Stargazing Guy

Follow for a weekly list of forthcoming astronaut* birthdays.

Maybe you share a birthday?!

If not, perhaps it will be you who adds your name to the list?!

If you do share a birthday, what does it mean to you?

Do you feel a connection, pride? They take to the skies (on controlled explosions) to improve the world, to explore (to travel to strange new worlds).

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11 March 1956 Curtis Brown (NASA) US.

11 March 1963 Marcos Pontes (RKA) Brazil.

12 March 1923 Walter ‘Wally’ Schirra (NASA) US.

13 March 1970 Aleksandr Samokutyayev (RKA) Russia.

14 March 1928 Frank Borman (NASA) US.

14 March 1934 Eugene Cernan (NASA) US. The last human to walk on the Moon. Who will be next? Could it be you? The NASA is aiming for a return to the Moon with the Artemis mission. The current timescale indicates a landing towards the end of 2025. No doubt this will slip – it is the nature of the space business. NASA are promising the first woman and first person of colour to walk on the Moon, and they will be from the current astronaut pool.

Hopefully, this will lead to permanent bases on the Moon and the expansion of the whole cis-lunar economy – what a time to be alive!

14 March 1939 William B. Lenoir (NASA) US.

14 March 1963 Pedro Duque (ESA) Spain.

14 March 1967 Michael Fincke (NASA) US.

16 March 1927 Vladimir Komarov (RKA) Russia. One of the early space pioneers and the first person to be killed in a space flight when the parachute on his re-entry capsule failed to deploy properly causing him to crash into the ground on 24 April 1967.

The asteroid 1836 Komarov, discovered in 1971, was named in the honour of Komarov, as was a crater on the Moon. This asteroid and the cosmonaut inspired the composer Brett Dean to write a piece of symphonic music commissioned by conductor Simon Rattle in 2006. The composition is named Komarov’s Fall, and it can be found on the EMI Classics Album of Simon Rattle’s The Planets.

NASA – Original image at http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/luceneweb/caption_direct.jsp?photoId=AS15-88-11894
View of Commemorative plaque left on moon at Hadley-Apennine landing site. A close-up view of a commemorative plaque left on the Moon at the Hadley-Apennine landing site in memory of 14 NASA astronauts and USSR cosmonauts, now deceased. Their names are inscribed in alphabetical order on the plaque. The plaque was stuck in the lunar soil by Astronauts David R. Scott and James B. Irwin during their Apollo 15 lunar surface extravehicular activity. The tiny, man-like object represents the figure of a fallen astronaut/cosmonaut.

Space is hard.

Per aspera ad astra

(Through hardships to the stars)

16 March 1932 Walter Cunningham (NASA) US.

16 March 1959 Michael J. Bloomfield (NASA) US.

17 March 1930 James Irwin (NASA) US.

17 March 1936 Ken Mattingly (NASA) US.

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Thanks to www.supercluster.com for the bios and links.

Also, thanks to www.pillownaut.com for the initial list of birthdays, and the many, many resources on the internet, especially Wikipedia and NASA.      

* = includes cosmonaut, taikonaut, parastronaut, spaceflight participant, space tourist, etc

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PS: I love coffee. BuyMeACoffee, leave a message with a date and time and we can share it, remotely, at the same time, and think about the Cosmos.

In the meantime, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else, too, because as Adam Smith said, “we naturally desire not only to be loved but to be lovely”.

Remember, hope lives here.

Contact Stargazing Guy for any copyright-related requests or queries @ stargazer1@stargazingguy.co.uk