Soon after, in May 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American and second person to achieve hypersonic flight when his capsule reentered the atmosphere at a speed above Mach 5 at the end of his suborbital flight over the Atlantic Ocean.
MirCorp and RSC Energia were the first to use this strategy for space exploration, which has emerged again more recently with Sir Richard Branson’s announcement to market Scaled Composites StarShip suborbital flights.
In May 2013, SpaceX announced that they had signed a three-year lease for land and facilities at Spaceport America in order to support high-altitude, high-velocity flight testing of the Grasshopper v1.1 reusable launch vehicle (RLV), the second-generation of the SpaceX experimental vertical takeoff, vertical landing suborbital technology-demonstrator.
James Doohan, who played Chief Engineer Scott on the 1960s television series Star Trek, and from astronaut Gordon Cooper, were rocketed into suborbital space (along with ashes of about 200 other people) by UP Aerospace from Spaceport America.