Showing posts with label this day in history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label this day in history. Show all posts

November 7, 2014

So many choices

Every day at school, I draw an event that happened on that day. They might be historically significant, scientifically important, curious, or just easy to draw.

Today presents so many interesting choices...
I went with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge because it's easy to draw and scientifically interesting.




July 20, 2014

Forty-five years ago today


That isn't a photo of the first footprint on the moon.

Sadly THE first footprint was obscured underneath a few of the next footprints as Neil Armstrong ensured that he could get back up to the lunar landing module.

That is, however, one of the first few footprints on the moon, a footprint made forty-five years ago today by Neil Armstrong and quickly followed up by Buzz Armstrong making a few of his own.

In my eyes, there hasn't been a greater accomplishment by modern mankind than our half dozen manned moon landings between 1969 and 1972.

And then we stopped.

We haven't been back.

Which is tragically sad.

Read up on Armstrong & Aldrin's short time on the moon here.

February 26, 2013

Never heard of it...

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the bombing of the World Trade Center (the truck bomb in the parking garage, not the airplane crashes that finally brought it down). I was looking up some of the details on Wikipedia this morning and clicked through (as I am wont to do on Wikipedia) to the Bojinka plot, one of three See alsos (with the 9/11 attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing). all links are to Wikipedia today...
The Bojinka plot (Arabic: بجنكة‎; Tagalog: Oplan Bojinka) was a planned large-scale three phase Islamist attack by Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The attack would involve a plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II, an air bombing of 11 airliners[1] and their approximately 4,000 passengers that would have flown from Asia to the United States, and Murad's proposal to crash a plane into the CIA's headquarters in Fairfax County, Virginia, in addition to the plan to bomb multiple aeroplanes.
The plan was obviously unsuccessful, but I don't remember hearing about this plot at all.

Does anybody out there remember hearing about this at the time?

December 14, 2012

Gone...never to return...

On December 14, 1972 at 5:55pm EST we left the moon.


Harrison Schmidt and Eugene Cernan were the last two people to ever walk on the lunar surface, the eleventh and twelfth people ever to do so, spending twenty-two hours and three minutes and fifty-seven seconds outside their lunar lander exploring the moon's surface. Cernan, as mission commander, was the last man to return to the lunar lander, but...

[b]efore Cernan left the moon on the Apollo 17 mission he remembered his daughter in a special way. “I drove the Rover about a mile away from the LM and parked it carefully so the television camera could photograph our takeoff the next day. As I dismounted, I took a moment to kneel and with a single finger, scratched [my daughter] Tracy’s initials, ‘TDC,’ in the lunar dust, knowing those three letters would remain there undisturbed for more years than anyone could imagine.” (source)
Since Cernan and Schmidt left the moon, we have never returned. In three and a half years of missions, we landed Americans on the moon six times before the Apollo program was ended for budgetary concerns, and we have never...ever...not once...left Earth's gravitational pull.


We took the greatest accomplishment that we as a species had ever managed - delivering to another celestial body our best and brightest before returning them safely to Earth - and stopped doing it because it was pricey.


We saw the glory of the universe, took the first step to spreading ourselves beyond where we were born, and we pulled back, we closed the door and seem to be at least politically content to live in our box.

This is a tragedy.

Eugene Cernana's gesture is a beautiful tribute.


September 5, 2012

And then came TO

It's been a while because I was having some camera problems, but here's the first return of This Day in History for the 2012-13 school year.