Corvette NASA Astronauts

Astronaut Alan Shepard, a long time Corvette owner, was invited by then GM Chief Engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov to drive pre-production Corvette models. General Motors executives later gave Sheppard a 1972 model with a Bill Mitchell interior. Jim Rathmann, a Melbourne, Florida Chevrolet dealer and winner of the 1960 Indy 500, befriended astronauts Shepard, Gus Grissom, and Gordon Cooper.



Rathman convinced GM President Ed Cole to setup a program which supplied each astronaut with a pair of new cars each year. Most chose a family car for their wives and a Corvette for themselves.
Alan Bean recalls Corvettes lined up in the parking lot outside the astronaut offices at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and friendly races between Shepard and Grissom along the Florida beach roads and beaches themselves as local police turned a blind eye.
Shepard, Grissom and Cooper even pulled each other on skis in the shallow water. The Mercury and later astronauts were unofficially tied to the Corvette and appeared in official photographs with their cars and with mock-ups of space vehicles such as the Lunar Module or Lunar Rover. Cooper talked of the races along Cocoa Beach in his eulogy of Shepard at the Johnson Space Center in 1998.

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