1959
The United States Air Force launched the first Atlas rocket. During this initial test, the rocket was equipped with camera in its nose-cone with which it photographed the Earth's cloud tops from an altitude of three hundred miles.
1961
NASA announced the November 1st launch of the first Mercury-Scout rocket series to test the Mercury tracking network, which would be integral to the first manned orbital missions. The trial was held at the Atlantic Missile Range.
1988
The launch of the Soviet spacecraft Buran is aborted by the automated launch system fifty-one seconds before liftoff due to a software glitch that caused by the late separation of an umbilical.
1991
The space probe Galileo passed within 1,604km of the asteroid Gaspra (Asteroid 951), the closest approach ever made by a space craft to a asteroid. During its fly-by, it captured the first close-up photographs of an asteroid in history. Gaspra is 20 kilometers long and orbits the Sun in the midst of the solar system's main asteroid belt, between the planets Mars and Jupiter. During the pass, Galileo was traveling at a speed of roughly eight kilometer per second.
1998
In the midst of a publicity bonanza, NASA launched the Space Shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Center, Florida on its twenty-fifth mission. (STS-95) The mission is more highly publicized than any in decades due because its crew includes former Project Mercury astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn, who, at age seventy-seven, became the oldest person to go into space. Glenn first entered the public eye in 1962 when he became the first American to orbit the Earth. As the mission's Payload Specialist, Glenn would conduct studies on the physiological parallels between aging and the effects of low-gravity environments. Glenn wasn't
the only aspect of the mission that carried historical significance, though. During the mission, Pedro Duque became the first Spanish astronaut in space. The Discovery's mission would last 213 hour and 44 minutes before landing on on November 7, 1998, over which time the shuttle would make 134 orbits, traveling 3.6 million miles.