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…
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A Brief History On June 3, 2023, the world celebrates Chimborazo Day, a day to admire and adore the highest mountain on Earth. You might wrongly think of Mount Everest as the highest mountain, but when measured as the furthest distance from the center of the Earth, Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador is the 1st Prize Winner. Digging Deeper An inactive volcano, Chimborazo has an altitude of 20,549 feet above sea level, much less than the 29,031 feet claimed by Mount Everest. So why is Chimborazo King of the Hills? Because it is located near the Equator where the Earth bulges…
A Brief History On May 30, 2020, the Crew Dragon Demo-2 spacecraft was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida courtesy of a Falcon 9 booster rocket from the private firm of SpaceX. The capsule, named Crew Dragon Endeavor, contained two astronauts, the first manned space flight to launch from the United States since the last Space Shuttle flight in 2011. Digging Deeper This first ever commercial manned orbital space flight on behalf of the American government space program was on a mission to link up with the International Space Station and have the two American astronauts work with…
A Brief History On May 27, 1996, President Boris Yeltsin of Russia met with Chechen rebels to negotiate a cease fire in what is known as The First Chechen War. The Chechen Republic is an almost autonomous region within the Russian Federation, which fought a war for independence from December of 1994 to August of 1996. Digging Deeper The Chechen people lost as many as 14,000 fighters killed in the war, and another 80,000 to 100,000 civilians slain. The Russians lost about 3,000 to 5,000 killed. A second Chechen War was fought from 1999 to 2009. Chechnya is part of…
A Brief History On May 26, 1951, Sally Ride was born in Los Angeles, California. She would grow up to earn BA, BS, MS and PhD diplomas from Stanford University, and in June of 1983 became the first American woman to take a ride into space, via the Space Shuttle Challenger. Digging Deeper Ride became the third woman space explorer, having been preceded into space by Soviet cosmonauts Belarusian Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Russian Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. Since the flights of these history making women, women have made over 75 space flights by at least 70 women. In…
