The Mercury Seven were a group of American astronauts selected to fly spacecraft for Project Mercury. Announced by NASA on April 9, 1959, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton created a new profession. The group piloted all the spaceflights of the Mercury program that had an astronaut on board from May 1961 to May 1963, and some flew in the Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle programs. Shepard became the first American to enter space in 1961, and walked on the Moon in 1971. Grissom, after flying Mercury and Gemini missions, died in 1967 in the Apollo 1 fire; the others survived past retirement from service. Schirra commanded Apollo 7, the first crewed Apollo flight. Slayton, grounded with atrial fibrillation, ultimately flew on the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project in 1975. Glenn became the first American in orbit in 1962, and flew on Space Shuttle Discovery in 1998 to become, at age 77, the oldest person to fly in space at the time.
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Seven
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1388:
Despite being vastly outnumbered, forces of the Old Swiss Confederacy defeated an Austrian army at the Battle of Näfels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_N%C3%A4fels
1838:
The National Gallery opened in its current building in Trafalgar Square, London. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery
1939:
After being denied permission to perform at Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, African-American singer Marian Anderson gave an open-air concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Anderson
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
force majeure: 1. An overwhelming force. 2. (law) An unavoidable circumstance, especially one that prevents someone from fulfilling a legal (usually contractual) obligation. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/force_majeure
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
An artist is only an artist thanks to his exquisite sense of beauty — a sense which provides him with intoxicating delights, but at the same time implying and including a sense, equally exquisite, of all deformity and disproportion. --Charles Baudelaire https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire