10 - Light This Candle!

Frontier of Infinity: A Space Exploration Podcast

The fallout from Yuri Gagarin's first manned flight rocks the United States, followed shortly by another crushing failure on the world stage for the Kennedy Administration. When a plan to overthrow the Castro Regime in Cuba goes wrong, the stakes rise even higher for the American Space Program as NASA prepares to launch Alan Shepard into space aboard Freedom Seven.
CORRECTION: Coral reefs did not sink any of the transport ships that took part in the Bay of Pigs Invasion, but did damage several, which slowed the operation.
Twitter: @FOISpacecast
Music: "Crossing the Universe" by Esther Garcia
Sources and Further Research:
Books-
"Project Mercury" by Eugen Reichl
"Moonshot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon" by Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton with Jay Barbaree and Howard Benedict
"Space Race: The Epic Battle Between America and the Soviet Union for Dominion of Space" by Deborah Cadbury
Web Sources-
Milestones: 1961–1968 - Office of the Historian (state.gov)