Speaker For The Diodes - QotD

05:33 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2007-10-04:

"Each of these first rockets was like a beloved woman for us. We were in love with every rocket, we desperately wanted it to blast off successfully. We would give our hearts and souls to see it flying." -- Boris Chertok, one of the founders of the Soviet space program, recalling his work in the 1950s. Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, was launched October 4, 1957. [http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070930/ap_on_sc/sputnik_s_secrets]

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

Today, of course, begins a cluster of sad spaceflight anniversaries (I'll include a date with two nice ones as well, since it's between two of the other dates):

• 1967-01-27: Grissom, White and Chaffe burned to death in Apollo 1
• 1986-01-28: Space Shuttle Challenger (51-L) explodes 74 seconds after liftoff killing Scobee, Smith, McNair, Resnick, Jarvis, Onizuka and McAuliffe
• 1958-01-31: Explorer I launched. Van Allen Belt discovered
• 1961-01-31: "Ham" the chimpanzee soars into space aboard Mercury-Redstone 2
• 2003-02-01: Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-107) disintegrates over Texas during re-entry killing Husband, Anderson, Brown, Chawla, Clark, McCool, Ramon