Curated playlist
1969 in spaceflight
- James McDivittJames McDivitt flew his 145th combat mission in Korea two hours after the armistice was signed. The war was technically over. He flew anyway. That timing captures something essential about the man. He was not someone who stopped mid-task.…
- Gene CernanGene Cernan stepped off the lunar surface on the 14th of December 1972, climbed the ladder of the Apollo 17 lunar module, and has not been followed by any human being since. More than half a century later, those footprints in the…
- Buzz AldrinBuzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon at 03:15:16 on the 21st of July 1969 (UTC), nineteen minutes after Neil Armstrong first touched the surface. His first words, spoken into the silence of the lunar landscape, were simply: "Beautiful view."…
- Apollo Lunar ModuleThe Apollo Lunar Module is the only crewed vehicle in history to land somewhere beyond Earth. That fact alone is worth sitting with. Not a probe, not a robot, not a satellite. A vehicle carrying human beings. And it went somewhere no human…
- Neil ArmstrongNeil Armstrong set his left boot on the lunar surface at 02:56 UTC on the 21st of July 1969, and said seven words that an estimated 530 million people heard live: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Those 530…
- John Young (astronaut)John Watts Young flew in space six times, walked on the Moon, and commanded the first Space Shuttle mission. No other astronaut in history flew in four different classes of NASA spacecraft: Gemini, the Apollo command module, the Apollo…
- David ScottDavid Randolph Scott was born on the 6th of June 1932 at Randolph Field, near San Antonio, Texas. His middle name came directly from that base, a fitting detail for a man whose identity would be shaped at every turn by the places and…
- Michael Collins (astronaut)Michael Collins orbited the Moon thirty times in July 1969 and never set foot on it. While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the Sea of Tranquillity, Collins flew alone in the command module Columbia, cut off from Earth for 48…
- Alan BeanAlan LaVern Bean was born on the 15th of March, 1932, in Wheeler, Texas, a small town in the northeastern corner of the Texas Panhandle. He died on the 26th of May, 2018, at the age of 86. Between those two dates, he became only the fourth…
- Saturn VSaturn V stands 363 feet tall, taller than the Statue of Liberty by a wide margin, and when its five F-1 engines fired together during a test at what is now the Stennis Space Center, the roar shattered the plate-glass window of a bank…
- Richard F. Gordon Jr.Richard Francis Gordon Jr. was born in Seattle, Washington, on the 5th of October 1929, and he died 88 years later having orbited the Moon 45 times. Most people who know the Apollo program can name the men who walked on the lunar surface.…
- Rusty SchweickartRusty Schweickart spent five minutes tethered outside his spacecraft, suspended above the Earth, and felt something shift inside him. Not fear, not exhilaration in the usual sense, but something closer to a philosophical reckoning. He…
- Thomas P. StaffordThomas Stafford was born on the 17th of September 1930, in Weatherford, Oklahoma, a small town that would later name an airport and a museum after him. At 14, he climbed into a Piper Cub for his first flight. That single hour in the air…
- Soyuz (rocket family)Soyuz holds the record for the most launches in the history of spaceflight. That single fact, buried in technical documents and launch logs, is extraordinary when you consider what it means: one rocket family, born in the Soviet Union…