2009 – Canadian billionaire and Cirque du Soleil founder, Guy Laliberté launches from Baikonur to the ISS to become the first Canadian space tourist.
2001 – Starshine 3 launched from Kodiak launch complex. Starshine-3 was a 90 kg, 0.9 m geodetic sphere that was partially manufactured and observed by students. The NASA satellite was basically a passive light-reflecting sphere, consisting of 1,500 student-built mirrors (polished by kindergarten and grade school students from many countries) and 31 laser “retroreflectors”. A few solar cells provide enough power to send a beacon at 145.825 MHz every
minute. Ham operators around the world were expected to obtain signal strengths from which the decay due to the magnetic torque of its spin rate could be determined. The project was managed by
NASA GSFC and Starshine was built by the Naval Research Laboratory.
1995 – The last transmission was received from Pioneer 11, 20 years after its 1972 launch. It was decommissioned on November 24, 1995. Pioneer 10 was 7.6 billion miles from Earth, or 82 times the nominal distance between the sun and the Earth. At that distance, it takes more than 11 hours and 20 minutes for the radio signal, travelling at the speed of light, to reach the Earth.
1994 – STS-68 Shuttle Endeavour is launched at 7:16 EDT. “The launch was originally scheduled for August 18, 1994, but there had been a Redundant Sequence Launch Sequencer (RSLS) abort at T-1.9 sec after all 3 main engines ignited.
1880 – Henry Draper makes the first photo of the Orion Nebula, and Doug Johnstone continues the exploration of the Orion Nebula today taking photos with Hubble Space Telescope and later with the James Webb Space Telescope.
