Space History for February 20: Walker, Glenn, Mir, etc

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CalliArcale

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Today is quite a remarkable day in space history, with many interesting events. First off, it's Joe Walker's birthday. He'd be 85 today.<br /><br />On February 20, 1921, Joseph Albert Walker was born in the city of Washington, Pennsylvania. Everybody knows Chuck Yeager, but Joe Walker should be remembered at least as well for his contributions to high performance aviation. Perhaps the main reason Yeager is better known is simply because Yeager is still alive. Joe Walker was NASA Dryden Flight Research Center's chief research pilot, and as such, flew a wide range of aircraft. Most notably, on March 25, 1960, he made the first flight of the X-15 rocketplane. He flew it 23 more times and on his last X-15 flight, on August 22, 1963, he reached the record-breaking altitude of 354,300 feet, only three months after acheiving the speed of Mach 5.92. These were the highest and fastest flights of the entire X-15 program. Later, during the Apollo program, Joe Walker made the first flight of the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, developing techniques that would later be used in training vehicles and the actual Lunar Modules. He received many awards and accolades throughout his 21 year career as a test pilot. Unfortunately, this career ultimately killed him. On June 8, 1966, he was participating in the early test flights of the XB-70 Valkyrie, an enormous supersonic bomber. He was piloting an F-104 chase plane following the second Valkyrie on what would be its final flight when his aircraft and the Valkyrie collided, resulting in the destruction of both aircraft and the deaths of both Walker and the Valkyrie's copilot, Carl Cross. (The Valkyrie's pilot was able to successfully eject, although he was very badly injured.) Later analysis of the accident revealed that the valkyrie's enormous turbulent wake had been gravely underestimated. The program was doomed from there on out, although the surviving Valkyrie continued to perform high altitude and supersonic research f <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>
 
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CalliArcale

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An interesting addendum to this list.....<br /><br />Feburary 20 would also have seen the launch of Japan's Astra-F, successor to Tenma and Asuka, but alas, bad weather yesterday caused the launch to be scrubbed. <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" /> They'll try to launch Astra-F again today. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>
 
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