Author: Major Dan

A Brief History On June 8, 1959, the US Navy teamed up with the United States Post Office Department to attempt to resurrect the concept of sending mail via rocket or missile. Digging Deeper The submarine, USS Barbero, was employed to launch a Regulus cruise missile, normally armed with a nuclear warhead but this time carrying Post Office containers, from the Atlantic Ocean to Naval Station Mayport in Florida. The 22-minute flight of the missile accurately delivered the commemorative “mail” enclosed, each piece addressed to President Eisenhower and other government officials.  While the test was technically successful, no such program…

A Brief History On June 7, 1938, the government of Nationalist China, at war with the Japanese invaders in the Second Sino-Japanese War, destroyed the embankments of the Yellow River, creating a massive flood in order to halt the advance of the Japanese Army. Digging Deeper The event called “The 1938 Yellow River Flood” was part of a war strategy of “scorched earth” policy, leaving little or nothing for the invaders to use in their conquest.  Described as the “largest act of environmental warfare in history,” the resulting flood killed between 500,000 and 900,000 Chinese civilians and created about 3…

A Brief History On June 6, 2002, high above the Mediterranean Sea, an asteroid estimated at about 10 meters in diameter exploded in the upper atmosphere with a similar effect to a 26 kiloton nuclear bomb, a larger blast than either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs.  What is really scary is that scientists failed to detect the approach of this chunk of space stuff and there would have been no warning had it hit the surface of the Earth! Digging Deeper Known as “The 2002 Eastern Mediterranean event,” another scary “what if” scenario involved the tense military stand-off happening between…

A Brief History On June 5, 1893, the murder trial of Lizzie Borden began.  Borden was accused of killing her father and stepmother with an axe.  Despite the popular assumption of her guilt, she was acquitted in one of the most famous trials in US history. Digging Deeper Some of the other candidates as the most famous American trial include the following: In The Sacco and Vanzetti Trial of 1921 for robbery and murder, the men were believed by many to be railroaded because they were immigrants and anarchists in a case that saw worldwide attention. The Scopes Monkey Trial…

A Brief History On June 4, 2010, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster made its first flight, and since then has been used as the launch booster for well over 200 launches, only one of which was a failure and one other a partial failure. Digging Deeper A reusable heavy lift orbital launch booster, the Falcon 9 is famous as the only privately made rocket to have carried humans into orbital flight, and is the only current US sourced rocket certified for manned flight. In 2021, the amazing Falcon 9 set a space launch record by launching a mind boggling…