1961
Former Marine Corps fighter pilot John Glenn was selected to pilot the first Mercury manned orbital flight and Scott Carpenter, a former test pilot, is named as a backup pilot. The two astronauts would immediately begin their training, and the five remaining astronaut candidates defocused their efforts on engineering and operational efforts in preparation for the mission.
The same day, NASA launched the Mercury-Atlas 5, the first U.S satellite to ever have carried an animal into space, from Cape Canaveral. The test subject, a five-year-old chimpanzee nick-named "Enos" successfully orbits Earth twice over three hours and twenty minutes. During the mission, Enos performed a sequence of tests that required him, among other things, to pull levers in sequence. The Chimp had been in training for the mission for over sixteen months, and during the course of the flight, he accomplished his tasks accurately despite a controls malfunction that caused the onboard system to shock Enos even for correct answers to the tests.
1965
The Canadian Space Agency launched the Alouette 2 research satellite carrying an ionospheric observatory, including a cosmic noise experiment, an electrostatic probe, an energetic particle experiment, a sweep-frequency ionospheric sounder, and a VLF receiver. It was not equipped with a recorder, so it could only return data while in line with a telemetry station in Australia, Central Africa, England, India, Hawaii, Norway, or Singapore, limiting its return to roughly eight hours out of every twenty-fours. It's operations would be terminated in July 1975, and it would only be reactivated once, on its tenth anniversary, to commemorate its launch
1967
Wresat (abbreviation for: Weapons Research Establishment Satellite), the first Australian satellite, is launched
from Woomera, South Australia aboard a Redstone rocket.
1996
Science Magazine publicized an article entitled "The Clementine bistatic radar experiment" by Nozette et al. that interpreted data returned from the Clementine Spacecraft. The article suggested the possibility that water-ice had formed in the constantly-shadowed craters of the Moon's south pole.