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>
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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>
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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>
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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>
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