Michael Collins (born October 31, 1930) is a former astronaut and test
pilot who was the command module pilot of Apollo 11 in 1969. The first
person to perform more than one spacewalk, he is one of 24 people to
have flown to the Moon. Collins joined the U.S. Air Force after
graduating from West Point in 1952. He graduated in 1960 from the Air
Force Experimental Flight Test Pilot School and was selected for NASA's
third group of astronauts in 1963. He made two spacewalks on his first
mission on Gemini 10 in 1966. During Apollo 11, he remained in orbit
around the Moon in the command module Columbia while his crewmates Neil
Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made the first crewed landing on the surface.
After retiring from NASA, Collins became Assistant Secretary of State
for Public Affairs and later director of the National Air and Space
Museum. Under his guidance, the museum opened on time and within budget
for the United States Bicentennial in 1976.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Collins_%28astronaut%29>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1517:
According to some traditional accounts, Martin Luther
(depicted) posted his Ninety-five Theses onto the door of the All
Saints' Church in Wittenberg, present-day Germany, marking the beginning
of the Protestant Reformation.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-five_Theses>
1973:
Three Provisional Irish Republican Army members escaped from
Mountjoy Prison in Dublin aboard a hijacked helicopter that landed in
the prison's exercise yard.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountjoy_Prison_helicopter_escape>
1999:
Australian sailor Jesse Martin arrived in Melbourne, becoming
the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe solo, non-stop, and
unassisted.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Martin>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
bunny boiler:
(slang, humorous, derogatory) A person who acts (or may supposedly act)
obsessively or even dangerously towards another person with whom the
first person was previously, or wishes to be, in a relationship with.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bunny_boiler>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
I assert that every man is a partialist; that nature secures him
as an instrument by self-conceit, preventing the tendencies to religion
and science; and now further assert, that, each man's genius being
nearly and affectionately explored, he is justified in his
individuality, as his nature is found to be immense; and now I add that
every man is a universalist also, and, as our earth, whilst it spins on
its own axis, spins all the time around the sun through the celestial
spaces, so the least of its rational children, the most dedicated to his
private affair, works out, though as it were under a disguise, the
universal problem. We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but
every pumpkin in the field, goes through every point of pumpkin history.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson>
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