NASA

  • On April 9, 1959, NASA’s first administrator, Dr. Keith Glennan, announced the names of the agency’s first group of astronauts at a news conference in Washington, D.C. Now known as the “Original Seven,” they included three Naval aviators, M. Scott Carpenter, Walter M. Schirra Jr., and Alan B. Shepard Jr.; three Air Force pilots, L.

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  • Explorer 1

    Explorer 1 was the first satellite of the United States, launched as part of its participation in the International Geophysical Year. The mission followed the first two satellites the previous year; the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 and 2, beginning the Cold War Space Race between the two nations. Explorer 1 was launched on January 31, 1958 at 22:48 Eastern Time (February 1, 03:48 UTC) atop the first Juno booster

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  • Challenger 28 January 1986

    It’s hard to believe that it has already been 33 years  ago since the Challenger disaster happened. I still remember it as if it was yesterday. One thing that I hadn’t thought of was that there was a group of children watching while their Teacher died. Looking back it make sense of course that the

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  • On January 27 1967, U.S. astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in a fire aboard the Apollo 1 spacecraft during a launch simulation at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. The Apollo program changed forever , when a flash fire swept through the Apollo 1 command module during a launch rehearsal test. The three men inside

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  • During the Cold War, the USSR built a look-alike space shuttle to compete with the U.S. program. The development of the “Buran” began in the early 1970s as a response to the U.S. Space Shuttle program. Soviet officials were concerned about a perceived military threat posed by the U.S. Space Shuttle. In their opinion, the

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  • Eugene Merle Shoemaker (April 28, 1928 – July 18, 1997), also known as Gene Shoemaker, was an American geologist and one of the founders of the field of planetary science. He is best known for co-discovering the Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 with his wife Carolyn S. Shoemaker and David H. Levy. This comet hit Jupiter in July 1994: the impact was televised around the world Dr. Gene Shoemaker died

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  • On Oct. 24, 1946, the first extraterrestrial view of Earth was shot from 65 miles away aboard a Nazi-built V-2 rocket launched by American scientists, according to Smithsonian magazine. Thanks to a Devry 35-millimeter movie camera, Earthlings saw their planet for the first time as a grainy, black-and-white mass that looked more like paint under a microscope

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  • Apollo 13-Phew, we made it.

    There is a great message to be got from Apollo 13. NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE. It is one to thing to break down with your car in the middle of nowhere, but to break down in Space, how to you deal with that? Well the men on the Apollo 13 dealt with it by staying calm

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  • Laika, the ‘space dog’ was sent into orbit from Russia in 1957. She was the first living creature to orbit the Earth. She was sent on a one-way mission but sadly died less than a week after blast-off. Laika was a stray dog from the streets of Moscow before she was selected to become the

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  • A small step for man

    July 1969. It’s a little over eight years since the flights of Gagarin and Shepard, followed quickly by President Kennedy’s challenge to put a man on the moon before the decade is out. It is only seven months since NASA’s made a bold decision to send Apollo 8 all the way to the moon on the first

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