Browsing: Travel

A Brief History On July 15, 1975, the United States and the USSR simultaneously launched manned spacecraft, an American Apollo capsule and a Soviet Soyuz capsule, bound for a rendezvous in space, the first ever international space effort. Digging Deeper The mission was part of an ongoing diplomatic effort to ease Cold War tensions between the superpowers, with the 3 man Apollo capsule docking with the 2 man Soyuz capsule via an intermediate docking section. Aside from the feat of a successful space docking between spacecraft from separate nations, the crews performed joint space experiments and their first ever in…

A Brief History On July 12, 1979, the island nation of Kiribati came into being as the Republic of Kiribati, a group of islands in the Gilbert Island chain of Oceania in the Pacific Ocean.  Prior to independence, Kiribati was a territory of the United Kingdom. Digging Deeper Consisting of a single island and 32 coral atolls, the nation is home to about 120,000 residents.  It is the main island and capital you may be familiar with, Tarawa atoll, which itself is divided into North and South Tarawa Islands.  Half the population of Kiribati lives on Tarawa. World War II…

A Brief History On July 11, 1979, America’s first space station, Skylab, reentered Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrated over the Indian Ocean and Australia. Digging Deeper Launched in 1973, to great public excitement, Skylab is the only space station to be operated only by the US.  Children were invited by NASA to submit ideas for experiments to be conducted on Skylab, and the author of this article submitted an experiment with welding in space.  The experiment was not accepted, but a participation letter was issued. Skylab was only occupied for 171 of the over 2200 days it spent in orbit, its…

A Brief History On July 10, 1985, the Rainbow Warrior, a ship owned and operated by Greenpeace, an environmental activist organization, was sunk by bombs placed by French government operatives while in Auckland, New Zealand harbor, resulting in a single death. Digging Deeper The French intelligence agency Directorate-General for External Security, or DGSE, was responsible for state sanctioned attack, code named Opération Satanique.  Obviously, France initially denied any government involvement with the terroristic act, but captured French operatives proved the involvement of the French government. Rainbow Warrior, was a small ship of 418 tons and a length of just over…

A Brief History On July 9, 2011, South Sudan seceded from Sudan and became the latest new African country.  While Africa has been a center of creating new countries, a dizzying number of new sovereign nations have been formed since 1960. Digging Deeper In 1960 alone, Africa went from having 9 independent nations to 26 countries, an incredible increase.  In 1991 and 1992, when the Soviet Union dissolved, the single nation became 12 separate nations.  Other Soviet era nations that split up into smaller countries include Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Besides the erosion of imperialism with nations gaining independence, other factors…