Monday, February 21, 2022

Remembering John Glenn's Pioneering Mercury 7 Ride...


I am a day or two late with the Sixtieth Anniversary, proper. . . but intervening malfeasance by a tangerine-hued guy, formerly a resident at 1600 Penn., put off this post, over the weekend. The present is indeed more urgent, than the past. Smile.

But the past, and JFK's appearance in it, in particular, serves to remind us all, as to why it is so important to preserve ordered liberty -- and not quietly succumb to lawless rule by would be cheap penny-ante despots.

In any event, we as Americans, should be proud of the game of "catch-up" President Kennedy started, and we completed -- pulling out a come from behind win. . . to reach the moon first. . . and secure a half century of undisputed leadership in space exploration. Now, including. . . Mars. Here's a bit from the NASA commemoration page, as of this morning:

. . .In February 1962, the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union was in full swing. Both nations had developed spacecraft to send humans into space and selected a group of pilots to fly those spacecraft. The Soviets leaped ahead by placing the first man, Yuri A. Gagarin, in space on April 12, 1961, on a one-orbit flight around the Earth aboard his Vostok spaceship. The United States responded with two suborbital piloted Mercury missions, launched atop Redstone rockets. The Soviets next kept a cosmonaut in space for a full day.

On Feb. 20, 1962, astronaut John H. Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth during the three-orbit Mercury-Atlas 6 mission, aboard the spacecraft he named Friendship 7. . . .


Onward, smiling -- ever smiling. We are immensely proud of Commander Glenn, Kathryn Johnson, Jim Lovell, Mae Jemison and all the others ("hidden figures", or not so) who made NASA the jaw-slacking success it is.

नमस्ते

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