STS-107 was the 107th flight of the space shuttle program and it broke up on reentry on 01 February 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard. The investigation revealed that during breakup of Columbia (homonym of Colombia), the astronauts slipped into unconsciousness quickly, within seconds, and were tossed about in the seat restraints as the shuttle went into a flat spin, spun out of control, and disintegrated. The astronauts’ lower bodies remained restrained by their seats but their upper body restraints failed during the spin and breakup. And as their upper bodies flailed, their helmets battered their skulls and delivered lethal trauma to them (they were either unconscious or already dead when this happened). The investigating team concluded that the breakup of the crew module and the crew’s subsequent exposure to hypersonic entry conditions was not survivable by any currently existing capability.
The investigation found five separate lethal events related to Columbia’s breakup: depressurization of the crew module, spinning G forces, exposure to vacuum and low temperatures of the upper atmosphere, and impact with the ground.
(Pretty fucking brutal.)
Later, Pope John Paul II later prayed for the astronauts during mass.
“Eternal Father, Strong to Save”, also known as “The Navy Hymn” or “For Those in Peril on the Seas”, is a British hymn traditionally associated with seafarers, particularly in the maritime armed services. Written in 1860, its author William Whiting was inspired by the dangers of the sea described in Psalm 107. More recently, verses praying for aviators and astronauts, among other personnel, have been written. Robert Heinlein wrote the verse ending “We ask thy mercy and thy grace / For those who venture into space.”
William Henry Harrison was elected president in 1840, Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, James A. Garfield in 1880, William McKinley in 1900, and Warren Harding in 1920. All of these Presidents died in office. Ripley’s Believe It or Not! claimed to note a pattern in 1931 and again in 1948, claiming that a president elected in a year ending in zero would die in office. They termed it the Curse of Tippecanoe. Franklin Roosevelt (1940) and John Kennedy (1960) continued the trend and Ronald Reagen (1980) survived a very serious assassination attempt. The closest 2000’s George W. Bush came to dying in office was chocking on a pretzel.
A bit more serious than an errant pretzel, President George W. Bush was also the subject of an assassination attempt with a grenade while speaking in Tbilisi’s central Liberty Square in May 2005.
Theodore Roosevelt was shot while campaigning for a third term in 1912. The would-be assassin’s bullet was slowed by the 50 page folded-up speech and glasses case in Roosevelt’s chest pocket. His staff wanted to rush him to the hospital, but he judged that he was not mortally wounded since he was not coughing up blood, so he proceeded to deliver his speech and spoke for over an hour.
Afterwards, an x-ray showed that the bullet had lodged in Roosevelt’s chest muscle, but did not penetrate the chest cavity. Doctors concluded that it would be less dangerous to leave it in place than to attempt to remove it, and Roosevelt carried the bullet with him for the rest of his life. Years later, when asked about the bullet inside him, Roosevelt would say, “I do not mind it any more than if it were in my waistcoat pocket.”
Theodore Roosevelt loved being the center of attention and always wanted to be, as his puckish daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth once said, “the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”
Theodore Roosevelt, who was born in 1858, married his first wife Alice Hathaway Lee on his 22nd birthday in 1880. Alice died two days after giving birth to their only child in 1884. Roosevelt married again two years later to childhood friend Edith Kermit Carow. This union produced five children. Roosevelt died in 1919 at the age of 60, while Edith died in 1948 at the age of 87. Both are buried at Youngs Memorial Cemetery in Oyster Bay, New York.
In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt authorized the establishment of a newly named Meteor, Arizona, post office. At that time the closest post office was 30 miles away in Winslow AZ. Meteor Crater was created about 50,000 years ago. The nickel-iron meteorite was about 160 feet across and moving at about 30,000 MPH whereas Apollo 10 flying to the moon achieved about 25,000 MPH. Apollo 10 holds the record for the highest speed attained by a manned vehicle.
Roosevelt’s only daughter, Alice, was headstrong and a handful.
When a foreign diplomat chided Roosevelt for Alice’s behaviour, Roosevelt replied: “I can be President of the United States or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.”
Princess Alice of Battenberg (1885–1969) was the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II. A great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, she was born in Windsor Castle. She married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark in 1903. She stayed in Athens during the Second World War, sheltering Jewish refugees, and was recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Israel’s Holocaust memorial institution, Yad Vashem, in 1994.
Of the twelve Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon, all except one was too young to have served in the military in WWII (1941-1945): Alan Shepard. Shepard served in the US Navy during the war. He later flew into space on Project Mercury’s Freedom 7 to become the first American in space.
According to Gene Kranz in his book Failure Is Not an Option, “When reporters asked Shepard what he thought about as he sat atop the Redstone rocket, waiting for liftoff, he had replied, ‘The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.’”
Sam Shepard (1943-2017) was an actor, playwright, author, and director. He was nominated for the Best Supporting Actor award for his portrayal of Chuck Yeager in the 1983 movie The Right Stuff, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child.
Samuel Holmes Sheppard was an American neurosurgeon. He was exonerated in 1966, having been convicted of the 1954 murder of his wife, Marilyn Reese Sheppard. The case was controversial from the beginning, with extensive and prolonged nationwide media coverage.
The U.S. Supreme Court determined that the “carnival atmosphere” surrounding Sheppard’s first trial had made due process impossible; after ten years in prison he was acquitted at a second trial.
The Sheppard case was the inspiration for the TV series and later film The Fugitive, with a little help from Les Miserables. David Janssen starred as Dr. Richard Kimble, a physician who is wrongfully convicted of his wife’s murder and sentenced to receive the death penalty. En route to death row, Dr. Richard Kimble’s train derails over a switch, allowing him to escape and begin a cross-country search for the real killer, a “one-armed man” (played by Bill Raisch). At the same time, Dr. Kimble is hounded by the authorities, most notably by Police Lieutenant Philip Gerard (Barry Morse).
In 1958, Vice-President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, undertook a goodwill tour of several South American countries. After stops in Uruguay, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, Nixon and his entourage flew to Caracas, Venezuela. On the drive from the airport to the hotel, Nixon’s motorcade was attacked by an angry mob of demonstrators. Although they managed to escape and make it to the hotel, it was not without injury. Nixon himself was not harmed, but a couple of his aides were injured. One of those injured by flying glass was Nixon’s longtime secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who would gain a whole lot more notoriety later in her career.
6.2 million European immigrants arrived in Argentina between 1850 and 1950. Due to this large-scale European immigration, Argentina’s population more than doubled. Italy and Spain sent the most immigrants; Eastern and Northern Europe were also represented by Russians, Poles, Germans and Scots.
Among the immigrants were the families of the parents of Pope Francis: Mario Bergoglio, who came from Italy’s Piedmont region in 1929, age 20, and the Genoese parents of Regina Sívori, who was born in Buenos Aires.
In the Space Race between the Americans and the Russians, on November 19, 1969, the first man to dance on the Moon was US Astronaut Pete Conrad of Apollo 12.