This Day in History

[Diaphone Jim]

From the link:

"Mr Casner, 88, from Summerville, South Carolina, added: "This is really big. If all the nine E-boats that were out that day hit us, I wouldn't be here talking about it."

[xoxoxoBruce]

Ah, then at the other link reporter heard the Nazis had 9 total got mixed up. They had pickets watching the E-boat base to warn the troops of the boats coming out but these four were still out from the night before. That's just another thing the Allies overlooked in this clusterfuck.

[Gravdigr]

May 4, 1988



BIG bada boom!

PEPCON Disaster

4500 metric tons of Space Shuttle fuel burn and detonate in four separate explosions, the last of which was the equivalent of 1 kiloton of TNT.

[Carruthers]

I thought that the shock wave at about the 7 sec mark was frightening enough, but that accompanying the explosion at about the 55 sec point was terrifying.

Two fatalities is two too many but I'm surprised that there weren't more given that there were also 372 souls injured.

[Gravdigr]

[Carruthers]

On this day, Apollo 10 was launched from Cape Kennedy.

Fifty years ago and a quarter of a million miles away, three astronauts carried out the dress rehearsal for one of the greatest events in human history.
On May 18, 1969, Apollo 10 lifted off from Launch Complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center. Its mission: to return to the Moon and make the final flight tests that would pave the way for the Apollo 11 lunar landing two months later.

Though Apollo 8 had already orbited the Moon and Apollo 9 had tested the Lunar Module (LM) in Earth orbit, there were still many questions that had to be answered and tests to be conducted.
Until Apollo 10, the Apollo spacecraft, crew, mission support facilities, procedures, and communications systems had never been fully tested under actual lunar mission conditions.
Until this was done, the success of Apollo 11 was very much in doubt.

Link

Link

Incidentally, the Apollo 10 Command Module was displayed at the Science Museum in London.
To the best of my knowledge it remains there today.

[xoxoxoBruce]

The powers that be at NASA gave them just enough fuel to test the lander down to 50k feet from the surface but if they landed they couldn't take off again.
The Astronauts were kind of a headstrong bunch, and there will be no upstaging the A team with their carefully choreographed landing two months later.