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Rear Admiral Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. (November 18, 1923 – July 21, 1998) was an American astronaut, naval aviator, test pilot, and businessman. In 1961, he became the first American to travel into space, and in 1971, he walked on the Moon. He was promoted to rear admiral on August 25, 1971, the first astronaut to reach that rank. Shepard was Chief of the Astronaut Office until his retirement from the United States Navy and NASA on August 1, 1974.

A Chinese character is a logogram used in writing Chinese, Japanese, sometimes Korean, and formerly Vietnamese. Four percent of Chinese characters are derived directly from individual pictograms, but most characters are pictophonetics, characters containing two parts where one indicates a general category of meaning and the other the sound. There are approximately 50,000 Chinese characters in existence, but only between three and four thousand are in regular use.