We met them fifty-three years ago today. It was slightly over two years since Gagarin’s first flight, whose fifty-first anniversary is on Thursday.
Category Archives: Space History
Wernher Von Braun
He would have been a hundred years old today. Also, it’s the 29th anniversary of the announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative. “Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than to avenge them?”
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related to last item: Japan prepares missile defense in anticipation of North Korean launch.
[Update a few minutes later]
Back to von Braun: a blog post from Roger Launius.
The Colliers Series
Started sixty years ago, introducing the American public to the coming age of space. It later led to a series of Disney short animations, shown on Sunday nights.
Valentina Tereshkova
Happy seventy-fifth birthday!
Half A Century Of Americans In Orbit
Started today, on February 20th, 1962. Amy Teitel has the story (though the URL is wrong — it’s fifty, not sixty years), and Clark Lindsey has some other links. I’ve written a piece that I hope will go up at PJMedia, but if not, I’ll post it here later.
[Late morning update]
My piece is up now.
Gerry O’Neill
Today would have been his eighty-fifth birthday. Many of his dreams may have been unrealistic, in retrospect (they were based on the assumption that the Shuttle really would reduce the cost of space access, among other things), but he inspired, and reinspired a generation jaded by the letdown of Apollo.
On a related note, Alexis Madrigal has an interesting bit of space (and California) history, over at the Atlantic.
The Apollo Fire
It’s been forty-five years since Ed White, Roger Chaffee and gus Grissom were horribly incinerated on the launch pad, in a ground test. Clara Moskowitz has the story of the changes to the program that ensued as a result. And tomorrow will be the twenty-sixth anniversary of the loss of the Challenger. Where has the time gone?
[Update late morning]
More from Amy Teitel. Note that for both these young women, this is history — it happened before they were born.
NASA’s “Day Of Remembrance”
OK, so the anniversary (forty-fifth) of the Apollo I fire is tomorrow, the twenty-sixth Challenger anniversary is Saturday, and Wednesday is the ninth anniversary of the Columbia loss. So why commemorate today?
To Boldly Go
…where no wives or kids can follow. Another piece from the current issue of Reason, by Nick Gillespie.
Another December 7th Anniversary
Thirty-nine years ago today, the crew of the last mission to the moon took this picture in their rear-view mirror.