 By June 16, 1962, the Union launched a total of six Vostok cosmonauts, two pairs of them flying concurrently, and accumulating a total of 260 cosmonaut-orbits and just over sixteen cosmonaut-days in space.On May 5, 1961, the US launched its first suborbital Mercury astronaut, Alan Shepard, in the "Freedom 7" capsule.Unlike Gagarin, Shepard manually controlled his spacecraft's attitude and landed inside it thus technically making Freedom 7 the first complete human spaceflight by FAI definitions.