FORMER NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell - a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission - has stunningly claimed aliens exist. And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions - but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades.
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Today In Space History: Columbia Lost On Reentry
February 1st is the five-year anniversary of Shuttle Columbia’s breakup over Texas. Seven astronauts lost their lives returning from a 16-day science mission, STS-107. NewsFromSpace was covering the landing as it happened.
President Bush issued a statement that day to a stunned nation.
The cause of the accident was later determined to be a breach in the leading edge of the left wing, which allowed a blast of superheated air to melt the underlying structure, ripping the orbiter apart as it was flying at Mach 18 across the American South. The hole was caused by a briefcase-sized chunk of foam insulation coming loose from the external tank and striking the wing during liftoff.
Today In Space History: 50 Years In Space
January 31st marks the 50th anniversary of the launch of Explorer 1, America’s first satellite. The flight, on 31 Jan 1958, came almost 4 months after the Soviet launch of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1, and followed a failed U.S. attempt to launch a different satellite called Vanguard.
JPL’s Explorer 1 was launched by a U.S. Army Redstone booster (AKA Juno I) from Cape Canaveral’s Pad 26, and was America’s entry into the space race. It first detected the Van Allen radiation belts that surround the Earth. The spacecraft orbited our planet until it burned up in the atmosphere in 1970.
The Soviets may have been first, but with Explorer’s success, the Space Race was on! What will the next 50 years bring?
Today In Space History: Challenger Disaster
Today marks the 22nd anniversary of a terrible tragedy in the history of the Space Program: The Challenger disaster. On 28 January 1986, 7 astronauts lost their lives when Shuttle Challenger exploded just 73 seconds after launch. Mission Fact sheet here; Crew info here; Video here; Image collections here and here.
Mission STS-51L was the 25th Shuttle flight, and it carried the first “Teacher In Space“, Christa McAuliffe. The Challenger, (OV-99), was the second orbiter built, and had completed 9 successful missions (starting with STS-6 in 1983) before the awful incident, which was caused by O-rings in the right solid rocket booster becoming brittle in the winter cold.
The accident rocked the nation and became embedded in the minds of an entire generation. The remains of some crewmembers were buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery, and the wreckage of the spacecraft is sealed in a missile silo at Cape Canaveral. NASA grounded the Shuttle program for more than two years while safety improvements were made.
The Challenger Learning Centers, dedicated to space science education, were founded in honor of the crew. Remember the brave men and women of Challenger, Apollo 1, and Columbia!
Today In Space History: Apollo 1 Fire
January 27th marks the 41st anniversary of a tragic day in the race for the moon: the Apollo 1 fire. On 27 Jan 1967, three astronauts lost their lives on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral during a test procedure in preparation for what would have been the first mission in the lunar program. Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee perished when a spark ignited the pure-oxygen atmosphere of the Apollo Command Module at Pad 34. Crew info here; Image collections here and here. The loss of AS-204 caused a delay of nearly two years in the Apollo program, resulting in many changes to the spacecraft design.
In December 1997, nearly 31 years after the accident, President Clinton posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to Chaffee and White. Grissom’s was among the first medals awarded in October 1978 by President Carter.
This week will see remembrances of the three tragedies whose anniversaries fall so closely on the calendar: Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia. Never forget the heroes of space exploration!