General Characteristics Crew List About the Ship's Name Image Gallery to end of page
USNS Alan Shepard (T-AKE 3)
- Military Sealift Command -
contributed by Ludger Brockmann
NASSCO Photo
USNS ALAN SHEPARD is the third LEWIS AND CLARK - class Dry Cargo / Ammunition Ship and the first ship in the Navy to bear the name.
General Characteristics: Awarded: July 16, 2002
Keel laid: February 14, 2006
Launched: December 6, 2006
Delivered: June 26, 2007
Builder: National Steel and Shipbuilding Company, San Diego, Calif.
Propulsion system: Integrated propulsion and ship service electrical system, with generation at 6.6KV by FM/MAN B&W diesel generators
Propellers: one
Length: 689 feet (210 meters)
Beam: 106 feet (32.31 meters)
Draft: 29.5 feet (9 meters)
Displacement: approx. 41,000 tons full load
Speed: 20 knots
Dry Cargo Capacity: 1,388,000 cubic feet
Fuel Cargo Capacity: 26,000 barrels
Aircraft: two helicopters
Armament: none
Crew: approx. 125 civilians and up to 49 US Navy
Homeport: Pacific
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Crew List:
This section contains the names of sailors who served aboard USNS ALAN SHEPARD. It is no official listing but contains the names of sailors who submitted their information.
Click here to view the list.
About the Ship's Name:
USNS ALAN SHEPARD honors the first American in space, Rear Adm. Alan B. Shepard Jr. Like the legendary explorers, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, for whom the first ship of the class was named, Shepard bravely volunteered to explore the unknown and became the first American in space. Thus began one of the most challenging endeavors in human history: the manned exploration of space.
Shepard graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., in 1944. He served aboard destroyers in the Pacific during World War II and later entered flight training, receiving his designation as a naval aviator in 1947. Shepard served several tours in fleet squadrons and was selected to attend the Navy Test Pilot School in 1950. He logged more than 8,000 hours of flying time.
In 1959, Shepard was one of seven men chosen by NASA for the Mercury manned space flight program. Two years later, he became the first American to journey into space in the Freedom 7 spacecraft launched by a Redstone rocket on a suborbital flight. He reached an altitude of 116 miles.
In 1963, he was designated chief of the Astronaut Office with responsibility for monitoring the coordination, scheduling and control of all activities involving NASA astronauts. Shepard made his second space flight as spacecraft commander on Apollo 14 in 1971. He was accompanied on the third U.S. lunar landing mission by Stuart A. Roosa, command module pilot, and Edgar D. Mitchell, lunar module pilot. Shepard logged 216 hours and 57 minutes in space, of which 9 hours and 17 minutes were spent in lunar surface extravehicular activity. He resumed his duties as chief of the Astronaut Office in June 1971 and served in this capacity until he retired from NASA and the Navy on Aug. 1, 1974.
After his Navy and NASA careers, he entered private business in Houston and served as the president of the Mercury Seven Foundation, a non-profit organization now known as the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation that provides college science scholarships for deserving students. Shepard died July 21, 1998, at the age of 74.
USNS ALAN SHEPARD Image Gallery:
The photos below were taken by Cindy M. and show the ALAN SHEPARD at Khalifa Bin Salman Port, Bahrain, on March 15, 2017.
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