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…
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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 June 29, 1971, the first human space travelers to die while in space perished when their Soyuz 11 space capsule depressurized after leaving the Soviet space station, Salyut 1. Digging Deeper Salyut 1 was the first space station launched into orbit around the Earth in April of 1971, and despite its then groundbreaking technology, only lasted less than 6 months, of which humans occupied it for a total of 24 days. Soviet cosmonauts Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev had become the first ever spacemen to occupy a space station, from June 7th to June…
A Brief History On June 25, 1997, an unmanned Russian spacecraft called Progress-M blundered into the Russian manned Mir space station. Despite considerable damage, no lives were lost, and the space station continued its mission. Digging Deeper Launched in 1986, Mir was a Soviet space venture that was built up through 1996, and eventually abandoned and burned up on reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere in 2001. Manned by a crew of 3, Mir was the largest human built satellite of the Earth until the International Space Station was built starting in 1998. Holding space records eventually beaten by the ISS,…
A Brief History On June 22, 1918, a passenger train carrying US military troops plowed into the rear end of the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus train that had stopped on the tracks for repairs. Sadly, 86 of the over 250 circus people died and 127 were injured, making the Hammond Circus Train Wreck one of the worst in US railroad history. Digging Deeper The name of the wreck derives from the location, near Hammond, Indiana. The driver of the troop train had fallen asleep and missed at least two warnings about the stopped train ahead. Luckily, the relatively fragile wooden circus cars…
