mercury 7 astronauts (Deke, Wally, and Scott) were smokers. So Alan likely had a few hits of nicotine before and after the flight. After a press conference in which three of Mercury 7 astronauts smoked onstage, inviting a question about it from the press, the astronauts were told to avoid smoking in public, because of the bad example it set. And they never smoked in space, as far as we know. Leave that to the Russians. Peggy Whitson, the NASA scientist who supervised the American science program for Norm Thagard’s mission to the Soviet space station Mir in 1995, was dismayed to find that the cosmonauts actually smoked cigarettes and drank vodka aboard the station.
– Jet Cannon