"AOK!" THE U. S. IS IN SPACE: Alan Shepard becoming the first American in space following successful helicopter recovery of Freedom 7, 5 May 1961.

Vintage gelatin silver print on fiber-based paper, printed 1961, numbered "NASA S-61-2710" in black in top margin, with NASA caption on verso (NASA HQ), 20,3 x 25,4 cm, creases in the left upper corner and a diagonal longer crease in the right upper half

Alan Shepard is being hoisted to the rescue helicopter following the splashdown of Freedom 7 in the Atlantic Ocean. His 15-minute suborbital hop took him to a height of 116 miles at more than 2 km (1.5 miles) per second before splashdown near Bermuda, 302 miles downrange from Cape Canaveral.

“Everything AOK [all perfect]. . Dye marker out,” Shepard said after the capsule hit the water. Only a half hour after liftoff, the space pioneer came triumphantly aboard the carrier USS Lake Champlain after the pickup helicopter had deposited he and his capsule on deck. His first words were “Man, what a ride!”

“The landing did not seem any more severe than a catapult shot from an aircraft carrier. The spacecraft hit and then flopped on its side so that I was on my right side. I felt that I could immediately execute an underwater escape should it become necessary. [...] I could see the water covering one porthole, I could see the yellow dye marker out the other porthole and, later on, I could see one of the helicopters through the periscope. The spacecraft righted itself slowly and I began to read the cockpit instruments for data purposes after impact. I found very little time for that since the helicopter was already calling me.”
Alan Shepard (Flight’s Pilot Report)

Literature:
LIFE, 12 May 1961, cover (variant); NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, September 1961, pp. 436-437 (variant); NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, September 1961, pp. 438-439 (variant).