Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
José Moreno Hernández was born on August 7, 1962, in the community of French Camp in California. His family was originally from the municipality of La Piedad in western Mexico’s state of Michoacán. During much of his childhood, as a matter of fact, Hernández and his family routinely spent half the year in the United... Continue Reading →
September 13, 2005 National Steel and Shipbuilding Company (NASSCO) began construction on USNS Alan Shepard (T-AKE-3), a U.S. Navy underway replenishment (UNREP) vessel. (This type of vessel is used to transport fuel, munitions, and various other supplies to ships out at sea.) The building of the Alan Shepard took place at NASSCO’s shipyard in San... Continue Reading →
April 26, 1977 Samantha Cristoforetti, a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut, was born in the major Italian city of Milan. She grew up in Malé, a commune (municipality) that is likewise located in the northern region of Italy. Cristoforetti traveled to the United States at the age of 18 as an exchange student in the... Continue Reading →
Kayla Barron, whose passion for exploration has motivated her to both travel beneath the sea and fly into space, was born on September 19, 1987, in the city of Pocatello, Idaho. Her family eventually moved from the Gem State to the city of Richland, Washington. After graduating from Richland High School in 2006, Barron entered... Continue Reading →
In 1983, Guion Bluford became the first African American to fly into space when he went into orbit on board the Space Shuttle Challenger. The first African American astronaut was actually Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. He never had the opportunity to travel into space, however; in 1967 -- just a few months after being selected... Continue Reading →
July 17, 1962 A new aviation record was set when U.S. Air Force (USAF) Major Robert M. White piloted a rocket-powered North American X-15 aircraft to an altitude of 59.6 miles (95.9 kilometers) above Earth. White’s trek up that far into the sky began with a bomber dropping his aircraft over Nevada. By subsequently zooming as... Continue Reading →
Wendy Lawrence has been a trailblazer in both her professional endeavors and personal life. She was a member of only the second class in the history of the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) to include women. Lawrence went on to pursue a record-setting career as a naval aviator. As a NASA astronaut, she became USNA’s first... Continue Reading →
In October 2022, NASA astronaut Nicole Aunapu Mann became the first enrolled female member of a Native American tribe to travel into space. John Herrington, an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation, had made history in 2002 as the first enrolled member of a Native American tribe to fly in space. (William R. Pogue, who... Continue Reading →
Scientist and NASA astronaut Fernando “Frank” Caldeiro was born in Argentina’s capital city of Buenos Aires on June 12, 1958. As a young immigrant to the United States, however, he regarded both New York City and the Florida community of Merritt Island as his actual hometowns. Caldeiro graduated from William Cullen Bryant High School in... Continue Reading →
Kathryn Dwyer Sullivan was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1951. She earned a B.S. degree in earth sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1973 and a Ph.D. in geology from Dalhousie University in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia in 1978. It was also in 1978 that Sullivan formally became one... Continue Reading →
Transportation History 