Lost in Space? - Don't Know Much About Geography - page 164

1961 The first man in space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, is launched by the USSR and orbits
the Earth.
1961 Alan B. Shepard becomes the first American in space, as his Mercury 3 capsule completes a
suborbital flight. Virgil I. Grissom becomes the second American in space.
1962 John Glenn is the first American to orbit the earth. Later that year, M. Scott Carpenter com-
pletes three orbits of the earth, and Walter M. Schirra completes six orbits.
1963 Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova-Nikolayeva becomes the first woman in space.
1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson accidentally discover the radio-wave remnants of
the Big Bang while trying to refine their radio equipment; their discovery convinces most astro-
nomers that the Big Bang Theory is correct.
1966 The Soviet Union's Venera III, the first human-made object to land on another planet, reaches
Venus.
1967 Three American astronauts—Virgil Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger Chaffee—die in
a ground test of an Apollo spacecraft. That same year, Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir M. Komarov dies
during the descent of his Soyuz I spacecraft.
1968 The first manned circumlunar flight by the Apollo 8 mission makes ten orbits of the moon.
1969 Mariner 6 passes close by Mars and returns television pictures and other data.
1969 On July 11, the American Apollo 11 mission successfully lands on the moon. American astro-
naut Neil Armstrong becomes the first human being to stand on the moon. He was later joined by
Colonel Edwin Aldrin. In November, Apollo 12 makes the second manned lunar landing. A third
landing is attempted in 1970 but is aborted because of equipment failure.
Geographic Voices Neil Armstrong, first man to walk on the Moon
Of all the spectacular views we had, the most impressive to me was on the way to the Moon,
when we flew through its shadow. We were still thousands of miles away, but close enough, so that
the Moon almost filled our circular window. It was eclipsing the Sun, from our position, and the
corona of the Sun was visible around the limb of the Moon as a gigantic lens-shaped or saucer-
shaped light, stretching out to several lunar diameters. It was magnificent, but the Moon was even
more so. We were in its shadow, so there was no part of it illuminated by the Sun. It was illumin-
ated only by earthshine. It made the Moon appear blue-gray, and the entire scene looked decidedly
three-dimensional. . . .
The sky is black, you know. It's a very dark sky. But it still seemed more like daylight than
darkness as we looked out the window. It's a peculiar thing, but the surface looked very warm and
inviting. It was the sort of situation in which you felt like going out there in nothing but a swimming
suit to get a little sun. From the cockpit, the surface seemed to be tan. It's hard to account for that,
because later when I held this material in my hand, it wasn't tan at all. It was black, gray and so on.