Curated playlist
United States Navy officers
- Arthur E. BrysonArthur Earl Bryson Jr. was born on the 7th of October 1925, and he would come to be called the father of modern optimal control theory. That title points to mathematics that helps machines steer, settle, and decide. But the same mind…
- Roger B. ChaffeeRoger Bruce Chaffee was thirty-one years old when he climbed into the Apollo 1 command module on the afternoon of the 27th of January, 1967. He was the youngest American astronaut ever assigned to a spaceflight mission, and he had never…
- Johnny CarsonJohnny Carson stepped in front of a camera for the last time as host of The Tonight Show on the 22nd of May 1992, and three decades of American nights ended. For thirty years, the country had tuned in at 11:30 to watch a man from Corning,…
- 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…
- 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…
- James TobinJames Tobin was born on the 5th of March, 1918, in Champaign, Illinois, the son of a journalist credited with inventing "Homecoming" at the University of Illinois. He died on the 11th of March, 2002, in New Haven, Connecticut, at the age…
- Edgar MitchellEdgar Dean Mitchell was the sixth person to walk on the Moon, and on his way home, something happened to him that no training could have prepared him for. Floating back toward Earth after Apollo 14, Mitchell experienced what he would later…
- L. Sprague de Camp"My own true name sounds more like a pseudonym than most pseudonyms do," L. Sprague de Camp said, explaining why he rarely used pen names. Over a career spanning 60 years, he wrote more than 100 books. By the 1930s and 1940s he had become…
- Joseph Francis SheaJoe Shea helped decide how America would reach the Moon. Only months into his NASA career in 1962, he worked through competing proposals for the lunar landing approach. His analysis guided the agency toward the design every Apollo mission…
- 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.…
- James Iredell WaddellJames Iredell Waddell fired the last shots of the American Civil War from the deck of a Confederate warship in Arctic waters, months after the fighting had stopped on land. He was born in Pittsboro, North Carolina on the 3rd of July 1824,…
- George HalasGeorge Halas was running late in 1915, and that delay saved his life. He had planned to board the SS Eastland in Chicago but was trying to put on weight for Big Ten football. He never made it to the docks. The ship capsized, killing 844…
- Daniel Patrick MoynihanDaniel Patrick Moynihan shined shoes at Pennsylvania Station as a boy during the Great Depression, in the same building he would later spend decades fighting to restore as a United States Senator. That arc, from the floors of Hell's…
- Maxime FagetMaxime Allen Faget was the engineer who decided that a spacecraft returning from orbit should look nothing like an aircraft. That single, counterintuitive choice shaped every American crew vehicle that followed. Faget, whose surname is…
- Red AuerbachRed Auerbach lit a cigar on the bench while the game was still being played. It was his signal to the opposing team, to the crowd, to anyone watching: this one is over. The habit became so iconic that Boston restaurants in the 1960s posted…