150, 50 & 30 Years Ago Today

While every day technically has something historical about it, today is unique in that 3 major events occurred on this date.

1: The battle of Ft. Sumter that kicked off the War Between the States:

By this time 7 states had already seceded from the Union. Over the next 4 years 600,000 lives were lost. On 9 April 1865 General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant technically ending the war, although a few more battles were fought before the news was spead. Grant had been living across the river from DBQ in a rented house Galena before the war. After the war he was given a hero's welcome & a new home. Both homes still exist in Galena. & the post war home is now owned by the state of Illinois & open for tours. (Yes, I've seen it.)

The war was as much about state's rights as slavery. I'm not going to enter into a huge debate here about whether the states could seceed. I think the could, that is made clear in the Declaration of Independence that when a certain threshold is reached, it is OK to seperate. BWas that point reached before the Civil War? I am still not convinced 1 way or another. As for slavery, no state had the right to make it legal, & if that was the only reason or the prime reason, then, no they had no right to secede. But there were plenty of other factors. so, like I said, for me the question is still open.

2: 50 years ago today Yuri Gagarin (Юрий Гагарин) became the 1st man to go into space. His flight aboard Vostok 1(Восток-1 - East), the 1st of 8 Vostok 3KA's to go into space, lasted only 1 orbit, but it proved man could survive in outer space & openned a whole new frontier for mankind to explore. A realtime documentary movie of that flight It was shot entirely from the International Space Station. It includes Gagarin's original mission audio as well as a new musical score by composer Philip Sheppard. The video is below. (For more info go to First Orbit)

In the years that followed man finally reached the moon. Today we have a permanant presence in space aboard the ISS. sadly we have yet to return to the Moon or go to Mars. God willing someday soon we will. 1 of the fruits of this flight is the 3rd event we commemorate today.

3: It was 30 years ago today that the 1st reusable space craft, Space Shuttle Columbia, OSV-1o2, actually flew into space. (The Space Shuttle Enterprise OSV-1, was a test vehicle that was incapable of going into space.) The mission was designated as STS-1. Originally planned for launch 2 days earlier, it was launched from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at 7 AM EST. Here is video of that launch as well as its return:

The crew consisted of 2 members, astronauts John W. Young, commander, & Robert L. Crippen, pilot. The launch had several 1sts. It was the 1st Space shuttle to be launched into space. It was the 1st of 24 launches from Pad A. It was the 1st time that solid-fuel rockets were used for a NASA manned launch. & it was the 1st (& only) U.S. manned space vehicle launched without an unmanned powered test flight. The main purpose was to test out the space shuttle. reached an orbital altitude of 166 nautical miles (307 km). The 37-orbit, 1,074,567-mile (1,729,348 km)-long flight lasted 2 days, 6 hours, 20 minutes & 53 seconds. Landing occurred on Runway 23 at Edwards Air Force Base, California at 10:21 a.m. PST, 14 April 1981. Columbia was returned to Kennedy Space Center from California on April 28 atop the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft.

Sadly the Columbia disintegrated during reentry into the Earth's atmosphere on 1 February 2003 (STS-107).